Write On: 'Shadow Force' Director/Co-Writer Joe Carnahan and Co-Writer Leon Chills
Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast
Release Date: 05/09/2025
Write On: 'Mussolini: Son of the Century' Director Joe Wright
Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast
On today’s episode, we speak with director Joe Wright whose new limited TV series Mussolini: Son of the Century, explores fascism through the early political career of Italy’s Prime Minister Mussolini in the 1920s. The show is incredible storytelling from beginning to end, mixing opera and techno rave music while drawing chilling comparisons to the current rise of fascism around the world. “We all have a dark side. We all have the choice to be the best of ourselves, or the worst of ourselves and we usually land somewhere in the middle. Working on Mussolini allowed me the...
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Write On: 'The Toxic Avenger' Writer/Director Macon Blair
Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast
“The thing that started it all off was me saying [the character Toxie] should be a guy in a suit. In other words, let’s not do a computer-generated creature, let’s have a person in a suit and have that handmade, hand-stitched kind of quality to it where you can sort of see the seams a little bit and have that be part of the fun. I also said let’s have it be rated R. Hopefully y’all are not interested in a family-friendly PG-13 version of this movie, because that’s not what the fans of the original are going to want, so let’s keep it in the R-zone. And let’s make sure it stays...
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Write On: 'Sirens' Creator/Showrunner Molly Smith Metzler
Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast
“Our goal in writing [Sirens] was to write something that makes you think, and offers the opportunity to re-examine your own assumptions that you made about these characters. And it's taxing. We ask some difficult questions. It's not The Perfect Couple. It's not a murder show. We're going after something thematically that’s really large and really ambitious, and that's why the Greek mythology came to mind. These are epic stories. These are about blood, and moms, and torture, and trauma, and pain. These themes are not tiny. These are complicated, juicy stews,” says showrunner and creator,...
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Write On: 'The Home' Director/Co-Writer James DeMonaco and Co-Writer Adam Cantor
Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast
“Write your own anxieties. Get into your own psyche. I think if it scares you – like, I'm terrified of guns, and that's where The Purge came from. But here, there were various generational fears and whatnot that led to The Home, Adam's fears and my fears about getting older and our anxiety. So I would say if it's born from your fear, the majority of the audience probably has a similar fear. I think we are communal in that way. Fears are not singular, so I think you should work off your own fears, and on a practical level, if you can keep the budget small, you're in a much better place...
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Write On: 'Abraham's Boys' Writer/Director Natasha Kermani
Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast
“Vampires hold incredible destructive power, and so we're very drawn to them, sort of like moths to a candle, right? I think that's sort of eternal, and that's the reason every culture, pretty much around the globe has some version of the vampire because it represents that very human conflict of what we desire which is so in tune with and aligned to things that can also destroy us. That just feels very honest and eternal, so I don't think [vampires] will ever go away. I think they will be an eternal part of our mythologies,” says writer/director Natasha Kermani, about the everlasting...
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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...
info_outline“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 wrapped up in the action,” says Leon Chills, co-writer of the new film Shadow Force, about writing action from a very personal point of view.
On today’s episode, we talk with director/co-writer Joe Carnahan and co-writer Leon Chills about the new action flick Shadow Force that puts a family at the center of the action. With a bounty on their heads, Kyra (Kerry Washington) and Isaac (Omar Sy) must go on the run with their young son (Jahleel Kamara) to avoid their former employer, a unit of shadow ops that has been sent to kill them.
Carnahan and Chills talk about the challenges of writing action set pieces and the power of giving the story emotional weight. We also discuss trying to push the boundaries of the action genre to invent set pieces that are fresh and inventive, and writing action scenes on the page that are compact and concise.
“As an older writer and doing it as long as I have, I’ll tell screenwriters, if I see four or five lines of scene description, I’m telling you, do it in two. Do it in one. Let people spend 40 minutes reading your script. No more. You know what I mean? Get through it with that kind of economy. If you’ve ever read M. Night Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense script – it’s an absolute masterclass in how to do that. Just so sparse and beautiful and pitch perfect the way that things are written,” says Carnahan.
To learn more about action writing and hear more advice, listen to the podcast.