"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 JT Mollner best known for his movie Strange Darling (2023), told in six non-linear chapters, and now The Long Walk. We talk about the challenge and thrill of adapting Stephen King considering Mollner grew up mesmerized by Stephen King's books. He even read Carrie in second grade – a transgression that landed him in the principal's office for possessing obscene material. Mollner also shares a birthday with King so it seems like it was all meant to be.

Mollner also shares that he made a decision early in the writing of the screenplay not to stray too far from Stephen King's beloved novel.

"I wanted the focus of the movie to be the emotions, and the relationships. And so Francis and I talked about it, and instead of updating it completely, we decided to keep it aesthetically, sort of in the same place where the book was written. We wanted to be very, very faithful to the DNA, however, maybe in a deviated version of reality, where our country had gone in a very different direction at some point," he says.

Mollner also talks about growing up in the family business of haunted houses and why he hasn't been interested in making a horror film – yet.

To hear more, listen to the 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 DaCosta about her journey to becoming a filmmaker, genre hopping into horror with Candyman and the upcoming 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. She even made the superhero movie The Marvels. We also talk about the challenges of tackling the complicated, often cruel character of Hedda in the new film.

"When I read the play [Hedda Gabler]," says DaCosta, "I'm like, this woman is hilarious! She's absolutely absurd. In the play, she's so verbose roaming around this sitting room, yelling at everyone who comes in. I wanted to replicate that, but more through action. And then there's the empathy part of it. To me, her tragedy is that she will never know herself. It's a life's work to understand and know ourselves, our emotional world. I think because she is so cruel, because she is so unhappy, because she has made these decisions that have trapped herself in this life – that to me is really sad. But I don't want people to forgive her for what she's done, or to excuse it."

DaCosta also shares her advice on adapting someone else's story. "I think you have to know why you want to do it, and what it is you want to use the work to say. To let that 'why' sort of guide your pen. That's my convoluted way of saying trust your gut."

If you've been thinking about adapting a classic play into a modern movie, you don't want to miss this 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 masterful John Wick action movies and his new animated TV show, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Deathwatch based on the popular video game.

Kolstad also shares his surprising advice for coming up with action scenes that feel fresh and inventive by going back to the silent era. "Look at Buster Keaton. Harold Lloyd, and Fatty Arbuckle, the Keystone Cops. Look at how those sequences were done, and then there's Asian cinema, you know? What I love about the things that I've been a part of is there's always this sense of humor at play. Nothing's so dark and so bleak that you're not enjoying it."

To hear more, listen to the 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, the text, should not be divorceable from the socio-political moment. One comes from the other and I think that was just in the back of my brain while I was writing."

On today's episode, we chat with screenwriter Nora Garrett about her new film After the Hunt, directed by Luca Guadagnino (Challengers), and starring Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield and Ayo Edebiri. Set in the philosophy department at Yale University, a devastating accusation by a female student (Edebiri) against a male teacher (Garfield) unleashes public and personal chaos that blurs the truth of the situation and will have you questioning the motives of every single character.

Garrett talks about working as an assistant in Hollywood, spending time on many film sets, and watching the good, bad and ugly parts of the existing power dynamics. These experiences helped her form the complex, morally gray characters that inhabit her script.

"We have a really hard time holding duality in our head. We have a really hard time being like, 'This is a good person who has done a bad thing' or, 'This is a bad person who occasionally does good things.' And it's not even really about bad and good, right and wrong. I think it's about this feeling of why these characters present themselves a certain way, and is that different from how they feel about themselves on the inside?" says Garrett.

She also shares what she learned about writing from working with Julia Roberts: "Economy. Julia is such a good actor, and I am the type of writer who will take two paragraphs to say what she can say in a look. I think that what I really learned from her was that sometimes you just don't need to say this monologue, you need these two lines, economy of word, and then asurplus of really good character thought brought by an actor can sometimes make a scene sing more than a lot of dialogue."

To learn more, listen to the 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 their past and present after their harrowing experiences with the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. Isolation, shame, regret and the true meaning of brotherhood are themes explored in this hyper-focused family drama.

On today's episode we sit down with Ronan Day-Lewis to find out more about his edgy first feature film, what it's like writing a screenplay with Daniel Day-Lewis, and Ronan's personal connection between his visual art and the imagery in the film.

Ronan also shares this advice to screenwriters tackling family and generational stories: "Whatever you can fall in love with, latch onto that: an image, a feeling, a character. Don't put pressure on approaching a script a certain way. Stay open, be patient, and keep sight of what originally gave you the impulse to enter that world. Over time, the story will reveal itself to you."

To learn more about this surprising and deeply emotional film, listen to the 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 Poots and Brett Goldstein. The film centers on two best friends, Laura and Simon, who harbor an unspoken love for one another even after a futuristic test matches one of them up with their supposed soulmate. Though the set-up of the story sounds like science-fiction, the movie stays firmly grounded in reality and examines the human need for love and how we often sabotage that love.

If you're a fan of the show Black Mirror, you likely know Will Bridges' Emmy-winning episode "USS Callister," the only Black Mirror episode to get a sequel. Brett Goldstein is perhaps most famous for playing Roy Kent on Ted Lasso, where he was a writer on the show before acting on it. He talks about his self-taped audition for the show and how taking that one risk changed everything for him.

Bridges and Goldstein talk about working together on an early project where they were forced to bunk in a "spider infested Airbnb," and they also discuss the nuances of their writing in the film All of You, including why they left out all exposition. "We never wanted to be too specific about where Simon and Laura are in their relationship, but we want to draw you in quickly. We want you playing detective: Where are they now? What's going on with them? So we just trusted the audience would get it," Bridges says.

They also discuss why you never see Laura or Simon separate from each other. "One of the rules of the film," says Goldstein, "we only see them when they're together. We don't see their lives when they're apart, and that's kind of fun and interesting to me, that we are watching the film of them. We are not watching the film of what it's like to be Simon, what's it like to be Laura, we only know what it's like to be them."

To hear more, listen to the 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 opportunity to look at my relationship with my own masculinity and it helped me understand the man I want to be," says director Joe Wright about the way he personalized Benito Mussolini's story to make it more accessible to a modern audience, adding, "I wanted the audience to be at times seduced by him, and then in a Brechtian sense, to kind of pull the rug from underneath their feet, and ask them to apply some critical distance."

Wright also discusses what he learned about storytelling growing up with his parent's puppet theater, his early films like Pride and Prejudice, and dealing with his own self-doubts as a filmmaker by making a movie about Winston Churchill called Darkest Hour.

"Darkest Hour is a movie about doubt. When I made that movie, I just made a movie called Pan, which the critics hated and lost a huge amount of money. I was sort of consumed afterwards by self-doubt. I was thinking, what have I got to say? I can't reach audiences anymore, I'm out of step. So, then the opportunity came along to do Darkest Hour, and I immediately perceived it as a story about a little man who was consumed by self-doubt, and who was doubted by others all around him. Yet he persevered and overcame enormous odds to lead a nation at their darkest hour. So, for me, that became a story worth telling," says Wright.

To hear more, listen to the 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 very silly. That silliness is what was so appealing to me about the original, and I just wanted to make sure that we weren't going to try and do something that was too self-serious," says The Toxic Avenger writer/director Macon Blair about pitching Legendary Studios his version of how he would reimagine the classic black comedy splatter film for a modern audience while staying loyal to the fans of the 1984 version.

On today's episode, we chat with writer/director/actor Macon Blair about his previous films like Blue Ruin and I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore, which won the Sundance Grand Jury award in 2017. His latest film is a reboot of The Toxic Avenger starring Peter Dinklage and Kevin Bacon, and is a whole lot of gory, gross-out fun. Blair talks about the need to dig into the over-the-top absurdity of the franchise while still making the modern version of the story feel authentic.

"I'm always looking for something that I can connect to on a personal level. I don't mean autobiographical. I mean to be able to have that electrical current with what I'm typing out," he says.

Blair tells us about his on-going journey to finding his voice as a writer and what it was like waiting two years to get distribution for The Toxic Avenger. He also explains why he skewers a famous screenwriting trope in the film that involves a cat named Mr. Treats who was apparently quite the menace.

To hear more insight, listen to the 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, Molly Smith Metzler about why she wanted to invoke big themes from Greek drama in her TV show Sirens.

On today's episode, we chat with Molly Smith Metzler, showrunner and creator of the hit Netflix limited series Sirens starring Julianne Moore, Meghann Fahy and Kevin Bacon. The show is based on her stage play Elemeno Pea from 2011. Smith Metzler talks about making the transition from playwriting to television and what she learned about being in the writer's room for Orange is the New Black.

"Everything you do in a [writer's] room is an offering. I'm here to serve, I'm here to serve you. Come in with ideas, offer them. If they don't hit, back off of them. You are a sous chef and a waiter," she says.

She also talks about writing edgy female characters unapologetically, like the ones in Sirens, and the numerous times she was asked to remove a certain risqué scene from the pilot script – which she refused to do. "We have to write these women in their truest form – they're complicated, and they don't have to explain themselves, either. My job is not to soften her so an audience won't turn off the TV show," she says.

To hear more about creating Sirens listen to the 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 getting it made. That was key to The Purge getting made, that it was one location," says James DeMonaco, director and co-writer of the new horror film, The Home.

On today's show, we talk with both James DeMonaco and Adam Cantor, co-writers of the new horror film The Home.

The Home is about Max (Pete Davidson), a troubled young man, who starts working at a retirement home only to realize its residents and caretakers harbor sinister secrets. As he investigates the building and its forbidden fourth floor, he starts to uncover connections to his own past and upbringing as a foster child.

DeMonaco, best known for creating The Purge franchise, and Cantor, an actor-turned-writer, talk about their favorite horror films from the 1970s, the challenge of bringing a 70s vibe to modern horror films, and working with their Staten Island buddy, comedian Pete Davidson and bringing out his intense dramatic performance.

DeMonaco also talks about the impact The Purge films have had on our culture.

"I grew up watching Romero and Carpenter films and George Miller. I always thought they put great mirrors up to society, and there was always some kind of smuggler's cinema idea, where they were smuggling socio-political themes into the genre's pieces. So sadly, The Purge is reflective of the world we're living in and becoming, I think, more reflective, which is scary. And terrifying. I wish it wasn't, I wish it was a complete fantasy to purge. Unfortunately, it's not right now, and it's seemingly getting worse," says DeMonaco who weighs in on whether something like The Purge could happen in real life.

"I used to say, 'Absolutely not!' Now, I don't know if I would say that any longer, and that's even scarier to me," says DeMonaco.

To hear more about The Home and the spooky events that h appened on set, listen to the podcast.