Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast

“People think sequels are easier, and I’m like, ‘No, no, it’s much harder. It is much harder to write.’ They have never written sequels, those people, because you need to do everything as well as the…

“The most subversive thing this show could do is make you cry… If you really boil down television, really cook it in the pan, it’s the character business. I’m in the character business. Movies are in…

“If everything's being played on the surface, it's very hard to make that character come to life. You want hinterland, you want subtext. You want the things that are buried, the things that we don't …

“There's no greater laugh than when you're at your most vulnerable. You're at a funeral, or you're in church and something's happening and there's great reprieve from the most human moments through h…

“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…

“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 stori…

“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,…

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 hea…

“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 jus…

“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 [fil…

“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…

“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 t…

“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 …

“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…

“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 …

“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,” say…

“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 ea…

“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, wh…

“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 wer…

“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 co…