“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, we’re participative in some way and it’s connective. How can any of us who are flawed humans connect with a flawless hero? The beauty of Wade [Deadpool] and Logan [Wolverine] is that really, they’re two anti-heroes. They do not abide by typical moral codes. They both have been scarred deeply. And I think one thing that’s really interesting about them is that the worst thing that’s ever happened to them is also the source of their superpowers. Which I think, by the way, is something worth thinking about in all our lives – that the things that we had to get over are also the source of our strength,” says writer/director of Deadpool & Wolverine Shawn Levy. 

In this episode, we discuss the elements that Levy thinks make a great hero and also a powerful villain like Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin). 

“There was something really juicy about [Cassandra’s] twinship with Charles Xavier, that this villain is a new villain who has never been in a movie, who has never been anywhere other than the pages of a Marvel comic book. But there is this connective tissue to deep beloved, extensive mythology with Professor X and Charles. So we did lean into her resentment, her envy of Charles. You know, I think maybe one of my favorite couplets of our writing in this movie is when Cassandra says to Wolverine, ‘He must have really loved you.’ And he says to Cassandra, ‘He would have loved you too. He would have torn a hole in the universe if he knew where you were.’ I get goosebumps saying it now!” says Levy. 

We also break down that hilarious fight scene between Deadpool & Wolverine that takes place entirely inside a Honda Odyssey.

To hear more insights about the highest grossing R-rated comedy of all time, listen to the podcast. 

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 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. 

“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 just this interesting, dynamic person, a person that was trying to figure out how she found herself in this world because she really talks about walking into this bar and meeting this charismatic young bike rider. And so, it was a really beneficial crutch for me to kind of get into this world. And then before you know it, by the middle of the script, I’m writing words for Kathy that never existed. It didn’t hurt that, in my research, I reached out to Danny and he turned over hours and hours of recordings. I would drive around town just listening to Kathy talk. I mean, I had this woman in my head and I felt pretty confident midway through the script that I could write in her voice. It just gave this perspective to a very masculine, aggressive subculture. It gave this feminine point of view, but to me it was just a really interesting point of view,” says writer/director Jeff Nichols about writing the character Kathy, played by Jodie Comer, in his film The Bikeriders. 

In this episode of the podcast, we speak to Jeff Nichols about his departure from Southern Gothic storytelling and going deep into the world of a 1960s motorcycle club for The Bikeriders, starring Austin Butler and Tom Hardy. We also discuss some of his other films like Loving, Take Shelter and Mud, starring Matthew McConaughey – a film Nichols thought would never get released. 

“I thought Mud was a failure. We had taken Mud to the Cannes Film Festival, and although we had a really nice reception there, you know, standing ovations and whatnot – no one bought the film. And we went an entire year with no one buying that film. In fact, no one ever did buy that film. The financier put up half the money to market and distribute that film and luckily, Roadside Attractions came in and put up the other half and then it became the film that everybody knows,” says Nichols. 

To hear more about Nichols’s writing process, and his advice for building stories around “emotional impact,” listen to the podcast. 

“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 [film] in particular, those robberies and the heist… I kind of like to really understand an environment and a landscape before I can write an action sequence. Because if I can’t figure out when a car is overtaking another car or where characters are in relation to it, then it’s impossible to write dialogue. I really try and map out the choreography of things and when to have those spikes of violence. I think you just feel it. You feel it on the page where hopefully you’ve built the tension. There needs to be some kind of release. And that’s maybe a gunshot or maybe it’s a line of dialogue that pulls someone in another direction. I’m pretty prescriptive in the way I write action and I write it in the way I hope it will be shot and it’s not just like an overview of a scene,” says screenwriter Zach Baylin on writing action sequences in his new film, The Order. 

The Order stars Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult and tells the true story of an FBI agent (Law), who’s determined to bring down a group of domestic terrorists in the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s. 

In this episode of the podcast, we talk with Zach Baylin about writing action sequences and also his film King Richard, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. He also shares this advice for writing a period film that might have parallels to today’s society:

“In terms of keeping things entertaining and not wanting to be preachy and didactic, I think that the approach that I took was just to try and tell the story of what happened in 1983 and ‘84 accurately and not to over relate it to today. The parallels to today are so obvious that if we were to throw in lines about things that felt like they were alluding to the present, it would totally take out both the veracity and the intention, which was, I want to tell this story correctly. And if I do, then you’ll walk out of it, both having been entertained and informed,” says Baylin. 

The Order is in theaters now. To hear more about Baylin’s writing process, listen to the podcast. 

“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 to do this crazy new model where the whole season was going to drop at once and they didn't know how it was going to go. And that was a show called House of Cards. And I was staffed for season two of that show before season one dropped. So, that was my entrance into television. It was my first meeting to staff on any show!” says Laura Eason, playwright and current showrunner for Starz’s TV show Three Women. 

In this episode of the Write On podcast, we chat with Laura Eason about her illustrious career as a playwright and how she made the intimidating transition to TV writing. 

“I got a call a week before the [House of Cards] room started and I went to Barnes and Noble and bought the book How to Write the One Hour Drama. I'm not kidding. I was like, oh my God. And I called everyone I knew that had been in TV and said, ‘Tell me everything you can about being in a room and how it's supposed to go.’ And then I was very lucky my first year in TV,” says Eason, who was nominated for an Emmy for House of Cards in 2017. 

Eason also talks about her latest show Three Women, its unique structure, and also shares her advice for writing a TV pilot as the tides in Hollywood are changing. 

“Well, we're coming into a different moment with this contraction that we're having in the [TV] industry. We had a very beautiful time where I think there was a lot of room for idiosyncrasy, and a lot of room for things to not quite check the list of everything a pilot should probably be, but because the voice was really unique or the world was interesting, those shows still got made. And I think we're in a moment now where all of the fundamentals need to be really, really strong. Like the engine of your pilot really needs to work. Someone needs to read that pilot and understand how you're going to be able to make 10 episodes or 20 or 50 episodes of that show, especially because there's less interest in limited series. So, making sure that you're paying as much attention to engine, to character, to your act structure, that the action is really moving and the acts the way it should as much as your voice, the unique things you bring, because of course that's the special sauce. But you really need to have both now, in a really strong way."

To hear more, listen to the podcast. 

“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 there’s that lovely episode in seven where Gordon becomes a stage mum to a TV dog, which is so funny. But yeah, we just wanted it to be interesting,” says Harriet Dyer, co-creator and star of Colin From Accounts about the shift away from Colin the dog to focus more on the relationship between Ashley and Gordon, and develop the supporting characters.

In this episode of the Write On podcast, we check in with the real-life Australian married couple Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer now that season two of Colin From Accounts is out on Paramount+. Brammall and Dyer talk about balancing the tone of the show that continues to have a few scatological elements and misbehaving body parts, but keeps the characters grounded as Gordon deals with a loss. “Episode five is a bit of a departure from the structure of the show and mixes the light and the dark with the comedy butting right up against the tragedy. We played a bit more with that as well. We did stuff that interested us and made us laugh,” says Dyer. 

Brammall also shares his advice for taking control of your creative life. “I started writing plays with a friend of mine because you have no agency as an actor. You’re waiting for the phone to ring. You’re waiting for someone to give you work. You can’t create your own work. And I’m like, well, f*ck this. I want to create work. But you definitely need a big old f*cking dose of luck on the way… And now more than ever, there are ways to make your own stuff and get it out there and produce it. But of course, the flip of that is that there is way more people doing that as well. How does one stand out? I don’t know. All I would say is it’s not going to happen if you don’t start doing it!” 

To find out more about Brammall and Dyer’s writing process, listen to the podcast.

“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 of something so objectively worse than anything the characters are going through. I wanted to put this funny, fraught relationship that seems like the stakes are quite high – are these two people going to continue on together? Against the backdrop of stakes that are so much higher, we can put their relationship into perspective,” says Jesse Eisenberg, writer/director and star of the new buddy movie A Real Pain that takes place on a holocaust tour of Poland.  

In this episode of the Write On podcast, Eisenberg talks about spending years trying to get this particular story just right, how it was personal to him, what it was like to shoot at a concentration camp and the great advice his producer Emma Stone gave him. He also shares his criteria for writing a road trip/buddy movie.

“It has to have an original quality to justify it as a movie. I read so many scripts as an actor and I’ve written so many things, that [a script] has to have two things: it has to be specific enough to feel real and personal. There are just so many movies in this road trip/buddy movie genre, if it doesn’t feel specific I think an audience can sniff it out immediately. The other thing is to make it feel new, to have a new reason to tell this story so it doesn’t feel like something I’ve seen 10,000 other times,” says Eisenberg.    

Listen to the podcast to learn more. 

“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 her on the mouth, I felt like this woman was as important as the Queen of England, as important as Napoleon. I felt her dreams and fears are just as universal as someone who has defeated an army and the only reason we're not hearing about her is because we have these sorts of rules in place for what possesses historical significance. And I don't really think that that's necessarily true,” says Lisa Taddeo, author of the book Three Women, on which her new TV show is based. 

In today’s episode, we speak to Lisa Taddeo, creator of the show Three Women that stars Shailene Woodley, Betty Gilpin, DeWanda Wise and Gabrielle Creevy as “ordinary” women searching for their sexual identity and fulfillment in disparate and surprising ways. The show is an intimate, often stark portrayal of forbidden female desire and the consequences of that desire – both good and bad. 

We also talk about writing the “female gaze” into the scripts, filming with prosthetic penises, the power the book Twilight has on teenage girls, and the uncanny way our mothers influence our own sexuality. 

“My mother made up her face every morning, even when she wasn't going to leave the house. Who is she? My father sees her before she puts on her face as they say, so it's not for him. Nobody is coming to the door today, so it's not for them. It's certainly not for me, because I see her without makeup when she washes it off at night. So, who is it for, you know? And that was a question I had but didn't really know how to frame,” Taddeo says. 

To hear more about the groundbreaking show Three Women that’s airing on Starz, listen to the podcast. Trigger warning: contains mentions of sexual explicit material, sexual assault and trauma.

“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 for up-and-coming writers to break in. It’s tough for everyone, even up-and-coming agents and managers, anyone coming out to Hollywood to pursue a career. It’s one of the toughest times ever, so you need to be patient,” says literary manager Jeff Portnoy, of Bellevue Productions.  

On today’s podcast, guest host Lee Jessup, Hollywood’s leading screenwriting career coach and judge of the Big Break screenwriting competition, interviews Jeff Portnoy, literary manager for Bellevue Productions. They discuss the current state of the industry and how it’s affecting writers. 

“We’ve been encouraging a lot of new writers to focus on features at the moment and explaining how bleak the TV staffing market is right now. So if they have hopes of getting staffed, it’s very difficult right now. Typically, if we had a client who wants to write in the TV space, we’d help them get a TV agent and we, the agents and I, would go out and try to get them staffed. But agents aren’t really signing anyone below mid level right now, so they’re not taking on those up-and-coming writers,” says Portnoy. 

But there is hope considering business trends are always cyclical. Portnoy shares this advice about writing spec features in this climate: “You want to stand out and that comes down to your ideas. The execution has to be great. It’s about choosing ideas that really stand out in a pack – the words I like to use are loud, bold, audacious. Managers, agents, producers – we see thousands of loglines a month and if we see a logline that’s loud, audacious and bold, it’s going to stand out.”

To hear more about the state of the industry, listen to the podcast. 

“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,” says Eric Roth about his latest film Here, co-written and directed by Robert Zemeckis and reuniting actors Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. 

On today’s podcast, we speak with Oscar winning screenwriter Eric Roth about the challenges of writing the screenplay for Here that mostly takes place in one room, with a fixed camera that never moves. The movie explores the ordinary lives of multiple generations of families in a way that many will find relatable, heartbreaking and, at times, claustrophobic. 

“I'm not sure [the characters in Here] are extraordinary or not, but they show the length and breadth of what people can and can't do and when they're trapped. I think when it works that way dramatically, it's quite lovely and quite beautiful. I don't want to use the word profound, but I think the [movie] is profound to a certain extent because it is just about the regularity of life. And that, from dinosaurs to the future, it's going to keep going. Hopefully people will find great joy in how they're living and I'm sure great pain too, but I think that's just sort of the circle of life,” he says. 

We also discuss some of his other films like Forrest Gump, for which he won an Oscar, and Killers of the Flower Moon. 

He shared this advice about using subtext in screenplays. “I think that I'm always trying to find a way to enhance the scene with not only subtext, but with some kind of metaphor and make it possibly more interesting as to getting to the root of people's feelings without them having to vomit out what they're saying you know. It's not easy, but I think as I've gotten more successful and more accomplished at it,” he says. 

To hear more of Eric Roth’s advice for screenwriters, listen to the podcast.