Write On: 'Apple Cider Vinegar' Creator and Showrunner Samantha Strauss
Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast
Release Date: 06/16/2025
Write On: 'The Smashing Machine' Writer/Director Benny Safdie
Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast
Writer/Director/Actor/Editor Benny Safdie is known for defying expectations and using his sense of humor to make a splash. He even once showed up on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon dressed all in silver, including painted silver hair and skin. So when we sat down with Safdie over Zoom to talk about his latest movie The Smashing Machine, we weren’t sure what to expect. For this interview, however, there was no face paint or sparkly clothes, he was simply wearing a shirt that said, “Radical Empathy.” Turns out there’s a very important reason for the shirt. “Empathy should be cool,...
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Write On: 'Avatar: Fire and Ash' Co-Writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver
Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast
“We try to answer two questions before we say yes to a job or embark on a spec script: Why does the protagonist need this movie? And the other is: Why tell this story other than to make money? That was our attitude going into Jurassic World. That was our attitude going into Avatar,” says screenwriter Rick Jaffa about how he and his writing partner Amanda Silver approach tackling a large film franchise. On today’s podcast, we sit down with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver to discuss their blockbuster new film Avatar: Fire and Ash, the follow up to 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water....
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Write On: 'The Long Walk' Screenwriter JT Mollner
Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast
“I didn't think I'd be a good fit as a writer if they were going to do a PG version of the story. That's not where my strength lies, so the great thing is that the version Francis [Lawrence, the director] wanted to make was the version I wanted to write. A week later, we had a meeting with Lionsgate, we pitched the project, and they said, let's do it. So, it all happened very fast. It's really not common how smooth that process went,” says screenwriter JT Mollner about sharing a clear vision with the film’s director for making The Long Walk. On today’s episode, we chat with...
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Write On: 'Hedda' Writer/Director Nia DaCosta
Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast
“I love adaptations. The beauty of adaptation, especially a classic, like Shakespeare and Chekhov or Ibsen, they’re such a gift because they give you this beautiful framework, and it’s almost like they’re begging you to take it and make it your own,” says writer/director Nia DaCosta about adapting Henrik Ibsen’s 1891 play Hedda Gabler into her new film Hedda. Set in the 1950s, the movie stars Tessa Thompson in the lead role, Imogen Poots as Thea, and reimagines the character Eilert Lovborg as a queer woman (now Eileen), played by Nina Hoss. We chat with Nia...
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Write On: 'Splinter Cell: Deathwatch' Creator/Writer Derek Kolstad
Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast
“As you do draft after draft, it becomes shorter and rendered down. And [Keanu Reeves and I] would go through scenes going, ‘Can people say less? Can the action be tighter? Can the action sequence be shorter?’ The action is an extension of the hero’s journey and if you don’t give a sh*t about the character, it doesn’t matter how great your action is,” says Derek Kolstad about his writing process with actor Keanu Reeves when they worked on the script that would become John Wick and spark an entire franchise. On today’s episode, we speak with screenwriter Kolstad about his...
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Write On: 'After the Hunt' Writer Nora Garrett
Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast
“People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.” –Otto Von Bismarck “It's funny, because when I was writing After the Hunt, I definitely wasn't like, ‘Oh, I want to write about this current socio-political moment.’ I was really just invested in the characters and the story,” says screenwriter Nora Garrett about writing a screenplay that probes the dynamics of power, privilege and social accountability. She adds, “What I didn't even realize was something that was drilled into me because of my acting training – that the work, the scripts,...
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Write On: 'Anemone' Co-Writer/Director Ronan Day-Lewis
Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast
“[My dad] really started to inhabit the characters, especially Ray, speaking as him during the writing process. That was when I realized this was going to be its own kind of special beast. Working with him taught me so much as a writer and storyteller; by the time we got to set, we had a shorthand for everything,” says director and co-writer Ronan Day-Lewis about writing the script Anemone with his father, Daniel Day-Lewis. The film Anemone, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Sean Bean and Samantha Morton, paints a portrait of a family torn apart as they struggle to come to terms with...
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Write On: 'All Of You' Writer/Director Will Bridges & Writer/Actor Brett Goldstein
Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast
“You have to love all your characters. Even if you're writing a bad guy. You, the writer, have to write them with love and empathy, and treat each character, give each character, a full life and a full arc in your story, even if their screen time is small. Essentially, if you were following that character, they also have a full story, a full life,” says actor/writer Brett Goldstein about how he approaches writing characters in film and TV. On today’s episode, we chat with writer/director Will Bridges and writer/actor Brett Goldstein about their new film All of You, starring Imogen...
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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...
info_outline“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 motivation to lie about having brain cancer.
Adapted from the book, The Woman Who Fooled the World, by Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano, Apple Cider Vinegar chronicles the incredible and heartbreaking rise and fall of the real Belle Gibson (Kaitlin Dever), a notorious health and wellness “scamfluencer.”
Strauss talks about starting her young life in Australia as a ballet dancer before a terrible injury led her to discover TV writing. She also talks about how her previous TV show, The End, got the attention of Nicole Kidman, who championed her writing career. Strauss gushes about how she was inspired by Kidman’s, “Fierce intelligence, just exactly what you'd expect, and rigor. You know, she would be giving notes at the end of a really long day of filming. She wasn’t resting on her laurels at all. There's just such a generosity of spirit there and to think she’s helped other emerging Australian creatives is pretty special,” she says.
Strauss discusses the challenges of adapting a true story while the subject is still alive, tips and tricks for making the show feel immediate and seductive while mimicking the addictive nature of social media, and getting the primal relationship of mothers and daughters authentic on screen.
To hear more about Apple Cider Vinegar and Strauss’s advice for writers adapting true stories, listen to the podcast.