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IFH 740: Screenwriting Rules You Need to Learn Then Break with Julian Hoxter · Indie Film Hustle® - A Filmmaking Podcast

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  You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more amazing filmmaking and screenwriting
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  podcasts, just go to ifahpodcastnetwork dot com. Welcome to the Indie Film Hustle
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  Podcast, Episode number seven forty. If writing was easy, You're doing it
• 0:18
  wrong. Ryan Hutchinson broadcasting from the back alley in Hollywood. It's the Indie
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  Film Hustle Podcast, where we show you how to survive and thrive as an
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  indie filmmaker in the jungles of the film biz. And here's your host,
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  Alex Ferrari. Welcome, Welcome to another episode of the Indie Film Hustle Podcast.
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  I am your humble host, Alex Ferrari. Today's show is sponsored by
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  Rise of the Film Entrepreneur How to turn your independent film into a profitable business.
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  to order it, just head over to www. Dot filmbizbook dot com.
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  That's film bizbook dot com. Now, guys, today on the show,
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  we have author and screenwriter Julian Huckster and here's the writer of the Creative Screenwriter,
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  Twelve rules to follow and break to unlock your screenwriting potential. And Julie
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  and I had a really amazing conversation where we take it from essentially the history
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  of screenwriting from the beginnings in the silent era days all the way to current
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  times to the spec market, boom and bust and everything in between, as
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  well as talking about craft, story structure, the mechanics of screenwriting, how
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  to develop an idea into a story, what you should really look for in
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  main characters, and much much more so. Without any further ado, please
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  enjoy my conversation with Julian Huckster. I'd like to welcome to the show,
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  Julian Huckster. How you doing, Hey, I'm good. Thanks, nice
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  to be here. Thank you so much for being on the show. I
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  wanted to have you in the show to talk about your book, The Creative
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  Screenwriter, Twelve Rules to follow and break to unlock your screenwriting potential. And
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  like I've said so many times before, I love bringing on different perspectives on
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  the craft because at the end of the day, we're all going towards the
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  same place, a good story, and how you get there could be one
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  person's way, it could be another person's way, it could be a million
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  different ways. And I always like to expose the audience to as many different
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  ideas because you never know what will click with the right with the right writer.
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  Would you agree completely? I mean, I think you know. I
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  teach screenwriting at San Francisco Straight. We have a number of people to teach
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  screenwriting and they're all really good, but you know, if you're a student,
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  you want the person not only who knows what they're talking about, but
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  who you kind of click with. And sometimes that's me. Sometimes it's very
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  much not me, you know. And that's fair. You know, there'll
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  be people who don't like my accent, don't like my beer, don't like
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  the fact that I'm an old, fat white guy, all these good things,
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  and yet hopefully there'll be others who'll find that I have something in value
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  to off. So yeah, I mean to be fair, I think the
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  accent really adds credibility to your teaching as an American. Well, when I
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  have a nine o'clock lecture start, I reckon it gives me twenty minutes to
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  sort of wake up and for the coffee to begin to poslaid inside me.
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  Before you know, they're really listening to what I'm saying, and they're kind
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  of in that I had to have his accents such yet but in so,
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  yeah, I count that as an advantage yet, no question. So how
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  did you get into the business. Well, I went to film school.
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  I went to UCLA many many years ago, and then I really discovered a
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  love of teaching and I went back to England and got a job part time
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  teaching at the university, and then that became full time, and then I
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  began to run departments and on it went, and so I've really been in
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  education for a very long time. And in that time, I've been working
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  as an independent filmmaker. I made some documentary features, done some rewrites on
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  you know, in the indie features and so on and so on. But
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  also I've been writing and working on more scholarly works, so the history of
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  screenwriting and the state of the industry and so on and so on. So
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  I kind of straddle to camps. I'm partly a screenwriter, partly you know,
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  a story consultant, but I also research, write and teach in film
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  studies. Out of curiosity, you talked about the history of screenwriting. I
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  actually never had that conversation with anybody. What is the history of screenwrit Like,
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  I know, like when when Edison started with his camera, you know,
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  they were just kind of like doing short little bits. But like,
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  at what point was there a screen Well, we would what we considered any
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  sort of guidance as far as a story, and then what we would know
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  as a screenplay today. Well, I mean I think very early there were
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  what you call scenario writers. And indeed, even before nineteen twenty, there
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  were people who were writing books like like what we're talking about today, you
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  know, how to write a screenplay or a scenario. There were people who
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  were pitching ideas for short comedy movies and you know, concepts as opposed to
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  fully drafted scripts. And that comes a bit later, that comes more in
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  the as we're approaching the classical Hollywood period perhaps, But you know, Griffith
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  was making features in the in the teens, you know, when we can
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  whatever we say about them, they're they're very, very important. And people
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  were writing some form of the screenplay, some form of the scenario from almost
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  from the word go. And so so when so in the teens, you
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  know, did what was that big epic film that he did, not Birth
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  of the Nation, but the other one in Tolerance? Did Intolerance have a
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  screenplay? But I don't have I'm sorry, Yeah, did they? I
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  don't have a specific answer to that. I I don't recall. But I
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  think what you have to kind of understand is that, you know, this
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  is a period where everyone is kind of learning what it means to make films,
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  and there are different versions of story that are going around. You know,
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  we don't come to the the sort of the modern screenplay, you know,
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  fully formed. Even in the even in the classical period, you have
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  a range of different formats. And of course, you know, until really
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  into the forties and fifties, screenplays were lists of shots. They weren't they
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  weren't or very they weren't typically broken by scene. They were broken by shot
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  and scene. So you know, these formats have developed over time, and
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  the formats also have developed according to the role of the screenwriter in the process.
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  So in the fifties, when you move after you know, the Paramount
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  Consent Decree, after the studios had to divest some of their divisions, and
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  after they basically sort of said goodbye to having buildings full of inhart screenwriters.
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  When screenwriters became independent, semi independent and freelance, you know, one of
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  the things that changes is the way that you tell a story on the page,
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  a screen story on the page. And you know, you begin to
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  tell a screen story to be read, because the reading is part of the
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  gate keeping us. So whether or not you're going to get your story soul
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  and you know, before you know, you go and eat pitch to the
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  producer. You pitched the studio as a writer, you know, within their
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  their writing department. After we get into the freelance paradigm, well, you
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  have to tell a story a different way. You can't just be be having
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  been given a pitch and you know you're writing out a list of shots.
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  It doesn't quite work that way. I'm simplifying, of course, right.
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  So, so basically, you know, when they were in the studio system,
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  it was more of like a mechanical document of like shot shots, shot
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  shots shot where afterwards you had to become a little bit more of a crafts
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  artistic craftsmen or woman to kind of sell the idea a little bit better.
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  I think so that sense upond entrepreneurialism, entrepreneurship and which is the word anyway,
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  you know, that's something that I think has always been part of a
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  writer's ship. They have to be able to sell their ideas. But it
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  becomes more and more important. I think, I'm sorry, and I think,
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  yeah, you know, writers learn that that's style is their sales pitch
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  as much as whether you can do a you know, an elevator pitch in
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  twenty seconds and get get the producer to you know, like what you're what
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  you're selling, because the whole relationship between writers and studios changes, and the
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  whole way in which writers interface with studios or writers agents, interfacement studios,
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  and the idea of kind of you know, story readers who sit as the
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  gatekeepers, you know, between the writer and the studio. You know,
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  that comes more and more important for writers to deal with and engage with,
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  you know, from the fifty sixty seventies onwards, you know, and that
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  sense of the development of coverage and how coverage is incredibly important not only for
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  the script and hand, but for your reputation within an organization and so on.
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  You know, who'll look back and see, well, what comveranies should
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  you get last time you submitted to us? And so on, and so
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  we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now now back
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  to the show. And then and then so when you hear of a of
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  a studio or an agency signing a writer based on their voice, even though
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  that script that they might have submitted will never in a million years get produced,
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  but they look at it as a voice, that is their style,
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  that is their signature in the marketplace. Yeah, to misquit the currents.
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  You know that that's their bottom think feeling right, I mean that that's exactly
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  what you want or what's you just saying? Right? Uh, you know
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  we can discuss the realities, but you know is somebody who has a unique
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  voice, and you know that we've got we've moved beyond in the in the
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  the ten pole era such as you know, we can call it that,
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  we sort of moved beyond the time in which writers write specs with the expectation
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  of selling the spec And now it's the expectation of selling themselves as you as
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  you indicate it, or a least right aspects are still being bought. But
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  then you know, the market is way down from what it was in the
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  Oh god, yeah, I mean I love talking to sometimes I get the
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  pleasure of speaking to some of those those screenwriters when there was like getting three
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  million dollars a script, two million dollars a ship five I mean with Esterhouse,
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  I mean, Jesus, I mean he, I mean he I think
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  he made I think what was the I think twenty or twenty five million on
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  scripts that never got produced? Yeah, backers, the other obvious examples.
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  Yeah, it was an insane time. And but a lot of screenwri I
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  still think today that that's a thing where it does happen, but it's rare.
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  It's much rare. I mean it's it's I was researching a book a
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  couple of years ago, and I'm trying to remember who actually was it John
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  august I can't remember. I can't remember who it was. Someone may made
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  a really good comment. But now it's a less than you guys that there
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  there really isn't a kind of market for some of the journeyman screen screenlink right,
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  what you have I mean again I'm simplifying, of course, sure,
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  Well what you have now is you have a list guys who are going to
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  who have their own relationships and I you know, maybe have you know,
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  first looks or whatever, but are basically going to typically be asked to do
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  rewrites. And then you have the new guys who are cheap and get the
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  one step deal and then get fired so that you can you know, afford
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  the a list writer to come in for a lower rate to rewrite rate,
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  and then rewrite the new guys script. That's more the pattern than the idea
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  that there are screenwriters who are you able to maintain a living that in the
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  way that was the case two decades ago. It's a lot tougher to become
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  not only become a screenwriter, but to make a living as a screenwriter because
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  the studios are not making as many movies as they used to. All the
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  movies that they are making are based off of I P or existing comic books
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  or whatever that they're dealing with. So the market for independent ideas are basically
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  regulated to the independence or the mini majors. And even then they're looking for
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  IP as well. No one's dubbing one hundred million into a into a spec
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  script unless there's a massive actor, massive director, massive producers attached. Right,
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  And this is one of the reasons. I mean, you're absolutely right.
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  And this is one of the reasons why when I'm teaching screenwriting. You
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  know at my college that we're developing classes and we're developing competencies in asking students
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  to think beyond the screenplay and to think about, you know, what do
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  you need to do in this convergent world in order to become visible to Hollywood?
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  And it's partly you know, you can write a screenplay, and you
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  can get show to agents, and you can win competitions and you can do
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  all these things, but even so, Hollywood is not interested unless there's an
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  IP with some track record typically behind it. Yeah, how do you go
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  about getting that track record? Well, maybe you write a novel, Maybe
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  you do something online with a you know, an online comic, who knows.
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  Maybe you do your own independent comic book. Maybe maybe you maybe you
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  maybe maybe maybe So you know. One of the things that I think that
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  we have to do as educators, and here I'm talking as an educator,
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  you know, is to think about how do you prepare students to be what
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  I loosely call screenwriter two point zero, right, Because if you think of
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  screen nutter a one point zero that you know, the person who and then
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  they may also have been a journalist or a novelist or something else in their
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  time, but basically the person who you know, wrote mood. That was
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  their career. They did as well as they did, but that was kind
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  of what they did. Never now and again maybe they did something else,
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  Whereas nowadays, I think that for the young writers coming up, the screen
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  writ a two point zero model is the screenwriter who is also thinking about all
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  these other media, all these other conversion media, all these other ways of
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  beginning to get an idea out there, particularly if they want to work in
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  you know, in Hollywood as we might still define Hollywood. And it's there's
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  the twin track, right. If it's my IP I want, I need
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  to get it some kind of audience. If it's my spec, well,
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  my spec no longer is what I'm selling. I'm selling myself as you say,
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  because you know, what we want if we're a studio is someone who
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  can you know, write the next I P based movie for us exactly And
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  and and I've seen a lot of success with podcasts like you know a different
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  podcasts that people are writing, story based podcast narrative podcasts that turn get that
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  got picked up because they get optioned. Uh and and obviously independent comic books,
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  novels. I've seen a lot of screenwriters create novels off of their screenplays
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  and sell them and then get optioned the book when when their screenplay was rejected
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  that they will option the book because it becomes a best seller, or even
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  if it doesn't become a bestseller, even it has some sort of success for
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  the for the for the studios. A lot of times they just feel more
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  comfortable because it covers their ass a bit more. But you know, it's
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  I mean, it's precisely. It's a theater of media, right, particularly
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  when you're an executive at a big studio and because there aren't the development budgets
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  that they're worrying more. I mean, it's you know, the upside I
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  guess is that if you if you do sell respect it's much more likely to
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  actually get produced now than it was in the in the eighties, right where
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  where it's one in twenty, now it's like one in three or four or
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  five and maybe out of take that numbers, but you're much less likely to
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  actually sell that script in the first place. I mean, so is that
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  a trade off you want? I don't know. Yeah, it's it's a
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  it's a it's a new world for for writers as well as filmmakers. You
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  have to be thinking of multiple revenue streams, other ways to make money otherwise
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  to maintain your your your you know, your craft, but your career.
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  And I've seen films, I've seen screenwriters who write those novels and they generate
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  money automatically from self publishing their own stuff. Every month. There's money coming
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  in keeping the lights on while they're chasing the screenwriting dream and getting assignments or
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  selling a script or something like that. But it's those writers who are like
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  making a living and that could be blogging, that could be that could be
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  podcasting, that could be teaching. There could be a million different revenue streams
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  that you can create as a screenwriter. You're absolutely right. I mean,
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  this is why I developed class for ss State in Great Story Worlds, right,
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  which is about developing an IP and thinking about how that IP might work,
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  Yes, by all means of the future film, but also you know,
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  as anything from a TV show to a comic book to a blog.
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  Yeah, but this is exactly correct. I think we're on the same page
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  with absolutely Now you've been working with the screenwriters for a long time, what
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  is the biggest mistake you see first time screenwriters make? Good question? There
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  are many, you know. I mean, I'm lucky that I work with
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  very inexperienced screenwriters. People often don't have the confidence that they can actually do
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  the thing literally functionally, let alone sell anything. And you know, my
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  number one job I think, and I think I'm coming round into answering your
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  question here. My number one job, I think is to actually give them
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  the confidence that they can do it now. Maybe that comes from you know,
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  the people who I'm seeing, you know who I think, you know,
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  need that sense that somebody is taking their work seriously, is going to
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  engage with it seriously. It's going to give them, you know, hard
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  but fair feedback, but on the basis of encouraging them to move forward and
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  finish the first draft. And I think one of the things that people get
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  wrong is the idea that it's fine to you know, quit halfway through and
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  start another project. And you know, I think that one of the most
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  important things if you're a young screenwriter or a screenwridger just starting out, is
• 18:33
  finish your draft. And the screenplay itself might be garbage, right, And
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  I've written you know, I hold my own hand up here. Of course,
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  I've written bad screenplays. Some of them are on the shelf over there,
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  and I will never look at them again. But no one else will
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  ever either. But that sense in which once you've done it once, however
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  bad, you think the outcome is and you know, you know, you
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  might come back to it in five years and actually find something that's that's interesting
• 18:57
  and you wanted about further. But bad, the outcome is, you know,
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  you can do it, and then the second one is easier. It's
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  not easy, but it's easier because you know, you've done an extraordinarily difficult
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  thing. And then when I think about, you know, what I do
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  as an educator, you know, I'm asking eighteen, nineteen twenty year olds
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  to write a feature scripting play. That's an incredibly difficult thing to do at
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  any age. And obviously there are some you know, writers who come to
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  us and they're wonderfully prepared and advanced, and they, I once said,
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  breathe through it. You know, they they find it less less difficult.
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  But there are a lot of kids who come, you know, with very
• 19:36
  little confidence in their own abilities and with lots of, you know, good
• 19:41
  reasons why. You know, writing is something that doesn't come naturally. And
• 19:48
  you know, the one more they do it, and the more they engage
• 19:51
  with the process, the better they get. So it's like building. It
• 19:55
  is like building a table. Like you build the first table you built,
• 19:56
  it's going to be pretty bad. I'm sure we'll be right back after a
• 20:02
  word from our sponsor, and now back to the show, and then to
• 20:10
  second table. Get better, The third paper will get better, and so
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  on and so forth. And that's some of the best advice I've ever heard
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  from from screenwriters that I've spoken to, is like, right, right,
• 20:19
  right, just keep right. I don't care if it's bad, just right.
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  I mean, yeah, I mean the kind of part two of that
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  is right, every day, do something that relates to writing every day.
• 20:30
  It can be actively thinking about stuff and taking notes. It can be you
• 20:33
  know, going to a location seeing if it inspires you because you think it
• 20:36
  might be of interest in your script. It can be anything. But if
• 20:40
  you feel like you're doing something that relates to your writing every day, then
• 20:44
  it becomes part of your life and it isn't the thing that sits there going
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  aha, you haven't done me today, you know, And then that comes
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  kind of the the unspoken you can't do it, that sits behind you.
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  You know. You find ways of engaging in the writing process, engaging in
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  the creative story thinking process every day, and you know it's it's one of
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  those you know, take care of the pennies and the pants or the dollars
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  will take it. Take care of the get my currency right, get take
• 21:11
  care of the cents, and the dollars will take care of themselves, right
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  exactly, and and and it's like they say, you know, you tell
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  the muse that you're going to be here every day. She shows up every
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  once in a while, but if you're not there, she might you might
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  miss her. Yeah, yeah, that's nice. I like, I'm ste
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  steal little, I stole it from somebody, so yes, please, this
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  is what writers do right well, And that's another thing. We let's just
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  dismiss all of this thing like, oh, I can't. You can't steal
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  from everyone steals from everybody, Every director steals from every director, from the
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  first person who made a two shot. It's been stolen by Martin Scorsese,
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  and everybody is stolen from Martin and everyone's and Spielberg stole from Krosawa and copal
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  It's and the good ones ad missed it, right, the good ones?
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  Yes, of course this was my influence, but I tried to do something
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  with it, you know, right. The cliche is, you know the
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  uh bad writer Steel good writers are influenced, you know, I mean this
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  is you know, a good bar, good good bar. Good writers borrow
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  great writers Steel. There you go, exactly, and it's but it's just
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  so truth. But like I remember when Tarantino showed up. Everybody tried to
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  be Quinin and you can't. Like, he's such a unique voice in the
• 22:23
  craft. There's literally he's a once in a generation writer and and let alone
• 22:29
  writer period, let alone screenwriter. There's just so many things going on,
• 22:33
  the complexities of what he's writing and how he's writing and how he's delivering it,
• 22:37
  you can't. And they trust me. If you remember the nineties when
• 22:40
  when pulp fiction came out, how many pulp fiction rip offs came out,
• 22:42
  and none of them were anything close. But also he had an encyclopedic knowledge,
• 22:48
  oh insanity, all kinds of cinema that you wouldn't even think about that,
• 22:52
  you know, absolutely. And when I was in film school, it
• 22:55
  was Shane by Right, it was piece a weapon came out. Everyone was
• 22:59
  reading screenplay, the Shane Blackism's you know, the kind of giosyncratic way in
• 23:03
  which you wrote. Everyone was copying that, and it was you know,
• 23:10
  yes, but there's no substitute of having your end books. And that's the
• 23:15
  thing. And I think a lot of times people start as a writer.
• 23:18
  At least I've done it, and I know I have a lot of other
• 23:19
  writers who's told me the same thing. Is they'll start trying to copy someone
• 23:23
  else in their style. But then as you go through the process, your
• 23:27
  voice comes out through it. And I think that happens with all writers.
• 23:32
  I think every writer who ever read something is influenced by I mean, how
• 23:36
  many people have been influenced by Shakespeare? How many people have been insumed by
• 23:38
  Hemingway or Dickens. And then you start to start down their road and then
• 23:44
  all of a sudden it becomes your thing. But you got you got to
• 23:48
  kind of like work out the thing. I think it was, I forgot
• 23:51
  who it was. It was a famious musician who said that when you start
• 23:55
  writing songs, it's like turning the faucet of a of a bathtub and the
• 24:00
  first stuff that comes out is sludge. It's just deep, muddy sludge.
• 24:04
  But as you keep letting it run, it starts to clear up and clear
• 24:08
  up and clear up until a point where it's crystal clear, and ah,
• 24:11
  now I could start writing. So you've got to get those bad drafts out
• 24:15
  as fast as possible. I could not agree more. I think, you
• 24:18
  know the other way of looking at it, and this is with my my
• 24:21
  sort of scholarly had on it is the idea that you know, all media
• 24:25
  texts are into texts, right, They are a combination of things that you
• 24:30
  know that you're being influenced by and things that you have no idea you know.
• 24:33
  So you know, it's like the cliche, right, what you know?
• 24:37
  Well, of course you're going to write what you know. What else
• 24:38
  can you do? And that's partly a conscious process. Partly thing well,
• 24:42
  I want to be in the style of X, and that's partly you know,
• 24:47
  you are the accretion of experience and neuroses that you are, and so
• 24:52
  that's somehow going to manifest in how you write. Yeah, I mean,
• 24:56
  it's just another way of saying what you've said. But you know, I
• 24:59
  agree with with the hundred percent. Now, one thing that a lot of
• 25:02
  people, a lot of writers specifically, I've heard say that structure is too
• 25:06
  formulaic, that it's going to make it. You know, I'm not going
• 25:10
  to just be a formula guy or gal, and I need to be free
• 25:12
  and free flowing in my ideas. I can't be boxed in by structure.
• 25:17
  What would you have to say about that? That's a great question, and
• 25:19
  it's a huge topic. I mean, one extent thing, it depends on
• 25:22
  who you're writing for. Right, If you're making your own micro budget movie,
• 25:27
  you can do whatever the whatever the hell And I'm not sure what our
• 25:33
  profanity filter is there, whatever the hell you want, right sure, But
• 25:37
  you know, if you're writing with a particular market in mind, then you
• 25:41
  have to be professional about it. And there are many different versions of in
• 25:45
  between, kind of you know, formula and complete anarchic freedom. I think
• 25:52
  for me, I look at it this way, that understanding how most movies
• 25:59
  still is most relatively mainstream movie stories are told is a very very powerful tool
• 26:04
  because that gives you a set of questions that you can ask yourself when you're
• 26:08
  getting to a certain point and you're not quite sure what to do or how
• 26:12
  to do it. You can go, well, all right, well what
• 26:14
  a most movies do at this point, and then you can assess what you're
• 26:17
  trying to do. So for me, that's where I think formula or structural
• 26:22
  paradigm. Structural models are useful because they give you opiniata. They give you
• 26:26
  a way of disciplining your thinking and a way of cutting through and asking the
• 26:32
  real questions as opposed to the what if generalized questions. But yeah, I
• 26:37
  mean all all models, and really, frankly, most of most of the
• 26:41
  people who write about screenwriting, including myself, are basically saying the same thing
• 26:45
  with little here, you know, And it's really about whose version of eloquence
• 26:51
  do you do? You appreciate it? And I think I think that the
• 26:56
  understanding a model, I don't care whose it is, you know, a
• 27:00
  model is a very very useful thing because that gives you a basis for your
• 27:03
  own thinking. And that also makes you think, if I'm going too far
• 27:07
  away from this, am I actually really going to be talking to the pingle
• 27:10
  I need to talk to? But using it as a kind of crutch is
• 27:15
  not what you want. Yeah, I was talking to a screenwriter the other
• 27:18
  day and he told me that basically all stories are either three acts or four
• 27:23
  at the most. You can try to cut up a movie. You can
• 27:26
  cut it up in eight acts. It's irrelevant because but certain things that happened
• 27:33
  through in the stories in popular films throughout history, without question hit these marks
• 27:41
  all the time, even pulp fiction, which is out of order in the
• 27:45
  genius, very conventional in the genius of that story, in the way he
• 27:49
  wrote it and shot it and edited it, even though the stories are timelined
• 27:56
  off, the hits are happening at the point they should be happening. So
• 28:00
  that's why it seems like an experimental film, but it's not, and it's
• 28:06
  so brilliant. That's what the brilliance of pulp fiction is. I say that
• 28:08
  that doesn't make it not clever, but yeah, but we have to want
• 28:11
  to listen to what it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was
• 28:15
  something Memento or yeah, I mean, Momento is another one. I mean,
• 28:18
  I mean anything Christopher Nolan, for God's sake. I mean he's always,
• 28:23
  you know, messing with time and everything in all like in Inception and
• 28:27
  uh, Interstellar at all of those things. But they all hit those marks.
• 28:33
  I mean, you you that's why you look at a movie like any
• 28:37
  David any David Lynch movie, any David Lynch movie. They're not there,
• 28:42
  They're all over in the place. And that's why his film's you know,
• 28:47
  I think I think Blue Velvet was the closest. Maybe maybe Elephant Man,
• 28:52
  Eraserhead possibly, but Blue Velvet's probably his most mainstream story wise, also one
• 28:59
  of the most popular. But U Mulholland Drive, like it's all like can
• 29:03
  you can you not can you can you pin those things on Moloney? I
• 29:07
  don't think he can not in terms of conventional loop right literally and as is
• 29:12
  Yeah, I mean I think I think you know the well then what he's
• 29:15
  trying to be semi conventional, like with Blue Velvet or like with the original
• 29:19
  Twin Peaks, he's doing that to to expose the conventionality as a as its
• 29:26
  own kind of artifice. Right, So, I mean he's not he's not
• 29:29
  being conventional. He's he's showing you that he's being conventional, if you know
• 29:34
  exactly, but so so for for everyone listening. So I just want you
• 29:38
  to kind of look like someone like Tarantino, who sometimes seems like he's unconventional.
• 29:44
  The genius of Tarantino is he's completely conventional within this unique structure that he's
• 29:48
  created and characters and and and and things that are strictly his. We'll be
• 29:56
  right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the show.
• 30:04
  But when you look at someone like David Lynch, who's, like, I
• 30:07
  mean, pinpoint a movie that has a conventional it's very rare to find because
• 30:11
  he's making art films and that's okay, and that's okay as as a writer
• 30:15
  as a director, you can do that. But if you're trying to sell
• 30:18
  to the studio system, you're trying to sell a conventional process. You need
• 30:22
  structure. You need to to pin And I personally, when I write,
• 30:25
  I love structure because it gives me a goalposts to write. It makes me
• 30:29
  feel a lot more. It's like, this is the this is the lane
• 30:33
  that I'm in, and I could play within this lane as much as I
• 30:36
  want, but I can't go off roading, right. I think that's extremely
• 30:41
  well, But I feel basically exactly the same. I always want to know
• 30:44
  that that I have some fullback, some fullback questions to ask myself, you
• 30:48
  know, and to begin to kind of judge what I'm doing against unless i'm
• 30:53
  really you know, I'm going off into the wilds of micro budget trump.
• 30:57
  But having said that, one of the great things that the contemporary moment screenwriters,
• 31:02
  and there are many not so great things, and we've covered some of
• 31:03
  them already in discussion, is the fact that micro budget is alive in a
• 31:07
  way that it never really was previously, and that you know, you can
• 31:11
  be Shankau to make a primer for seven dollars or whatever he made it for
• 31:17
  and you can be you know, a queer filmmaker or a woman or a
• 31:22
  person of color, you know, and be making stories that are deeply meaningful
• 31:26
  and radical without having to, you know, deal with the system. In
• 31:33
  many ways, I feel that this, I feel that the system is as
• 31:37
  we know it because I mean, you and I both kind of grew up
• 31:40
  in this. I think we're similar vintage, close enough to the vintages of
• 31:42
  our age, so we kind of grew up in the in the in the
• 31:47
  time when the system was the system. I remember one that, you know,
• 31:49
  Warner Brothers was putting out fifteen to twenty movies a year at some of
• 31:53
  them five million dollars maybe ten million dollar movies, you know, and then
• 31:56
  occasionally would have these big budget things where now it's just like everything's a big
• 32:00
  budget everything, but it's all very calculated based on IP and things like that.
• 32:05
  They were taking chances. I mean, can you imagine Taxi Driver today?
• 32:07
  Can you can you imagine Raging Raging Bull maybe would get made. You
• 32:14
  could make a version of Taxi Driver for ten bucks and if you and Meg
• 32:17
  yeah, yeah, but within a studio system exactly. I no way in
• 32:22
  how that anything in the seventies want to get made Minnike, Cowboy La.
• 32:28
  But I mean, but also all of the GENA movies that I grew up
• 32:30
  with, right, you know, John Carpenter and name name name, any
• 32:35
  Jurora movie maker of the seventies eighteen nineties. You know a lot of that's
• 32:38
  gone. I mean, yes, there's certainly is new iterations of things like
• 32:42
  horror movie and blumbhouse and you know, and so on, and that's cool,
• 32:45
  But but you know, where is the sort of the mid level genre
• 32:49
  movie. They kind of don't exist, or at least there are very few
• 32:52
  of them. They're either really shlocky and kind of their budget or they need
• 32:58
  to be three hundred million dollars because because you know, one of the lessons
• 33:00
  that we learn, you know, is that the B movies has become the
• 33:04
  AI movie and and so now those genres are are tempole genres as opposed to
• 33:07
  being you know, knockoffs, right and specifically, like, you know,
• 33:13
  you could make a thirty million dollar genre piece with John Carpenter directing back in
• 33:16
  the day, and that was acceptable. Now do you need Gil moldol Toro
• 33:22
  to make it? And it becomes an art piece and when's the Oscar You
• 33:24
  know, it's a I mean, there's this horrible word niche, which which
• 33:29
  applies to like most of where India has gone. Right, there's not get
• 33:31
  indie. There's like niche or crossover or specialist. And then you know you're
• 33:37
  in this indie wood frame where you're kind of working in a very different notion
• 33:42
  of what independence is. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The Sun Dance three
• 33:45
  million dollar independent film, that's yeah, with with major stars attached to well
• 33:49
  took pay cuts. Yeah, that's not indie to me. It's and I'm
• 33:52
  glad that those filmvies are getting made because they're telling there's telling stories that might
• 33:58
  not get made. But when I see them at Sunday and sometimes I'm like,
• 34:00
  really, do you you got an Oscar Winner in your movie? I
• 34:05
  know, yeh sure, it costs you a million dollars to make, and
• 34:06
  they're working for scale. But you know, where are the where the Ed
• 34:12
  Burns, the Spike Lee's, the Robert Rodriguez Is, the Quentin Guarantee Knows,
• 34:15
  the Kevin Smith's of the world. All that nineties drop of filmmakers are
• 34:20
  they? None of those guys would even make it today if they were coming
• 34:22
  out and I've spoken to some of them and they said the same thing.
• 34:27
  I'm like, would you would Brothers mcmullens show up today, He's like,
• 34:29
  it never just would. It wouldn't get the light of day. Too much
• 34:32
  stuff going on in today's world. So it's a very interesting place we are
• 34:37
  in history. You know, I couldn't agree more. And and it's a
• 34:40
  place that's weirdly simultaneously a place of more opportunities will weighless opportunities. It's a
• 34:46
  strange, a strange, you know, scary mixture between the two. I
• 34:52
  think, well, I think today though, I think that before the barrier
• 34:57
  to entry was creation. Now creation does not the barrier to entry. Now
• 35:00
  it's marketing, it's eyeballs, it's getting to an audience, is getting seen.
• 35:05
  Is that that's the art now where the creation of it used to cost
• 35:08
  so much. But now like I made my last two features were made for
• 35:10
  under ten thousand, and I sold them to Hulu and internationally because you know,
• 35:15
  and they got sold. But that's that's the world we live in today.
• 35:21
  It's about that. And I think also for screenwriters, you know,
• 35:24
  the competition for screenwriters is I think there's more opportunity now for writers than ever
• 35:29
  in history of Hollywood. So many shows, so many things going on,
• 35:32
  and streaming is fascinating, fascinating. Where it's going to be in five years,
• 35:36
  I don't know, but right now it's it's genre breaking. It's said,
• 35:39
  there's a whole lot of really interesting things going on. That's where all
• 35:43
  the independent filmmakers went. That's all the independent writers went because they can't go
• 35:46
  into which is one of the reasons why. I mean, I'm not an
• 35:50
  expert on TV, but it's one of the reasons why. What's so fascinating
• 35:52
  to me from the outside about streaming is that all of these film people have
• 35:58
  gone into television and they're trying to renegotiate what a series it's, what an
• 36:02
  episode is, what it means to write, you know, sequential narratives and
• 36:09
  the breadth the variety that we're getting. Not all it works, of course,
• 36:14
  but you know, it is really fascinating, and I think that's something
• 36:16
  that is changing the model. And there's kind of a battle going on,
• 36:21
  it seems to me between you know, those shows that are invested in the
• 36:25
  idea of the episode and the episode is actually a good thing. The episode
• 36:29
  is something that you want to to kind of cherish, you know, for
• 36:31
  its own purposes, and those who basically want to kill the episode dead and
• 36:36
  chop their long movie into you know, random thirty minute sixty minute chapters.
• 36:40
  You know, So that the war for sequential narratives is ongoing and I'm very
• 36:47
  interested to see where it ends up. They basically is like I want all
• 36:51
  the Harry Potter movie, all the Harry Potter books out now, as opposed
• 36:54
  to waiting little by little year after year, waiting for them to all come
• 36:58
  out. Is like I want the whole story right now, or I'm going
• 37:00
  to value the episodes. And there's there's netflixes and there's the Hulus of the
• 37:06
  world, Like I'm waiting for Handsmaid's Tale, and every week I'm like,
• 37:09
  oh, I got away. This is horrible. You know. I'm so
• 37:15
  used to just like binging everything. But it's a It's an interesting place we
• 37:19
  are with our question now. In your book, you also talk about mechanics
• 37:23
  and some of the mechanics the screenwriters need to learn. What are some of
• 37:27
  those mechanics. Well, I think there are many, but for me,
• 37:30
  one of the keys is format, and I think one of the things that
• 37:35
  certainly my experience of my students, one of the things that they often leave
• 37:39
  behind or feel a little bit frightened k is actually being creative with format and
• 37:44
  realizing that format on the page is something that isn't simply a chore, isn't
• 37:46
  simply a lesson to be learned. You know, slugline and description, and
• 37:51
  you know character and dialogue, but once you get beyond that, it's something
• 37:55
  that you can be very literary with, that you can be very stylistic,
• 38:00
  that you can own, and that you can use, as you know,
• 38:06
  a creative tool. And I think that's something that often students take more time
• 38:14
  to come to terms with because of course, you know, if you haven't
• 38:17
  written a screenplay before and you're trying to think about the story and character development,
• 38:22
  all the good things that you have to do structure forth down the you
• 38:27
  know the gap sometimes. So one of the things that I try and do
• 38:31
  in the book a little bit, but also you know, in my classes,
• 38:35
  is really to show examples of formating different genres in different kind of styles
• 38:38
  and get them excited by how to use that creatively. I suppose that just
• 38:43
  being you know, the short to learn and then you do the basics and
• 38:46
  then you move forward. I mean that's just one example. Now, can
• 38:50
  you talk also a little bit about the sea of white that most producers the
• 38:55
  sea of white on the on the page. They want to see as much
• 38:59
  white space as possible, and that descriptions are not novels and they have to
• 39:05
  make those concise. I mean, there are lots of reasons for this one,
• 39:07
  and that I'll mention upfront, and I'll come back to exactly what you're
• 39:10
  talking about is the idea that you know, when a producer or certainly a
• 39:16
  reader is engaging with your script, what is going to turn their blood cold?
• 39:22
  You know, particularly if your some for intern who's got twenty script through
• 39:24
  you know, is walls of text, both in dialogue and an in description.
• 39:30
  But also you know, the idea is that what you want to try
• 39:32
  and do is replicate the style of the movie on that will be on screen
• 39:38
  as much as you can in the way which you set it up on the
• 39:42
  page. And sometimes that's about trying to anticipate things like kinesis, you know,
• 39:45
  movement, dynamis and action. So there are ways that you can play
• 39:49
  fast and loose with grammar and syntax, and you can carry a sentence over
• 39:52
  and we know our eyes move are moving us through, and we're getting excited
• 39:58
  and reading fast. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and
• 40:07
  now back to the show. And that sometimes is exactly what you want.
• 40:10
  But anyway, what you want to do, you know, in my opinion,
• 40:14
  is to think away from you know, the big descriptive paragraph and to
• 40:17
  think more in what I call thought images. So the sense that you aren't
• 40:21
  calling shots unless you have to, but what you're doing is implying shots by
• 40:28
  describing something succinctly, eloquently and then line of white and then describing something else.
• 40:34
  And it's like what you're doing is effectively calling the shots through. We're
• 40:37
  looking at this, we're looking at this, this happens, this develops,
• 40:40
  and I think that's something that you know, write, just take a little
• 40:45
  bit of time to learn that. The instinct is to kind of you describe
• 40:49
  what's on screen and you end up with, you know, the wall of
• 40:52
  text that we all want to avoid. But the idea of the thought image,
• 40:55
  the idea that what you're doing is trying to inspire reading directors, actors
• 41:01
  and give them every opportunity to kind of launch from your disposable pages, you
• 41:07
  know, and make them feel invested not only in the story in the abstract,
• 41:13
  but actually the style that you're implying that it will feel like once it's
• 41:16
  once it's on the screen that I think is really important. And it's you
• 41:20
  know, the joke I was made not really much of a joke, but
• 41:23
  you know is that when you have the director talking about their vision on late
• 41:28
  night talk show, you know, there's the there's the screenwriter with his or
• 41:32
  her whiskey shouting at the screen and saying that was my line, you know
• 41:37
  exactly. But that's been going on since the beginning of I mean, who
• 41:42
  was it was a Jack Warner or something like that that said that, you
• 41:45
  know, this movie, this was great if we could just get rid of
• 41:46
  the writers or something. I can't remember the exact quote, but but I
• 41:52
  know what you look, it's one of those things. Now. One of
• 41:55
  the most difficult things I think to do as a writer is to develop a
• 42:00
  story out of an idea. How what what advice would you have for that?
• 42:07
  Again? You know, I guess I would backtrack a little bit and
• 42:12
  I would say it depends where the idea comes from, and it depends for
• 42:15
  a certain extent what is the spark, Because sometimes the spark is a plot
• 42:20
  idea or a setting idea. Sometimes it's an image you get. And I
• 42:23
  wrote a novel and we're writing up that just began with an image. An
• 42:27
  image came to me, and I was interested in that image, and I
• 42:29
  began to ask questions about it, and so, well, why is that
• 42:31
  person doing what they're doing? What? Where is this? What's going on?
• 42:36
  And sometimes it's you know, a character, Sometimes it's a situation,
• 42:39
  it's something political with a small or large p So so that the idea can
• 42:45
  come from anywhere, and I think that your first job is to give that
• 42:51
  idea space and begin to interrogate it and ask it logical questions. And those
• 42:57
  logical questions are really story about that story telling questions because as soon as you
• 43:01
  ask, you know, here here's my image. Well, okay, there's
• 43:04
  a character in that image. Who are they? What are they doing there?
• 43:07
  Why, why are they feeling what they're feeling? What is the world
• 43:12
  around them? And so you begin to spy a diagram and kind of expand
• 43:15
  beyond. So that is the kind of the organic development process. Right.
• 43:19
  You begin with some spark and then you begin to kind of ask you questions.
• 43:22
  The other process is, you know, I guess to kind of think
• 43:23
  cleverly about genres and hybridity and you know, uh, log lines and think
• 43:30
  about, well, okay, if I take this this kind of horror movie,
• 43:34
  but I add this kind of element, well what does that become?
• 43:36
  And then I begin to expand it out and then I place a character in
• 43:38
  that world and I see, you know, what goes on. So there
• 43:40
  are kind of I guess that's top down, bottom up versions of story thinking,
• 43:46
  but this is really only the beginning of it. Then I think,
• 43:50
  you know, you've got to decide, well, all right, who's my
• 43:51
  audience? Who is this for? Is this going to be a relatively conventional
• 43:54
  movie or am I kind of going somewhere way off on my own, either
• 43:58
  of which is metallic. Fine, just deal with the consequences of the way
• 44:01
  and the consequences of relatively mainstream. Is you need now to talk the language
• 44:07
  of development in your own thinking, because even if you don't conceive of the
• 44:09
  world, and you made the point about three acts and four acts a few
• 44:12
  minutes ago, and I agree with you completely, but even if that's not
• 44:15
  how you instinctively think you need to be able to articulate your idea in those
• 44:19
  terms, because that's how development thinks. Yeah, you know, and so
• 44:24
  I think that it's you know. Another reason why it's a good idea to
• 44:28
  have some relatively coherent notion of conventional structure to fall back on is because you're
• 44:35
  going to have to explain it that way to someone who doesn't have magical insight
• 44:38
  into your creative brain, isn't an idiot and does understand what they think story
• 44:45
  is and how it works, and you have to meet them halfway and be
• 44:49
  able to explain it. So this is a very good way, a very
• 44:52
  reason to say, no, you don't have to be formulaic, but you
• 44:53
  have to be able to talk to people who understand story in a certain way.
• 44:58
  And if you can do that, and if you can make your story
• 45:00
  of work in that kind of frame, somebody will take the idea seriously in
• 45:04
  principle, whether they like it or not. There's another conversation. Then you
• 45:08
  begin to get into models, and then you begin to think about genres and
• 45:13
  what kind of genre is this, And you know, genres come with their
• 45:15
  own histories and joys and also constraints, you know, and so all of
• 45:22
  these questions begin to put flesh on the b on the bonts. And I
• 45:27
  think that unless you're running up against the other, one thing I would say
• 45:30
  on this is uns you're running up against a really hard deadline, give yourself
• 45:32
  the luxury of time, because I think wherever your idea comes from, and
• 45:38
  however you begin to conceive it in terms of you know, genre and our
• 45:42
  audience and market and all these kind of pragmatic professional questions, the more time
• 45:47
  you give it, as long as you're being active with it and thinking about
• 45:50
  it, the more chance there is that you'll you'll develop it organically rather than
• 45:54
  forcing it. You know, a point comes where you know either you've got
• 45:58
  to you know, should it off the pot, right? I mean,
• 46:00
  you actually got to do something. But you know, I think I've always
• 46:06
  got two three four story ideas that are somewhere in the in the bubble of
• 46:10
  my calldron mind, you know, a different levels of cooking whatever I'm working
• 46:17
  on. And that's also a really great thing to have as a writer because
• 46:21
  it means that you know you've got more than one idea and you know you
• 46:23
  have things to move on to and you feel like you're part of an ongoing
• 46:29
  process of creative thought and you aren't. Just I have this one idea.
• 46:31
  This is all I know. If it fails, my life is over.
• 46:35
  You know, there's there was a movie I was watching the other day that
• 46:39
  which is going to lead into the question I'm going to ask you. I
• 46:42
  was watching a movie the other day and I absolutely did not care in the
• 46:46
  least about the main character and what he was going through. And I was
• 46:51
  watching the movie and I started just saying, you know what, I'm going
• 46:52
  to watch this a seat where this goes because I'm curious on what the writers
• 46:57
  and the director and the acting was and had a nice cast to it,
• 47:01
  but no one. I couldn't grab onto anything that the main character. I
• 47:06
  didn't care. The only moment at all which I found interesting that I even
• 47:10
  remotely cared is when the main character was in some sort of real peril,
• 47:15
  like they were going to go to prison because if they were wrongly accused or
• 47:20
  something like that. But throughout the entire movie, there's no stakes for this
• 47:24
  character other than emotional stakes that I really didn't care about. It wasn't enough
• 47:29
  enough that like hook onto. So what are some things that you'd like to
• 47:31
  see in main characters? Well, again, it comes down to this old
• 47:37
  writing cliche of needs. You know that they need to need something. And
• 47:43
  you know, I think the way I conceived a story is of narratives,
• 47:47
  is that you know, you have story and you have plot and plot are
• 47:51
  things we see on screen, surface action, all the rest of it,
• 47:53
  and plot and story. You know, it is the sort of motivational ark,
• 47:57
  right, is why characters do what they do beyond the simply pragmatic.
• 48:04
  You know, someone shoots at the iduck, But I think you know understanding
• 48:07
  needs in relation to story and plot, that would be the shorthand and theme.
• 48:14
  So if you don't have a coherent theme for your character, if they
• 48:16
  aren't trying to achieve something, trying to you know, mend some break,
• 48:22
  get some advantage, find the woman man horse of their dreams. And I
• 48:30
  meant that in a in a girl and pony kind of way, yes,
• 48:35
  yes, that in a in a weird way. Yeah. And you know,
• 48:38
  I think I think that's what gives stakes because then what you've done in
• 48:43
  your first act is you've established that this is a real person who has real
• 48:47
  flaws once needs in the world and you know, they make a decision to
• 48:52
  go out and trying to achieve that, and that's something that we that we
• 48:55
  want to see. That's what the basis of the story is. And it
• 49:00
  doesn't matter how plot driven your story. I mean, you can think about
• 49:01
  some movie like twenty twelve, that's the Mayan Yah. Yeah, the big
• 49:09
  the big world crushing. We go see the movie. We go see the
• 49:13
  movie because you want to. We want to see California fall into the sea,
• 49:15
  right, which it's spectacle exactly. But but what holds the movie together
• 49:21
  is it's a story about, you know, some failing writer who can't keep
• 49:24
  his family together. So the story of the movie is about the John Cusack
• 49:29
  character, you know, trying to prove that he's not a dead beat dad
• 49:31
  and he can get his family together. Do we care about that? No?
• 49:35
  Is that how the movie is sold to us? No, But it's
• 49:37
  coherent and it's there, and that's the underlying narrative that holds the whole thing
• 49:42
  together and allows us to forget about it and enjoy California falling into the sea.
• 49:46
  So even in very very plot driven movies, you need that sense of
• 49:50
  character coherence behind the plotting. We'll be right back after a word from our
• 49:57
  sponsor, and now back to the show. Otherwise it's simply an exercise in
• 50:07
  stylistics, right. So, so a character like Indiana Jones, who could
• 50:12
  have who could have been a very one dimensional character? I mean because and
• 50:15
  then trust me, because after Indiana Jones came out, a lot of one
• 50:19
  dimensional copies of him showed up in other in other films. But the thing
• 50:23
  that the theme, and I don't know if there is a theme, but
• 50:25
  the need behind Indiana Jones is that he wants to protect archaeology, archaeological treasures
• 50:35
  and they belong in the museum. They belong in the museum, and he
• 50:38
  fights for that. If he was just a treasure hunter, or if he
• 50:43
  was just a grave draw a robber, which so many of his copies were,
• 50:45
  they fall flat. But because of that one little tweak in the character,
• 50:51
  that there's a real earnestness about why he's doing what he's doing, That's
• 50:55
  what drives his character. I could not agree more. And this is why,
• 51:00
  you know what wonderful is some of the Tate books are books of games,
• 51:07
  art books. You know, that's why they don't work as movies.
• 51:10
  Because you don't have that kind of in lesson. But the other thing,
• 51:13
  of course that the Indiana Jones has is a really engaging b story, right,
• 51:17
  a really engaged story. We see that he's basically an asshole, but
• 51:24
  also he you know, he will sacrifice himself to save marry and of course
• 51:30
  not the Marian always needs saving, right, I mean, this is one
• 51:32
  of the joys of the movie, is you know, so so she can
• 51:37
  meet him on his own ground, which is which is you know, cool
• 51:39
  or at least you know they they sell her out a little bit here and
• 51:43
  there, but basically, but the whole, but the whole, the whole.
• 51:45
  Let's but let's let me looking at Raiders, the whole thing has so
• 51:49
  many different layers, so many different things going on, subplots to other storylines,
• 51:53
  you know, making Indiana Jones, who is essentially a superhero of its
• 51:57
  of his day, his kryptonism snakes and how hilarious that is and giving him
• 52:02
  a weakness like that throughout the piece and all of these things. It's great.
• 52:07
  And then like looking at last Crusade, where the thing that brings him
• 52:13
  like kind of like weakens him is his father and his relationship with his father,
• 52:16
  Junia. It is so brilliant. Yes, please please continue with your
• 52:23
  Sean Connery sir. That's that's all you get. But I guess, by
• 52:31
  the way, when I was growing up, you know, if you're a
• 52:34
  king in England in the at school in the seventies, you didn't have a
• 52:36
  bad Michael Kaine, you didn't have a bad Shortgonery you and so on.
• 52:38
  So obviously, uh well, oh yes, Indiana, Joe, Yeah,
• 52:45
  I mean, and this is also the way in which you know its own
• 52:47
  intertext, right going back to how you land a bit or not his own
• 52:53
  intertext, as you know, an adventure movie, a kind of mash series,
• 53:00
  as you know, all of all the the genres that kind of come
• 53:02
  in. You know, it is so wonderful because each one you do allows
• 53:07
  you to do a different thing, allows you to add another element to it.
• 53:10
  And also you know, but I think we were talking about, you
• 53:15
  know, style and the side of writing and how that you know plays you
• 53:22
  know on screen. One of the things that of course makes Indian and Jones
• 53:25
  also so real is the fact that you don't have digital stuff, that you
• 53:32
  have people who are actually getting drag behind trucks and all that and it may
• 53:36
  be somewhat less uh, you know, dynamic than you know, The Avengers,
• 53:39
  a movie which I admire in same way. But you know, you
• 53:44
  feel that he's been through hell to get where he's going. So not only
• 53:47
  has he sort of emotionally had to deal with things, and not only has
• 53:51
  he has dealt with his integrity and the fact that you know, Nazis I
• 53:54
  hate those guys, but also you know, you you you can feel he's
• 54:00
  been beaten up always with the movie, and it feels like it feels real,
• 54:06
  but it feels real in a way that most movies made the last twenty
• 54:09
  years net right. And even when that showed up, it was something that
• 54:13
  really people were just completely blown away by because it was just something you've never
• 54:16
  seen before. One thing that I really love to hear your opinion on is
• 54:22
  mixing of genres. When you when you collide genres, that's where some really
• 54:27
  interesting things happen. So, you know, Star Wars or let's something that
• 54:31
  employed by the way, that's what it has to do exactly. So let's
• 54:36
  let's combine something very contemporary Mandalorian, which is a spaghetti western meets a sci
• 54:44
  fi film. That is it's not a sci fi film by itself. It's
• 54:46
  not a spaghetti western by itself. It is a mixed genre, and because
• 54:51
  of it, it allows for so many different tropes and things that you couldn't
• 54:57
  do in its own if they were just two separate. There's things that you
• 55:00
  can't do in a spaghetti western that you can do in Mandalorian, and there's
• 55:02
  things in the Mandalorian you could do you can't do in a sci fi a
• 55:05
  standard sci fi fil right. I mean, you know, thinking about the
• 55:08
  history of screenwriting, one of the great interventions that the first Star Wars made
• 55:14
  is the idea of centering abse some genres around the potential hybridity, right,
• 55:19
  I mean, this is the thing that your Star Wars with the Samurai movie
• 55:22
  style Wars was Western Star Wars a science section movie and cereal and l so
• 55:27
  and this is, you know, to the nth compared to what we're talking
• 55:29
  about within Yana Jones. So that sense in which hybridity has become increasingly central
• 55:34
  as opposed to occasional picking is a really really important idea and one that you
• 55:42
  know, if your if your pitch, if your movie, if your spec
• 55:47
  has an interesting hybridity to it is actually much more likely to get read seriously
• 55:52
  and take them on. In the midustry, a sci fi romance is more
• 55:58
  interesting than a romance like Oh God, the Great movie Somewhere in Time Christopher
• 56:05
  Reeve even yeah, ago, I think it came out in like eighty but
• 56:10
  that was a a back in time romance sci fi film. But it took
• 56:16
  place in like Victorian times, if I remember correctly, or something like that.
• 56:22
  But it was it was a romance sci fi I mean back to the
• 56:25
  future, right or ladyhowk of course? Right? You know, well so
• 56:32
  exactly. No, I couldn't agree with you more, I think, But
• 56:36
  I think that this is one of the great things about the current generation of
• 56:40
  potential writers is that they think hybridity and almost instinctive mm hmm, because I
• 56:46
  have so much almost one of the things I don't have to teach in my
• 56:50
  classes, and I'll you teach it exactly, but you know, because my
• 56:53
  students are coming from video games, and they're coming from comic books, and
• 56:57
  they're coming from you know, everything that's going on you know in YouTube of
• 57:00
  the media and TikTok and who knows what stuff that I wouldn't know because I'm
• 57:04
  too old, you know, and I think that they're already doing half of
• 57:07
  that thinking and that's very encouraging. But yes, I mean I think that
• 57:13
  that this is right. One way of thinking about it, though, is
• 57:15
  what is your lead genre and and what is the hybrid dare and how are
• 57:19
  they collecting? So an example of that I would take would be the first
• 57:22
  alien alien movie, which you know, opens as a as a science fiction
• 57:27
  movie. We're a science fiction movie. We're in a spaceship. People are
• 57:30
  waking up there figuring out what's going on, and then it becomes obviously an
• 57:34
  old dark house film. It becomes you know, here's the master chasing us
• 57:37
  through the house, and the horror comes into it. But the lead is
• 57:40
  science fiction, and that I think is important to understand, you know,
• 57:45
  what the hierarchy. I mean, the most important part of Alien is the
• 57:49
  horror, is the nature of the alien being and its stages and its abilities.
• 57:54
  But you know, it's sold as a science fiction movie in which these
• 58:00
  other things happen. So thinking about what what genre leads and what genres you
• 58:05
  know, infest it, but also thinking also not just about hybridity in terms
• 58:08
  of mixing to or more genres up front, but also the idea of mode
• 58:14
  and the idea that there are times in a movie where another kind of genre
• 58:19
  can bleed in, infest it, and then kind of go out again.
• 58:22
  So if you think of a movie like Science of the Lapse, right,
• 58:27
  which is a procedural, right, but there are moments when it absolutely invests
• 58:32
  itself in horror. But those moments come and go. So you know,
• 58:37
  for example, when Lectter smilers, when Lecter escapes and we think that he's
• 58:44
  injured some cot very badly and they're in the back of the ambulance, then
• 58:46
  he sets up and takes so great not only kud a sin in a great
• 58:52
  moment, but also that's like that's modal, right, that's the moment where
• 58:54
  another genre goes oh and then back down again as opposed to being the constant
• 59:00
  right, like alien like alien will be like yes, yeah. And then
• 59:05
  of course Cameron took aliens to another level where it took horror, action,
• 59:10
  sci fi and war right, and he jammed those all together. And I
• 59:15
  think Cameron specifically who oddly enough, Cameron doesn't get the credit that he deserves
• 59:21
  as a writer because he's so well known as a director, being one of
• 59:23
  the most prolific you know and you know, most popular directors of all time.
• 59:29
  But his genres, the way he combines genre in all Titanic True Lies,
• 59:35
  I mean from the beginning from Terminator, he's combining genres and themes that
• 59:40
  you know, the is is pretty remarkable. Like in Terminator, I mean,
• 59:46
  I mean there's a few things going on in Terminator between science fiction,
• 59:51
  action, the almost like the immaculate conception will be right back after a word,
• 1:00:00
  our sponsor and now back to the show idea. You know, like
• 1:00:07
  he's got a lot of stuff going on. But he's been doing that throughout
• 1:00:12
  his career in almost every movie. And I always when I talk to when
• 1:00:15
  I talk to some some very popular screenwriters, Cameron is one that always pops
• 1:00:20
  up when I talk to them. They go, yeah, it's just James
• 1:00:22
  Man. Jim knows how to do this or Jim does that, And like
• 1:00:25
  Avatar. I mean, I just love to talk to you real quickly about
• 1:00:29
  Avatar because he gets so much crap a lot of a lot of other writers.
• 1:00:32
  They're like, oh, it's so this or it so that. But
• 1:00:36
  yet yet he was able to combine, you know, it's basically Dances with
• 1:00:43
  Wolves meets fer and Gully and jammed in those two ideas and then jammed in
• 1:00:47
  a bunch of other things as well. But the way he presented the story
• 1:00:52
  it touched a chord in humanity. Because it's still the biggest movie of all
• 1:00:58
  time twelve years or whatever later. It's still holding strong in the era of
• 1:01:05
  Avengers, which it did beat of Avatar for a minute, but that Avatar
• 1:01:07
  got re released and it took over and just again, you know, but
• 1:01:12
  it's it's remarkable with Cameron and Avatar, Like, how would you analyze that,
• 1:01:16
  because it is it's you know, it's I can't say it's paint by
• 1:01:21
  numbers, because it's not. It's it's this. It deceives it's you.
• 1:01:24
  You are deceived by its simplicity. But yet the complexity behind it, well,
• 1:01:29
  I think, I guess where I come in is I think it's two
• 1:01:31
  thirds of a genius movie and then the last three. In other words,
• 1:01:37
  it feels like all of the things that invested me and engage me, the
• 1:01:42
  cleverness both in you know, I mean again, as you say, it's
• 1:01:44
  not some it's not most complex film in the world, but the cleverness of
• 1:01:47
  the Avatar system and the building, the relationships and all this kind of stuff
• 1:01:52
  which you know, half of me is going, yes, yes, yes,
• 1:01:54
  I get the I get where this is coming from and how this is
• 1:01:57
  working. But it works. And but you know, that set up I
• 1:02:00
  found genuinely engaging interesting. I like the world and I be but then it
• 1:02:07
  kind of defalls to an action movie. Yeah, and then you know they're
• 1:02:12
  you know, the humans has fall into cliche and it's so obvious that I
• 1:02:16
  have to hate them and and you know all the rest of it, and
• 1:02:20
  I kind of lose interest. It's well done. I mean, it's amazingly
• 1:02:22
  you know, as a piece of spectacle. It's very effective, you know,
• 1:02:27
  flying around those those hobberships and as. But but I kind of lose
• 1:02:32
  interest because it where hybrid, the hybrid, the t kind of the balance
• 1:02:37
  of the genres went away from me, and I began to feel that I
• 1:02:42
  that I was less interested towards the end. But when you you see a
• 1:02:45
  film like Avatar or you know, or like even if you go back to
• 1:02:50
  Aliens, it's not a complex story. These stories are not like mind turners,
• 1:02:57
  They're not like a Nolan film, but they're exit cuted to almost perfection.
• 1:03:00
  It's kind of like making a chocolate chip cookie. The recipe is not
• 1:03:05
  complex, most people could do it, but when you execute it perfectly,
• 1:03:09
  it's the best chocolate chip cookie ever. Right. And it's also a film
• 1:03:15
  that back in you know, if you think back twenty years ago, it's
• 1:03:17
  a film that actually used three D creatively. And well, oh so,
• 1:03:22
  I mean this is not in one sense, this has nothing to do with
• 1:03:23
  storytelling. And I was since it's everything to do with storytelling, you know,
• 1:03:27
  right that you know that there have been these you know, more recent
• 1:03:30
  experiments and with three D and that we're okay and whatever. And then I
• 1:03:35
  remember sitting in the cinema and watching the Avatar and three D going oh,
• 1:03:38
  oh, okay, this is different. This is this is this is this
• 1:03:43
  is not like these other things when Hugo when when Scorre stated to Hugo he
• 1:03:46
  used three D Yeah, yeah, purposefully and with design and style and it's
• 1:03:52
  not just converted, yea, it was designed that way. And I saw
• 1:03:57
  I only saw Avatar in the theater in three D, like I've never seen
• 1:04:00
  it in the theater without the three D aspect. And it's arguably when the
• 1:04:03
  only movie I enjoyed in three D. Honestly, well exactly, this is
• 1:04:06
  kind of what I'm saying that I'm all for three D when it actually becomes,
• 1:04:11
  you know, even radically part of the aesthetic. And I think kind
• 1:04:14
  of did in Avata, you know, will it simply becomes excuse to charge
• 1:04:18
  me ten bucks more for my seat I'm not interested in. And I think
• 1:04:23
  the new Avatars are going to be, honestly the thing that brings people back
• 1:04:26
  to the theaters. It's going to be expected next time, next summe,
• 1:04:30
  next summer, or next winter. I think it comes out twenty twenty two.
• 1:04:31
  It comes out, but then they're coming out every two years after that
• 1:04:35
  or every year after that, because he's got all four of them in a
• 1:04:38
  row. But I think that would be the film that brings people because I
• 1:04:43
  don't want to see that at home, Like there's certain films I don't want
• 1:04:46
  to see at home. I want to get that spectacle. Well, this
• 1:04:49
  brings us I couldn't agree with you more again, but this brings us back
• 1:04:53
  to the big unknown, right that what is the future of cinema as an
• 1:04:57
  institution, as an opportun sho you just tell me popcorn. And I think
• 1:05:01
  obviously the three D was seen as being, you know, a life extender,
• 1:05:09
  and is it still you know, where are we going to be?
• 1:05:12
  I don't have an answer to where are we going to be in two,
• 1:05:15
  four, six, ten years time. Are we going to have a few
• 1:05:18
  cinemas to show us specialist movies or are we really going to have a healthy
• 1:05:23
  exhibition sector? You know? I wonder, I think I personally, my
• 1:05:27
  opinion is that it's going to go the way of Broadway. I mean,
• 1:05:30
  plays were the only thing for a while, but now plays are expensive things
• 1:05:35
  that you go to and their spectacle and their high productions and things like that.
• 1:05:39
  And I think in thirty or forty years, seeing an independent film at
• 1:05:43
  a cinema, you know, or seeing a comedy or seeing it you know,
• 1:05:46
  is going to be rare and rare and rare, because it's just the
• 1:05:51
  way it is. But I don't think it will die. I just think
• 1:05:55
  it will It's going to be spectacle and there might be art house things like
• 1:05:58
  like there's like there's a Broadway or there's like you know, plays somewhere else.
• 1:06:01
  There'll always be some form of it, just like plays are. Still
• 1:06:05
  there's no reason to go see a play. But people do see it because
• 1:06:09
  it's enjoyable. It's a different form of all art, right, I mean
• 1:06:11
  I guess, I guess, I mean my instinct, I think, I
• 1:06:14
  think I'm I largely agree with what you said. I mean the other side
• 1:06:16
  of it is the question is where does that Where does that social interaction go,
• 1:06:19
  you know, where where the kids go on dates? Where what becomes
• 1:06:24
  the replacement for cinema as a social activity? Is it ready? It's a
• 1:06:27
  ready player one? Is that what it is? No? But like is
• 1:06:31
  that you and I can't conceive of it because we didn't grow up with it.
• 1:06:35
  But my daughters are coming up and they're playing Roadblocks or or you know,
• 1:06:41
  or World of Warcraft or things like that where war craft. Yeah,
• 1:06:45
  you're in the digital space. And then that gets into a whole conversations with
• 1:06:48
  like why people buying NFTs and why are people you know, it's it's a
• 1:06:53
  different mindset completely than what we're used to in the analog world. No,
• 1:06:58
  you're right, I mean, I mean absolutely, And you know, I'm
• 1:07:00
  in well Walker, I'm in a guild. I really do these things.
• 1:07:02
  So obviously that social space is something I'm familiar with. And yet you know,
• 1:07:06
  I think I think that that sense of the virtual versus the real.
• 1:07:12
  You know, where where do a gender A and gender B or both genders
• 1:07:15
  the same? You end up where they can where where they can be fourteen
• 1:07:19
  and and touch each other and make out in the back row, you know,
• 1:07:24
  I agreed. I don't know where that's going to be. And it
• 1:07:27
  might be movies still, but it might be, it might be it might
• 1:07:30
  be something else. I mean, that's the interesting question, right, So
• 1:07:33
  I guess all I'm saying is that's my that's my big unknown. As far
• 1:07:38
  as the future of the future of exhibition, I don't know. Yeah,
• 1:07:41
  yep. So let me ask you what are three screenplays every screenwriter should read.
• 1:07:50
  Yeah, this is one of the questions that if you said, if
• 1:07:53
  you said me this one before, I might have had, you know,
• 1:07:57
  really interesting question. Okay, let me try and find a quick answer.
• 1:08:02
  Uh huh, Push and sound dance comes up often Goldman of course. Yeah,
• 1:08:12
  anything by Bergmann. I know it's in translation, but just anything by
• 1:08:15
  Bergman. Uh and Alex Cox is repo man. I love under a certain
• 1:08:23
  definition of my favorite film, that's my favorite film is one of those films,
• 1:08:27
  film that deals with high bridges erradic. Oh Jesus does it? I
• 1:08:31
  mean that's it? I mean look at they live? Oh oh god,
• 1:08:38
  that just the fight scene alone, It's worth the price of admission. Oh
• 1:08:43
  rowdy right, rest in peace? Now, what what advice would you give
• 1:08:47
  a screenwriter wanting to break into the business today? Again, great question,
• 1:08:54
  tricky one. I think it well. Part one. It depends on what
• 1:08:59
  you mean by the business. If you mean Hollywood, if you mean big,
• 1:09:02
  big budget movies, then you know it's about having enough experience that you
• 1:09:09
  can you know, you can really write a screenplay. You know that you
• 1:09:12
  haven't just managed to struggle through one. You've got written two, three,
• 1:09:15
  four. You actually have that set of skills as a writer, and you're
• 1:09:18
  flexible. Second is that you are an entrepreneur. You need to be an
• 1:09:24
  entrepreneur. You need to be able to talk to people. You need to
• 1:09:26
  be the cliche good in a room. You need to be someone who has
• 1:09:30
  the guts and the you know, the arrogance without being a dick. Ideally
• 1:09:36
  to to be able just to go and talk to someone, you have to
• 1:09:39
  be able to make connections. You have to be able to to build relationships
• 1:09:43
  because it's still a relationship driven business, which kind of means that you know,
• 1:09:48
  you can be a writer. You can be successful and not live in
• 1:09:50
  LA, but to be to start as a writer. We'll be right back
• 1:09:57
  after a word from our sponsor and now back to the shows. I think
• 1:10:05
  that's trickier not to be in LA. I'm from someone I'm good. Yeah,
• 1:10:13
  No, from someone who lived outside of LA for a long time,
• 1:10:15
  and I've been here for thirteen years now, I get that. I understand
• 1:10:20
  it. Is it possible to do it outside of LA, Yes, no
• 1:10:25
  question. There's other places that have a lot of production in the United States,
• 1:10:28
  and if you're outside of the United States, you know London and other
• 1:10:31
  places within each country has But but LA does something as of this recording,
• 1:10:38
  because there's an exodus right now, as of this record, there's an exodus
• 1:10:43
  out of California. That you learn here at a quicker pace because you're working
• 1:10:47
  at a with people at a higher level than you would outside the market.
• 1:10:50
  And it's not because they're better or worse. It's just because they just do
• 1:10:54
  it so often that you just get that experience much faster. Like I learned
• 1:10:58
  more in the first year I was here that in five years of living in
• 1:11:00
  Florida doing the business, it's just it's just that kind of thing. And
• 1:11:03
  the connections are here. The connections are here. And even if even if
• 1:11:08
  you take the route of you know, starting as a PA and whatever else
• 1:11:11
  and just just getting the experience and being on sets and meeting people, you
• 1:11:14
  know, you're you're gonna meet people. You're gonna meet producers, You're gonna
• 1:11:16
  meet people are who are at a level that when they want to help you,
• 1:11:20
  they can help you. By the way, the worst thing, of
• 1:11:23
  course you can do is turn up the first day was on a on a
• 1:11:26
  shoot and talk to the producer and handling the screenplay. But don't don't but
• 1:11:30
  you know you have a relationship, and then the point will come where they
• 1:11:34
  will say what you God, That's it. The only the way I always
• 1:11:40
  tell young filmmakers and writers about making connections and stuff is and I'm sure you
• 1:11:45
  have this experience as well. We can smell desperation coming from a mile away.
• 1:11:50
  It is a very bad scent, and you can smell it if you're
• 1:11:54
  a professional who've been in this business for a while. So when somebody just
• 1:11:57
  wants I need from your need from you. I need for you, I
• 1:11:59
  need I need a you need to do something for me. That energy.
• 1:12:01
  You can smell it in a heartbeat, whereas the opposite is where you go,
• 1:12:05
  how can I be of service to you? How can I help you?
• 1:12:09
  And it could be something super simple, could be more complex, and
• 1:12:13
  you start building relationships that way, because that's how friendships are built exactly.
• 1:12:16
  I mean, and listen, I mean I think again, I think you've
• 1:12:18
  hit the nail on the head. And what I would say is that to
• 1:12:21
  some people who listening to this, that might sound like he's being cynical,
• 1:12:26
  He's not being cynical, because you know, it's about building a human relationship,
• 1:12:30
  which is based on trust and respect. And you know, frankly,
• 1:12:35
  if you meet somebody higher up in the industry, there's nothing they really want
• 1:12:39
  from you. What do you have to offer Steven Spielberg, right, other
• 1:12:44
  than your willingness to be human helpful? And yeah, I mean, I'd
• 1:12:49
  be enough service And I promise you that is very valuable because when you meet
• 1:12:55
  people at that level, when you can connect with them at a human level
• 1:12:58
  authentically, that is rare in their world because everybody's always trying to imagine being
• 1:13:03
  Steven Spielberg. Imagine walking in for the last thirty years, to every room
• 1:13:09
  you walk into, every eyeballs on you because you know you're you're a kingmaker.
• 1:13:14
  You can literally just go you. You now shall direct, you,
• 1:13:16
  you shall write, and with one touch of his hand, it's your your
• 1:13:21
  The door opens. Can you stay there is up to you. But the
• 1:13:25
  door opens, opportunities open, And I've and I've had the pleasure of speaking
• 1:13:28
  to people who've and by the way, Spielberg has touched so many careers,
• 1:13:32
  so many careers. It's he's one of the most giving people in this business.
• 1:13:38
  But can you imagine being him walking around with that exactly? But I
• 1:13:43
  mean it's like this that everyone in Hollywood or the industry knows that every relationship
• 1:13:48
  is in some sense contingent. It's some in some sense in some way.
• 1:13:53
  So you know, given that you need to try as hard as you can
• 1:13:57
  to be as human as possible, you know, so that that's not what
• 1:14:00
  you're thinking about when you're engaging with someone, and that's all they're thinking about,
• 1:14:04
  right, And if you know, if people like you and they want
• 1:14:08
  to help you, they'll help you. Yeah, And also time. It
• 1:14:11
  takes time. I'm sorry, yeah, and it takes time, and it's
• 1:14:14
  not going to happen in six months. I've had, really, I had
• 1:14:15
  relationships with people for three or four years before I even asked them for anything
• 1:14:20
  or before they even offered anything, because I learned that along the way.
• 1:14:25
  Whereas when I was younger, I would walk on the set with the script
• 1:14:30
  or the idea. I'm like, hey, can I have your card?
• 1:14:31
  I got this thing. It's going to be my perthct. I mean I
• 1:14:34
  I've been. Of course you did, because it's the law, right,
• 1:14:36
  we all did. And I say this, you know, when you're young
• 1:14:41
  and you're an asshole and you don't know, I mean, this is the
• 1:14:43
  you know, I mean, with all your respect, but sure, yes,
• 1:14:45
  I mean this is exactly the exactly the thing. Yeah, well that
• 1:14:48
  question. I'm just saying, this is definitely something I'm going to show all
• 1:14:54
  my all my students because what you said there is you know, so important.
• 1:14:58
  Yeah, and I and it's I appreciate that because I talked to filmmakers
• 1:15:02
  and screenwriters on a daily basis, and I talked to the most experienced,
• 1:15:05
  and I've talked to the most you know, naive and delusional of our species.
• 1:15:11
  And it's there's nothing worse than a delusional filmmaker who thinks that there I
• 1:15:17
  always came like, I always pretend to be this delusional filmmaker. And I'll
• 1:15:21
  say, when, why hasn't Hollywood knocked on my door? Why haven't they
• 1:15:26
  recognized my genius? I don't they understand that I am the next Tarantino or
• 1:15:30
  the next Nolan or the next Fincher. Don't they get it? Why haven't
• 1:15:33
  they just seen my short film and just automatically just given me a check?
• 1:15:36
  Why hasn't sun Dance allowed me into their their little festival when they should be
• 1:15:42
  recognizing my talent? There These are serious conversations I've had with filmmakers who are
• 1:15:46
  and screenwriters too. Who are they just think because they wrote something that they're
• 1:15:50
  owed someone to read it. That's not the way the game works guys at
• 1:15:55
  all. And I'm sure you deal with it on a daily basis. I
• 1:16:00
  have nothing to add to that. That is that's in a nutshell. No,
• 1:16:02
  I mean that's yes. And finally, last question, three of your
• 1:16:09
  favorite films of all time and a repo Man is on the top of that.
• 1:16:12
  Listener The Wickedman Original, the original, I mean the Nicolas Cage obviously,
• 1:16:16
  the genius Nicolas Cage show the Bees, the Bees, No, no,
• 1:16:19
  not no, the Void Void The Wicked Man the original is the work
• 1:16:24
  of genius. Okay, we mentioned Berg the version spring Okay, great,
• 1:16:30
  great choices, and can we all agree that Nicholas Cage is a national treasure
• 1:16:34
  and and should be. It should be treated as such and should be rush
• 1:16:39
  more where where. Oh but what I'm dying to have. I'm dying to
• 1:16:45
  have him on my show one day, or at least just get to speak
• 1:16:47
  to him one day, because he is I just love him and everything with
• 1:16:54
  you, I think. I think he's terrific. He's awesome, and you
• 1:16:58
  know what I love about him. And this is now we're going on the
• 1:17:00
  side on a side side thing here. But what I love about guys like
• 1:17:03
  Nick, like I know him, mister Cage, is that they take swings
• 1:17:11
  at the bat where they get on baby, when they get up to the
• 1:17:14
  to the bottom the batter's box. They take big, monstrous swings. And
• 1:17:18
  you need artists to take swings like Nolan. Nolan takes massive swings when he
• 1:17:24
  shows up to bat. You know, there's the safe bunters and the first
• 1:17:27
  base hits, and but then there's these guys that just show up and if
• 1:17:30
  they swing and they strike out, they take the hits, you know.
• 1:17:33
  And that's the kind of artist one, which is why you keep him on
• 1:17:38
  the roster because you know the next time they're gonna you know, they're they're
• 1:17:41
  the big giant guys. They're just like if they catch one. I'm trying
• 1:17:45
  to make a segue to cricket here, but I just done hot. This
• 1:17:48
  is I don't know what is it exactly? Yes, it's best I can
• 1:17:53
  with baseball. I've had a few. I've had a few Brits who just
• 1:17:55
  like, I'm with you. If it was soccer, excuse me, football,
• 1:17:59
  it would it'd be one thing. It'd be cricket. But you get
• 1:18:02
  the idea. I totally get the idea. Yeah, Julian has been an
• 1:18:05
  absolute pleasure to talking you. I know, we could bribe off for another
• 1:18:09
  hour. Where can people find out more about you and look up your books?
• 1:18:14
  Well, they exist on Amazon. I don't have a functional website right
• 1:18:17
  now, but hopefully that will emerge soon. But I'm on faculty at San
• 1:18:23
  Francisco State University in the School of Cinema. That's where I do my teaching
• 1:18:28
  and you can find out more about me there. Great, and I'll put
• 1:18:30
  links to all of that in the show notes. Julian, thank you so
• 1:18:32
  much for sharing your knowledge bombs with the tribe today, Sir my pleasure.
• 1:18:39
  I want to thank Julian for coming on the show and dropping his knowledge bombs
• 1:18:42
  on the drive today. Thank you so much, Julian. If you want
• 1:18:45
  to get links to anything we spoke about in this episode, including how to
• 1:18:47
  get his one of many screenwriting books, head over to the show notes at
• 1:18:51
  any film asco dot com Forward slash seven forty and if you have it already,
• 1:18:56
  please head over to Filmmaking podcast dot com. Subscribe and leave a good
• 1:19:00
  review for the show. It really helps us out a lot. Guys.
• 1:19:04
  Thank you again so much for listening to guys as always, keep that hustle
• 1:19:08
  going, keep that dream alive, Stay safe out there, and I'll talk
• 1:19:11
  to you soon. Thanks for listening to the Indie Film Hustle podcast at indiefilm
• 1:19:15
  hustle dot com. That's I N D I E F I L M h
• 1:19:18
  U S T L E dot com.