2013 Go Into The Story Screenwriter Roundtable

My conversation with Chris Borrelli, F. Scott Frazier, Chris McCoy, Justin Rhodes, Greg Russo, and John Swetnam.

Between them, they have sold more than a dozen spec scripts and have multiple original screenplays on the Black List. Here is the 2013 conversation featuring Chris Borrelli, F. Scott Frazier, Chris McCoy, Justin Rhodes, Greg Russo, and John Swetnam.

Scott: It’s been almost a year almost to the day that we did the second annual roundtable. And I think clearly the number one question on everyone’s mind is this: Why the sudden inexplicable disappearance of Scott Frazier from Twitter?

Chris McCoy: [laughs] That is a delicious question. I want to know the answer to that right now.

John Swetnam: Yes.

F. Scott Frazier: I don’t know if everybody knows, but I actually had a baby back in February.

Scott: Congratulations.

F. Scott Frazier: Well, I didn’t. My wife did. I just kind of hung out. I was getting to the point where there was so much going on on Twitter and so much work stuff and baby stuff, and it’s just like one of them had to go away for a little bit. And so I chose Twitter.

Nothing scandalous, just he started crawling, and he’s a little bit more of an actual person that you have to take care of on a day-to-day basis. It was a priority thing.

Chris McCoy: Frazier, there are thousands of Twitter followers that need you and only one baby. I feel like you’re making a selfish choice.

[laughter]

Scott: Besides, you’ve got zone defense with the kid. It’s two parents, one baby.

F. Scott Frazier: This is true, but yeah, there’s nothing scandalous or salacious.

Scott: Brian Duffield will be very happy to hear that because he tweeted we had to ask this of you. “Does Scott still love me?” “Am I still Scott’s BFF?” “Why won’t Scott return my calls?” “Why did Scott send me a restraining order?”

F. Scott Frazier: It’s weird. He was at my front door last night asking the exact same things. I didn’t understand what was happening.

Scott: [laughs] That’s because you weren’t on Twitter.

F. Scott Frazier: Yeah.

Chris McCoy: Did he have the boombox?

F. Scott Frazier: He did. It was a weird moment. Yeah.

Scott: “Tweet Anything”.

F. Scott Frazier: Yeah, exactly.

Scott: Thanks for clearing that up for us, Scott. As long as we’re catching up, I know each of you has got some interesting developments in 2013, so I thought I’d check in just one by one to start things off.

Borrelli, you’ve got a movie that’s due out next year, “The Vatican Tapes.” Can you talk about that? What’s the history of the project and what’s going on with it?

Chris Borrelli: It’s a very long history, being on the Black List in 2009, and it looked like it was going to go down. It just finally happened, and when it happened, it happened quickly. I think a lot of Mark Neveldine, who’s directed it, and I’m looking forward to it coming out and being in theaters.

And in the meantime, it’s also encouraged me. It hasn’t been announced, but I’ve set up a… I wrote another small horror… when I say small, small budget horror film. And it’s encouraged me to really pursue what I’ve wanted to pursue for a long time, which is directing. I’ve had offers on this other script, but it’s been set up with me directing, and I guess we have the money. I’m hoping in 2014, I’m shooting a movie. It kind of helped encourage me to what I really wanted to do.

One of the reasons I even wrote “The Vatican Tapes” back then was thinking I would direct it, but I stepped aside. On this latest film, I’m not doing that.

Chris McCoy: Nice. Congrats.

Chris Borrelli: Thanks, yeah. It hasn’t been announced, but we’re all pretty excited.

Scott: So you’re definitely going to direct this new one?

Chris Borrelli: Yeah, yeah. It looks great, with some very good producers. We will see. As we know, until it’s actually rolling… it’s not a jinx thing for me, it’s just that I like to sort of undersell. I think that’s a smart thing for our own personal careers in some ways, is to have plenty of irons in the fire that we care about.

But at the same time, when it actually goes, I’ll be very, very excited. We do have the funding, and I’m with really great producers. I don’t see anything stopping us since it’s not a cast‑contingent movie, either. Hopefully I’ll have some real news on that one.

Scott: That’s terrific. Actually, I could segue off to Chris McCoy on this, because, Chris, you are trying to transition into directing. I know you did a short film The Bicycle that blew up on Vimeo. Can you talk about that and then this other project you’re directing?

Chris McCoy: Yeah, sure. I co-directed it with my friend Adam Neustadter. We had a nice run of festival appearances. We played at the Austin Film Festival. We played at the Mecal Barcelona. We played at Interfilm Berlin. We played all over the place.

You basically have a year to do all your festival appearances, and then you can put the film out publicly. So we put it up on Vimeo, and it was a Vimeo staff pick. We were getting tens of thousands of views a day.

It’s exceeded any expectations we could have had. So that was terrific, and that was also good training because we’re looking to shoot “Good Kids,” which is a script that I had on the Black List in 2011.

That’s with Depth of Field as producers, which are Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz and Andrew Miano. I think that so often, doing what we do and being writers, you’re always trying to attach a director. It’s kind of like, well, just be that guy.

F. Scott Frazier: I’ve come across those same problems this last year as well. It’s always about getting a director. You need that director to take it from a script to a movie. It’s a very small list of people that can get movies made, and you just kind of get to the point where it’s more of a barrier than a help. You get to the point where you just want to be able to make it.

Writing scripts is fun, but I’d rather be making movies.

Scott: For you, Scott and Greg and Justin and John, are you all thinking maybe eventually moving into the writing/directing mode?

F. Scott Frazier: Yeah, I definitely am.

Greg Russo: I’m not. I don’t want to mess around with cameras. I break everything I touch.

[laughter]

Chris Borrelli: You’ve got to get up early, by the way. That’s what kept me away for years.

Greg Russo: Get up early? Hell no. That’s why I became a writer.

Scott: Did you see this tweet from Brad Bird? He said if bullets were questions, each day directing a movie’s like the D‑Day landing sequence in Saving Private Ryan.

[laughter]

Scott: And this is something you guys want to be doing, right?

Chris Borrelli: I actually call it “answering questions”. That’s a huge part of directing. I consider producing, coordinating a movie, kind of like planning a wedding reception every day. That’s what that feels like. Directing is just answering thousands of questions over the course of the day.

I’ve seen both. I’ve been with and even two hours ago, had a conference call with a director on another project, and I was very impressed with the way he handled the call and his vision for this other film I was hired for earlier this year.

And so that went very well, but I’ve also had plenty of directors that don’t understand writing, and they come on board, and they’re either only thinking in visuals, or they don’t actually understand the script they’ve attached themselves to.

I’ve seen all those kind of ridiculous things happen. There’s a few directors that really add value, and there’s a few that whether or not they technically add value, they have passion and you can share in their vision and then there’s plenty of others. I feel like I’ve dealt with all of that.

Scott: Greg, you had a splash in November when you got hired to adapt the movie version of a TV series, “It Takes a Thief,” that 70s series. How did you get involved with that project?

Greg Russo: That’s an interesting one. You can actually trace the origins of that project all the way back to the early 90s. It’s something that a lot of writers have tried to break. I really respond to challenging jobs like that. I like trying to figure out why it never happened, and see if I can solve it.

When I first learned about the show I had no idea what it was so I had to go back and take a look at it. My parents were like, “Oh, what a great show that was.” I was like I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. What I loved about this project when I first got the script, was the character. The character at the heart of this movie, is this morally ambiguous thief. You never know if you can trust him. One of those roguish good guy/bad guy roles that I think actors love to play. It’s a really fun character to write.

It was a long process. I think it’s an important property to Universal considering how long they’ve invested in it. They want a big franchise picture. It was funny because when I got the project I was traveling in Peru and I remember I had to pitch the producers from Lima on a call and it was just an absolute disaster.

The call dropped out every three seconds. I remember walking back to tell my wife: “Well, I fucked that one up.” She was like, “Have a Pisco Sour. Or five. Forget about it.” Eventually, I found out that I didn’t actually fuck it up and ended up getting it.

Scott: The logline for it, “A clever thief is recruited to work for the CIA after eluding them for years.” I’m old enough to remember the TV series, which was a lot of fun. Robert Wagner. Is your version keeping some of that fun caper dynamic?

Greg Russo: It will absolutely be fun. People who know my stuff, know I can’t help but try and pull fun out of the projects I work on. But it’s important to remember that it’s still the studio that made Safe House.

Scott: More action?

Greg Russo: While being big and fun, the goal is to make sure the project also feels grounded and present day. That’s not to say there won’t be any levity. It’s lighter than Safe House. Mission: Impossible is probably the best comp for tone. Real world, serious grounded stakes, big set pieces, and if there’s humor to be mined from the characters in those situations, even better.

Scott: Justin, you’ve had a pretty high profile project come that you’ve gotten involved with this year called “The Breach” with Lorenzo di Bonaventura and David Goyer. How did you get involved with that project?

Justin Rhodes: I had a relationship with Goyer from something else we’d done and he optioned the book and took it to Lorenzo to produce. I think, just based on our prior relationship, he was interested in having me take a look at that. We actually just finished the going-out-with-it draft a couple weeks ago. And Goyer’s attached to direct and they’re actually talking to a couple of potential cast right now.

Scott: This is from a Patrick Lee book, right?

Justin Rhodes: Correct. Yeah.

Scott: “An ex‑cop races to prevent an artifact from bringing about an apocalypse.”

Justin Rhodes: Yeah. It’s more of a Bourne thriller with some scifi elements to it. The apocalypse part, I don’t really know about that.

Scott: I think it’s a trilogy so are they looking at this as a franchise?

Justin Rhodes: Very much so, yeah.

Scott: Is this your first adaptation? If so, how was that?

Justin Rhodes: It’s actually my second adaptation but the first one was based on a true-life memoir so this is my first fictional one. It was a very interesting process. It’s like legally sanctioned plagiarism.

What I found different from writing a spec is that with an adaptation everybody already has some idea of what they’re passionate about from the moment the project arises. The will to turn this story into a movie predates you as the writer. The conversation shifts from “should we even do a story about this at all?” with a spec to “what’s the best possible version of this that we could do?”

The flip side of that is that everyone also approaches the project with some preconceived notions of what the sacred cows are and what they want to abandon. Those notions don’t always line up with your own, so with an adaptation you can also sometimes find yourself trapped within a bit of a box. And of course with a spec there’s no box because nobody knows what the borders are until you tell them. Probably the secret key to infinite happiness is to write a bestselling novel, get it optioned and then adapt it yourself.

Scott: Frazier, you had a movie released in 2013, The Numbers Station. What was that like for you?

F. Scott Frazier: It was kind of a surreal experience. I had a whole bunch of friends and family come out and see it. It was a very limited release. DirecTV did a really big push. It was one of its biggest movies this year. There were commercials for it. You could only watch it on DirecTV before it came out in theaters.

I had already seen it and I had live-tweeted it for people who wanted to watch it on demand. But seeing it in a theater was definitely a bizarre experience. I don’t know if I can even put it into words. I was nervous the entire time. I felt like I was going to throw up. I just don’t think that there’s anything even comparable to seeing it up on a 60-foot screen. It’s just a very bizarre experience.

Scott: Yeah, because we spend so much time just in a room with the story. To actually see it live, in front of an audience, is a pretty startling experience sometimes.

F. Scott Frazier: I think my best experience from the movie coming out this year was… I don’t know, God, when I wrote the script, five years ago, six years ago now, there was a point where I was writing the script, and I wrote line of dialogue. After I wrote it, I said to myself that’s a trailer line. Then it ended up in the trailer. It was like the key line in the trailer. I just thought that was one of the coolest things ever.

Scott: That is cool. What about your project “Autobahn”?

F. Scott Frazier: The movie was getting put together this summer. We had a leading man, then a couple of weeks before the shoot, the leading man dropped out. He has since been replaced. They’ve rebuilt the cast, and the latest update is it’s going to be filming in 2014.

Scott: Is this Amber Heard and Nicholas Hoult?

F. Scott Frazier: Yeah, they are currently the two that are attached to it, yeah.

Scott: That’s interesting because she was in Zombieland, right?

F. Scott Frazier: Just for like a second.

Scott: And he was in Warm Bodies.

F. Scott Frazier: Yeah.

Scott: I was thinking, because the logline is “An American backpacker gets involved with a ring of drug smugglers as their driver.” It may be too late in development to do this, Scott, but what do you think? “An American backpacker gets involved with a ring of drug smuggling zombies.”

F. Scott Frazier: It’s possible! I mean, we could probably fix it in post. Just add it with some ADR.

John Swetnam: Actually, I already wrote that as a found footage movie, so sorry guys.

F. Scott Frazier: Swetnam’s jumped on it. John, you had a movie come out, Evidence.

John Swetnam: I did.

F. Scott Frazier: Was that your first spec script that sold? Is that right, or do I remember that?

John Swetnam: Yes. That was the first one we sold. It was the same, actually, distribution as Frazier’s The Numbers Station.

Scott: As I recall, you had written 17 scripts before you sold your first script. In a sense, when that movie came out, that must have been some sort of validation for you to have gone down that incredible path of all that work to see it actually get made.

John Swetnam: Yeah, and if anyone else would have seen it, it would have been awesome.

[laughter]

No, it was crazy. It’s the dream-come-true kind of thing. There’s really no way to explain it. It’s like Frazier said. I think it played in three theaters within 100 miles. I had to drive down to Orange County to see it in the theater because I wanted that experience.

I was in the theater, and actually, one of the actors was… there were only three people in the theater. It was a person I brought, and then one of the actors in the movie was actually at the theater. So there wasn’t a crowd, but still, it was really cool to see it on a big screen. I’m in it, and I looked amazing.

[laughter]

Scott: You’ve got two others on the calendar in 2014: Step Up: All In and Into the Storm, both in August.

John Swetnam: Yep. Summer of Swetnam, fellows.

Scott: At some point, it’s possible you’ll have two movies out in theaters at the same time.

John Swetnam: Yeah, I would hope.

Editor’s note: In fact, both Step Up: All In and Into the Storm opened on the same weekend, a unique experience for a writer to have two movies released simultaneously.

F. Scott Frazier: They do an OK business with those movies.

John Swetnam: They’ve made a bit of money. Yeah, it’s going to be a trip. It’s one of those things where I just have no idea what that’s going to be. I keep telling people that, especially girls at bars, but I don’t know what it is going to be. It’s crazy to me, the idea that I’m going to have an actual studio movie, and then another one.

It’s just a trip, so check back in with me after it happens, if I’m not in prison or hung over somewhere.

Scott: You started producing this year, too, didn’t you?

John Swetnam: I did. I started a production company, and that’s been amazing. We’re setting up a lot of stuff. Hopefully, our first project will be shooting in the summer.

Scott: Had you always thought you wanted to go into producing, or was that just something that evolved organically?

John Swetnam: Honestly, I never started out being a writer. I started out. I went to school as a director. I went to grad school, started as a director. Then I was like directing is too expensive because you have to pay for your own short films. I was like well, fuck it, I’ll produce. Then I couldn’t find any scripts. Then I was like well, I’ll just write a script. How hard can it be? Fast-forward nine years later, eighteen scripts later, it was really hard. The production company was always the plan.

Again, for me, it’s just about having control. It’s about making movies the way I always dreamed that they would be made. I’m very fortunate, and I’m happy about the way things are going, but it’s not exactly the way you imagined it. I want to make movies where it’s like camp, where everybody gets together, you bring really cool people together, and you go off, and you make a movie. It makes money, but everyone’s having a good time.

I want to be the producer that I wanted as a writer. That’s what I tell people. I’m a writer-producer, but I want to be a writer’s producer, do it a little differently and have my own stamp on the way producers work. It’s an experiment, and I could be back at the Olive Garden in two years, but fuck it, I’m giving it a shot.

Scott: Is it far to say, then, because you’re moving into some producing and Chris… both Chrises are moving into directing.

John Swetnam: I’m actually directing my first movie as well.

Scott: Oh, you are?

John Swetnam: Trying it all, yeah.

Scott: OK. Can you talk about that project…

John Swetnam: We independently financed. We are fully financed. I’m producing it, writing, directing. I’m producing with John Legend and his production company, Get Lifted Film Co. It’s a fun, cool little dance genre movie.

Scott: It seems like, at least for some of you, this issue of control, or having more of an input, oversight over what’s going on, that’s a big deal. Is that fair to say?

John Swetnam: Yeah.

Chris Borrelli: Yes, from me.

F. Scott Frazier: That’s very fair.

John Swetnam: For me, it’s not about necessarily control or oversight, per se. It’s more about partnership. What happens with writers a lot is that you kind of get kicked off the team, or your value on the team diminishes very quickly, which is fine, because that’s just the way it’s always been.

I like the idea of the writer, in whatever capacity, being on the team and being an important player on the team all the way through the production, through editing, through everything. And that’s kind of what I want to do, is whether I’m directing, producing, or writing, I just want to be part of the team. And I want to have input, and I want to be partners more than like the dictator, if that makes sense.

Chris Borrelli: That’s still what I see as control. I think that’s really well‑said, by the way. That’s just how I see it as control, and starting with a vision, and hopefully ending with the same vision. Even if it changes a little bit, but being part of it through the whole process.

I’ve watched certain things I’ve written be kind of screwed up over my career, and I want to screw them up. Why not me? I can screw it up, too. That’s really my philosophy, and it’s what I’ve always wanted to do. At the same time, I think everything’s coming together. Movies, television, the lines are getting more and more blurred. I think with creating a film, while I don’t really believe in the auteur idea, I do think directing and writing and editing, things like that, and producing, that there should be some overlap there. And I’m definitely not afraid to step into those different worlds.

F. Scott Frazier: If you look at our most successful artists in the moviemaking business, you look at the Coen Brothers, and those are guys that have complete control over their movies. I would say that for better or worse, they always make a Coen Brothers movie, and it’s always their movie.

And I think that they have way more home runs than they have strikeouts. It’s about those guys making a movie and making their vision. Obviously, it’s always going to be collaborative process. There’s always hundreds of people that make a movie.

But I think you also want to have a little bit of that vision, and you want to… for me, there’s a lot of scripts that I write that I’m just like OK, I get it. This is a hundred million dollar movie. I’m not going to be involved in it anymore. There’s way too much on the line for my say to be the final say in making decisions.

When I write something that’s a little bit closer to my heart, or I write something that’s a little bit smaller, it definitely does kind of hurt when you get taken off of it, or you get, like John said, you get taken off the team or you get put on the bench. It wouldn’t exist without writers, and to kind of get the short shrift is never fun.

Chris McCoy: The point is also to make movies. I think that everyone here in this roundtable is in a position where we’ve been able to have careers and make a decent living and make money, but I don’t think anyone came out here just to write scripts and be able to tell your friends your scripts are set up at places.

I think that at a certain point, you just realize there are enough people who have just taken the reins at some point and decided “I can do this. Lots of people before me have directed a movie. It’s time for me to do this.” It gives you confidence. Every single director started out with a first film somewhere, so you just have to be that guy.

F. Scott Frazier: I’ve always said that screenwriters are some of the only types of artists that I can think of where what they create is not viewed by the public. If you write a really good script, 100 people in Hollywood read it, and then 100 crewmembers read it, and then it gets made into a movie.

The people who go and see the movie, 99 percent of the time, they’ll never read the script or they’ll never see the work that we put on the page. I’ve always likened it to an architect. An architect is the same way.

If an architect does a really good job, you’re never going to see his blueprints. You’re just going to see his building. When they start making the building, the architect isn’t suddenly set aside and told thanks for the blueprint, we’ve got it from here.

It’s definitely a bizarre situation, and there’s always going to be a struggle, I think, between wanting to be a part of it, and that there’s 100 million dollars on the line.

Greg Russo: The writer’s also the only guy above-the-line where it’s okay for others involved in the film to mess around with his craft. There’s a great analogy to the cinematographer. I don’t know if you guys have heard it. Imagine a producer going up to Roger Deakins on set and saying, let me fuck around with your camera a little bit here and there until I’m happy with it.

F. Scott Frazier: Can I adjust the depth of field?

Chris Borrelli: I don’t even get asked. They just do it. On top of that, it’s funny, just a lot of writing, of course, is done either in dark rooms or maybe a coffee shop, often with very little interaction with other people. It’s funny how much we can learn about human nature from honestly being a screenwriter.

People, they love you. These producers will do anything for you, and they want your opinion. Once they have what they want, I’ve seen it time and time again, they just move on. Just human nature. So I’ve learned to not take it personally.

A lot of the people that you work with or hire you, I believe they’re terrified for their own jobs or their own place in this. I don’t really take it personally, but the fact to create something that I do care about, when I’ve watched it go the wrong way or I’ve watched the ball be dropped, or something be set up or we have an amazing leading man in the line, and that falls apart.

When I’ve watched that happen through bad mistakes, kind of a slow motion car crash, I wish I could step in and have more say and have something to do with it, and have something to do with taking that vision to the finish line.

That’s one of my big reasons I’m making this push, and I’m surprised I waited this long, really.

Scott: I remember a producer telling me once, he said it’s so hard to make a movie, it’s like a space shuttle launch. A million things can go wrong.

We’ve mentioned a few of them, directors, actors dropping out. What are some of those key elements that can happen in a scripted project that cause the project to go south?

F. Scott Frazier: I can give you an example on Numbers Station, which happened before we actually filmed. They were set to film about four months or so before. John Cusack was in the movie. He had a couple other movies coming up, and Numbers Station was going to be his movie, and then he was going to roll into those next two movies right after it.

And what happened was this was the Monday that, I can’t remember, was it I think the Federal Reserve or one of the banks downgraded the dollar. This was in the end of 2011. In that happening, in the dollar getting downgraded, the financier lost their gap financing, and the movie just completely fell apart.

And then John Cusack, they couldn’t get the movie together. John Cusack had two other movies to do, and so he went and did them. Luckily, the movie ended up getting made after those two went. It’s just like a roll of a thousand dice, and if any one of them comes up bad, you get screwed.

Greg Russo: For me, it’s definitely been competing projects. Similar concepts pop up, that can sink the project incredibly fast in development. I remember the first script that I had sold and set up was a project called “Down” that took place in an elevator.

We were budgeted at seven million, trying to shoot in Puerto Rico. We had our director and everything. But there was another elevator movie that was currently shooting when we were scouting ours. It absolutely killed everything.

You just never know.

Justin Rhodes: Something kind of strange that can happen is sometimes the creative department at a studio and the marketing department are not necessarily moving in sync. You can end up in a situation where all the creatives say we’re ready to go, and then some marketing guy suddenly will get concerned about how it’ll do in foreign or something else like that.

Certain things that were working for everybody all the way along or whatnot suddenly get revisited. Even within the same studio, there are people that are not a part of the process that get added on later.

F. Scott Frazier: This definitely didn’t happen to me earlier this year, but an actor going to rehab or something like that.

Chris McCoy: Or sometimes a director’s attached to one of your things, and then something comes out, and they end up in movie jail. It just affects every project that they’re involved with.

F. Scott Frazier: Oh, yeah, I had a pitch with a director this year. We were waiting for his movie to come out. The movie didn’t do well, and now we have this pitch that we worked on for three months, and it’s just kind of sitting there. Nobody’ll take the meeting.

Scott: I’m reminded of that quote. I think it’s Charlton Heston. He said the problem with movies as art is that they’re commerce. How much do you all think about the business of screenwriting, the business of making movies, versus the more, I guess, pure creative aspect of crafting a story?

F. Scott Frazier: I tend not to think about it. Like Borrelli said, it’s never personal. I think when that sort of thing happens, that’s the business side. As far as writing, I’m definitely thinking about writing a script for myself to direct.

I’m trying to figure out what’s a cool movie that I can do for five million dollars or even a smaller budget. I think about it in that regard, but not when things happen. You can’t take it personally.

Chris Borrelli: For me, I know of no better way to do the system. I think it’s strange we don’t have a middle class of movies. We have 20 million, 30 million and under, and then it seems 100 million and over. People are terrified, from my experience, to make the 50‑60 million dollar movie because they can really lose their shirts on that, where these giant behemoth movies, they have ways of always recouping at least some of it.

Chris McCoy: I feel like that extends to the 30s, too. I would say that there’s a class of under 15, and then over 90. It seems like that 30‑40 number, people get really freaked out about, too.

John Swetnam: Yeah.

Scott: You’ve got the six major studios, and so any of those high budget projects, that’s basically the only place those can go. Then the lower budgeted things open it up to all these financiers. Is that actually an active part of your thinking when you’re taking on projects?

John Swetnam: For me, it’s just my business model. I think a lot about the business. I mean, a lot. With my company, the guy that is my vice president comes from foreign sales. This whole year has been about learning that process.

To me, the business side of it, thinking about demographics and foreign co-productions and tax incentives and all that stuff, is what you have to do. I won’t even take a pitch out unless I’ve got every answer in my head about all of those questions.

For me, the way I’ve always been, and again, this might just be me own thing, but even when I wrote Evidence, it was all about putting myself in a box. I built a box that I thought was a very sound business box. I thought about it as if it was my own money, and how am I going to make money.

At the end of the line, everything we’re talking about, it always comes down to that. Whether we like it or not, that’s what it comes down to. Every project gets derailed, at its core, because of money. Whether they think they’ll make money or they won’t make money or they can’t get the money.

So I tend to really think about that stuff up front because somebody else is going to think about it along the line. Some marketing guy, some bank, some financier, they’re going to ask all those questions anyway, so I try to ask them first and have the answers, put myself in this box, and then once I feel really comfortable with that box in terms of concept, budget, all that kind of stuff, then I take it all off, and I get to play as a writer. For me, it’s actually more fun because it’s almost like a puzzle, so that I like to get be really, really creative within the box that I’ve built.

I guess especially from my production company, again, you have to think about the money and how can you get the money, and how can you make money for the people that are giving you the money. It’s just, in my mind, sort of how it works, and I’m not going to fight it.

Again, I don’t take any of it personally. It’s about trying to be really, really smart in my decision-making. I don’t want to spend two years developing something that will never get made. I’ve done that. I spent eight years doing that. That’s my philosophy, but maybe that’s just me.

Chris McCoy: I had coffee with Frazier about a year ago. I haven’t seen him in a while. I remember talking about this with you, Scott, where I feel like because the foreign element is so significant, I feel like from now on, every one of my scripts is going to be titled “Istanbul” or “Berlin”.

[laughter]

If you’re doing anything that’s going to require these foreign sales, they really want to know very clearly. They want to have that foreign element delineated for them clearly up front it seems.

Chris Borrelli: Even though we’re at the beginning of it, we’ve seen the business change with so many films aimed at foreign and how it’s, in some ways, perhaps affected comedy and other parts of film.

I’m very encouraged that we may be getting to the point where more and more people around the world see our movies. I want to add to it, I don’t think we can always blame people here in this country. Fewer and fewer people that I know are seeing movies in theaters.

I’m glad there’s this huge foreign outreach, and maybe we’ll get to the point where six or seven billion people have the potential to see something we write. In some ways, I’m encouraged by the way the business is heading, although I think there’s some growing pains.

F. Scott Frazier: I always, I’ll read comments on movie review sites and that sort of thing of people complaining that all the movies that are coming out are all the same. It wasn’t that long ago that the studios were releasing 60 million dollar adult thrillers and adult romances and adult dramas, and we as a collective audience just stopped seeing them in the theater.

I don’t necessarily know it’s a studio’s fault that they only want to release The Avengers or they only want to release these big tentpole movies, because that’s what we’re going and seeing in the theater. It’s reactionary, it’s not like a specific, let’s just stop making movies for grown‑ups. We just stopped going and seeing them.

Greg Russo: If I could translate just a bit of advice for anybody that might be reading this, I would say if you’re going to write something to break in, you probably want to target that under 15 million range, something that has the potential to be read by as many buyers as possible.

You want The Purge, you know? I was so impressed with that movie, both conceptually and how well it performed. It’s just the perfect high concept, delivered at a price point that people want to make movies at right now. So that would be the target range that I would say to go for.

Scott: About this foreign audience angle, before we jump off that, Greg for “It Takes a Thief,” was there much awareness of that, consciously saying OK, we want to target a foreign audience?

Greg Russo: I think it’s just practical moviemaking. When you’re talking about films that will incur large budgets, you want to make sure that you open up your audience as much as possible. “Thief” will no doubt be a higher budgeted film, and action and espionage tend to travel well so that always helps. But it’s not an accident that the movie features locations around the globe, especially upswing movie markets. (BRIC) — Brazil, Russia, India, China.

All of the bigger movies I’ve worked on, almost every one of them has a set piece that’s international or some kind of major international component. As a writer, you always want to be aware of your marketplace and write accordingly.

Scott: Justin, “The Breach,” that’s set in Alaska, is that right?

Justin Rhodes: It’s Alaska, Zurich, Wyoming. It’s kind of a global movie.

Scott: Do you think that was part of the appeal from that project, was the foreign component?

Justin Rhodes: Maybe. If so, it’s all above my pay grade. In terms of conscious foreign concerns I know about, there were a couple spots in the book that positioned some off-screen violence happening between the US and China, and we had to change it to Russia to avoid the risk of potentially upsetting Chinese markets.

Scott: This point Greg made, this actually jumps to a question that a reader had. I want to get your reactions to it. Do you see any value in an unknown writer writing a big budget, high-concept spec, or should one stick with a lower-budget picture?

Greg was suggesting that, as a piece of advice, aim for that high-concept 15 million and under budget. Would anybody disagree with that?

F. Scott Frazier: I think there’s always going to be market for those big spec scripts, even if it’s a matter of the movie never getting made, but it’s your calling card script. There are so many writers that are getting their foot in the door with really, really big scripts.

I don’t think that it’s ever a waste, I just think that you have to be realistic, that it’s the kind of script that leads to more jobs than necessarily ever gets made.

Chris McCoy: Yeah, and I think that that first thing is your calling card, like everyone was saying. It should show your voice to the town in a way that you want to be perceived. That first thing is basically going to be your debut album.

It’s going to be you saying to the world, this is what I sound like, this is what I can do. Even if that’s something that’s weird or personal or not necessarily a targeted kind of thing, where it’s a big budget kind of thing, it should just be a story that’s really important to you.

On your first thing, what they’re looking at is the uniqueness of your voice and not necessarily an 80 million dollar movie. Chances are that first thing won’t get made, but if people like it, it’ll get you a ton of meetings. Then things roll from there.

But I don’t think that you should really say ‘I’m going to write a big monster movie’ or something like that because that’s what the studios are buying. I think that that first thing should be something that you care about a lot, that sounds a lot like your brain and is the way that you want your reputation in town to be established.

Chris Borrelli: I would add ‑‑ I think that’s a lot of good advice ‑‑ there’s nothing, nothing like getting a movie made, as far as a calling card, or…and I know that sounds like I’m getting ahead of myself, but that idea of putting a script out there that a lot of people could potentially make and aren’t reading as a sample.

Reading a sample is sort of like a favor to you, some of these producers see it as. I think it is good advice, when possible, to lean toward that 15 and under.

On top of that, I’d say if you’re someone who wants to write giant, giant big movies, I would say to a writer, on a one-on-one level, I would say can you do your giant, giant, giant movie in another way, where I can tell you can do great action?

Can you find a way to do it in that small way? People will read it and know they’re reading somebody who can do giant set pieces, but look, this guy or this girl did it in an apartment or an apartment building, whatever. I think that’s really good advice, and whenever possible, I think your first script, I definitely agree it should be personal, but it would be smart, it’d be a little smarter to do 15 million and under. Keep that in mind.

Scott: Do you think that extends, too, to representatives and to particular managers, that they’re looking for that type of material?

Chris Borrelli: They can blast it out. They can blast it out to a lot more places because there’s a lot more people that can make those movies.

Greg Russo: They’re looking for something they can sell. More buyers equals a better chance at a sale, so it helps you quite a bit.

Scott: Something interesting John said, that he actually likes to create that box, and correct me if I’m wrong, John, but you kind of find a freedom there, a creative freedom, once you’ve got those parameters, you know you can just go in there and play?

John Swetnam: For me, that’s definitely the way I like to do it, yeah.

Scott: As opposed to some people, who would feel like it inhibits their creativity.

John Swetnam: I think one of the things is like, and again, this is just something I’ve been thinking about it. It’s completely my opinion. But even the way sample scripts used to be when I first came to town 10 years ago, they were different.

A lot of people would write samples because you would be trying to go after jobs. You had a lot of managers and agents and people that were looking for those kinds of things. To me, the way managers and agents are now, I think the vast majority of them are looking for something to sell.

They’re not looking to find… again, there’s a few managers like that, but I think the majority have leaned more towards I’m looking for a script that I can go sell right now. If that happens to turn into a sample, great, but it’s really about just getting something that they believe is a piece of product that they can sell, which I don’t blame them for. But I just feel like that’s the way representation, in my mind, has shifted, maybe I’m wrong.

Chris Borrelli: No, I would agree.

Scott: John, you sold a spec this year, right?

John Swetnam: Yeah, I sold “Spinback”.

Scott: OK. Anybody else here still writing on spec, or are you all just basically doing assignments at this point and pitching?

Chris Borrelli: I sold a spec this year. It hasn’t been announced, which is kind of odd, but I sold a spec this year. I like to do it. I like it because it’s something I… well, here’s the word control again, but I really believe five days a week, I should be at my desk writing.

I also did an assignment this year that everyone’s pleased with and I’m very happy with it. It was a great experience. I like to do an assignment and a spec and other stuff each year. If I’m not actually writing something on that day, I don’t really take a day off from work. I’ll have something that’s needling around in my brain that I will work at. So I believe in it.

F. Scott Frazier: I still like to do specs. I’m kind of like Borrelli. I like to write a spec a year at the very least right now. My board is full of ideas that I want to do. I did, actually, I wrote a spec earlier in the year, and it wasn’t as good on the page as it was in my head.

I banged my head against it for months on end, and I got to the point where I was like OK, I’m just going to take some time off of this, and I’m going to go work on these other projects that I have and come back to it. I can’t remember who said it, but it’s definitely that idea that your inner critic is at a very high level. The reason that we write is because we want to see what we like be made, and we have a very high taste level. But then we get down to the act of writing it, and our creative muse is not at the same level as our critical muse. I think that that’s one of those things that you can kind of bump against and almost give up on. It’s happened to me a couple of times. I think it’s a tricky beam to walk on.

Scott: Does anybody else have that dynamic, that conflict between the critical voice and the creative voice?

Chris McCoy: I also write books, and this year I had to finish up a book that was part of my first-ever writing deal, which was a two-book deal with Knopf for two YA books. So, this year I had do that second book, which I actually found to be a really nice break for a couple of months from screenwriting.

In screenwriting, you’re constrained to economy of language and three lines of an action paragraph and that sort of thing. I find it freeing to go and dip into books because it allows you to keep both sides of your brain sharp, the more technical screenwriting part of your brain and the go-to-crazy-town-with-ideas novel part of your brain.

Scott: I’d like to move onto some more craft oriented questions. Here’s a reader question. How do you inspire yourselves before starting a new project? They were referring to that interview I did with Kelly Marcel where she said she likes to aggregate pictures and props, stuff to have visual references.

Do you have any tricks like that or things that you do to help get you inspired before you start a project?

John Swetnam: I always shop for houses and cars online. I like to look at really fucking nice houses, and then I get really motivated very quickly.

[laughter]

Greg Russo: There you go. [laughs] Art versus commerce, right?

Scott: Forever known as the Swetnam approach.

John Swetnam: There you go.

Chris McCoy: I can’t write without music. Hopefully, there’s always new stuff coming out that I like. I feel like if there’s a new album that I’m into, it helps with my process. I think it’s more auditory for me.

Scott: You’ll actually buy some CDs or music or whatever that will accompany that particular project?

Chris McCoy: Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes, it’s just like wow, I’m so excited about this new record that came out and it just feeds into my writing. And I write faster and better, and it sort of amps me up.

If there’s nothing that’s coming out that I’m into, that’s when I go back to the well, and I’m listening to Iggy Pop and the Ramones and Bill Withers and stuff like that, the old standbys for when I’m writing certain scenes and trying to get a certain energy.

F. Scott Frazier: Tuesday is always one of my best writing days because it’s always the day that new music comes out. I feel the same way. I go a lot by music. I’ll usually take a week off every four or five months and just completely, what I call, recharge my batteries, where I will just absorb videogames and movies and books and music as just like, a creative topping off.

My inspiration is weird in that I get real inspired by something early on when I come up with the idea, and if I don’t write it within a very short amount of time after the idea comes up, I start losing it. I know there’s a lot of writers that think about something for a really long time, and then they go into it.

I’m kind of the exact opposite, where I’ll get an idea, and I’ll just want to write it. A lot of my inspiration is just being able to get in front of the computer as quickly as possible after it strikes. Otherwise, I find myself almost getting bored with ideas or stories or characters, and I want to move onto something new.

Chris McCoy: I think that’s due to the elevator thing that was brought up before. I’ve tweeted about this, but I have a theory that any time you get an idea, there’s like 50 people or 500 people or 50,000 people that get that idea at the exact same time, and it’s just a race to the finish.

F. Scott Frazier: That’s horrifying, actually. I’m not going to sleep at night now because of that.

Scott: Wendy has a couple questions for you.

Wendy: I guess it’s two separate questions. One is if you’re writing about a very specific subject or specific genre are there times that… you talked about music but other ways to keep yourself within the world? Then, also, just generally as a writing practice, are there certain techniques or habits you rely on?

Scott: Basically to stay in that story universe, right?

Wendy: Yeah.

Scott: How do you do that?

John Swetnam: I’ll jump in. This last year I had two projects. I think I might be doing this on purpose. The first one was “Spinback,” which is an action movie set in the world of EDM festivals and concerts and clubs and then “Step Up 5,” which is all about dancing at clubs, etc. Pretty much, I spent the entire year at clubs and festivals and just partying and it was the best research ever and I really think it came through on the page. I really do.

F. Scott Frazier: John, how good of a dancer are you now?

John Swetnam: I’m fucking amazing! (laughter). But I always tell people about this pigeonhole question because I came out with a horror found footage movie and was the found footage guy and now, somehow, I’m the dance guy. I sold a dance TV show, I wrote a dance movie, “Step Up 5.” I’m directing one. What the fuck? I don’t know how it happened but I’m very happy that my moves are finally getting their due.

Scott: One answer, then, to that question is find something that you really enjoy and write about that and then that way it’s pretty easy to stay in that story world.

Chris Borrelli: Oh, I thought it was just about becoming a really good dancer. That makes more sense.

Scott: Justin, for example, this project “The Breach”. It sounds like a sprawling story and an action-type thing. How did you manage to get into that story universe and stay there?

Justin Rhodes: On “The Breach,” of the projects I’ve done this year, that one was the strangest in that way because normally my process involves a whole lot of research and this one didn’t. So I kind of had my security blanket taken away. Thematically, the script is about encountering stuff we don’t understand. I don’t know. It was hard.

In terms of staying immersed, a lot of the elements of the story sort of made my head hurt. Kind of just coming in every day and looking at it. I probably read the book 50 times and that’s probably not an exaggeration. The thing that’s nice about an adaptation is that you’ve got, in this case, a producer and a director that also have opinions on it, and you can have those conversations when you get stuck, where you can reach out for help if you need to.

Scott: On other projects, you found that if they were research-heavy, that helped you immerse yourself in the story?

Justin Rhodes: Yeah, I’ve got another project about military robotics where I did a bunch of research. For me, research is where I often get to have the most fun under the pretense of work. I got to meet with a roboticist. I did some military training with some Delta Force guys. I talked to an intelligence adviser for the Brookings Institute and all kinds of stuff. That one was a full immersion thing, which is normally more how I go.

Scott: Wendy has another really interesting question. Could you ask that one about the character plot thing?

Wendy: People divide themselves into two camps. You either write character really well or you write plot really well. Do you feel you kind of fall into either group, and then if writing plot’s a challenge for you, how do you approach that?

Justin Rhodes: I would say plot and character are the same thing. Or at least they are from my point of view. If you had a different character, you’d have a different plot. If you’re following your protagonist, and your protagonist is an active protagonist, and the plot’s coming from how he reacts to what’s happening, then who your character is is what’s determining your plot.

Maybe your initial setup or your inciting incident or some of those things are different, but then also your villain is doing what he’s doing. You’re even in a script where you don’t necessarily have a villain, but what’s happening is happening because the characters are setting those things in motion.

At least for me, if the plot’s not working, it’s probably because the character’s broken.

Chris Borrelli: I love that, by the way. I think that’s a really good point, and it sounds like what you’re talking about, too, is that idea that your hero is the perfect character for this exact situation and problem, for the plot. You have the exact right hero when it’s someone who has to react to the plot, and only she or he can react in a certain way or solve the problem in a certain way.

John Swetnam: I’ll chime in with something that I learned this year I thought was really interesting for me as a writer. As a producer I learned this, and it was that I think as a writer, you also have to know your strengths and your weaknesses.

I don’t think there’s a lot of writers that are just the best at everything. Then there’s not a lot of writers that have such a reputation that they can just do whatever they want and follow it all the way through. What I learned was I think you have to know what you’re really, really good at and be OK with just doing what you do well and allowing other writers who do something else really well…

Now, I’m saying you can write plot and character fine, but for me, I’m much better at plot. Before, someone would come to rewrite me, and they would do a lot of character work and dialogue work. And I would get really pissed off and be like fuck that, I can do that.

But then I realized that when I would read the revisions they made, I’d be like holy shit. They’re amazing at character and dialogue. This was really great. So as a producer, I’m working with a lot of writers now. And you find some writers that get a little overprotective or a little too defensive.

And it’s OK, because it really is a collaboration. If you do dialogue better than me, I’m OK with that. My loyalty is to the movie. I’ve learned to not have loyalty to my script. I care about the movie. And if bringing on a guy who is amazing at dialogue or who is amazing at character will help get that movie made and make that movie better, I’ve learned to just embrace the shit out of that.

I actually enjoy it now. It’s actually become something that I really love, is when writers actually work together in that way.

I know a lot of times, people hire writers because they don’t know what the fuck they want, and shit gets goes crazy. But if it can work, and you know what you do really, really well and let other guys do what they do really well, you can join this fucking Voltron thing, and it’s actually really cool to me.

So for me, I’m a concept guy. I’m very good at plot and structure. I have realized that I am not that strong at character and dialogue. I’m working on it, and I want to get better, but there are a lot of people out there that can do that shit way better than me, and I’m OK with them coming in and doing that to help make a great movie.

Greg Russo: I feel like to work professionally, you have to be able to do both. But let’s say you’re starting out and you feel like you need a better grasp on character, I think one way to learn more about character is to get out of your space, go out, and just observe people. Go somewhere. Take a trip. Try to immerse yourself around other people and see how they talk and how they act. Try to keep that as realistic as possible.

If you feel like you need a better grasp on plot, then break down real scripts.

Take the movies you love, and then break them down into their pieces and look at that transparently, and ask yourself how does this work, how do these parts move? How do these beats gel from moment to moment? That would be my advice.

Chris McCoy: I do think that if the audience really cares about a character, they’ll follow you anywhere. You can be the best at plot in the world, but if people don’t care about who they’re looking at up on the screen, then it’s not going to matter.

For me, I feel it all starts with character, and it all starts with creating parts that have depth to them and that actors want to play. And a lot of your plot is going to come from knowing your characters so well that you know what they’ll do in a given circumstance, in a given situation.

Once you’re in their head, you can surprise yourself and just know where to go next. It’s sort of your character telling you where to go next and not a bunch of 3x5 cards sometimes.

F. Scott Frazier: When I’m outlining or coming up with an idea the most plot I ever think about is what happens on page 15. What is the inciting incident? After that, I feel like it’s up to the characters to determine that. That might just be me making it up as I go along because I don’t think that I’m good at plot. I get something like The Departed and I just shake my head at it like holy shit, I don’t even know where to begin to write something like that.

Or The Dark Knight or The Dark Knight Returns where it’s a thousand 30-second scenes and every single one of them move the plot forward in crazy ways. My head doesn’t work like that. I tend to prefer simpler plots, simple stuff. If you saw The Numbers Station is two people in a basement trying to get out. A lot of my scripts are that way. “Autobahn” is very much a guy in a car trying to get to his girlfriend.

Not a lot in the way of plot outside of what happens on page 15 and the rest of it is just how the characters react to what that big event was and how they interact with each other.

John Swetnam: I’ll just jump in and say that I agree that one of the things I’ve learned by reading more scripts than I’ve ever read, and mostly from guys that are considered professionals, is that there is a baseline like the NBA. If you’re a professional, you are pretty good at both, at the plot and characters. I think if I was coming up again it would be, yes, work on both those things and get to a certain level, but then when you are working you are going to be considered usually one thing or the other.

You’re usually brought in on an assignment because you do one thing that they want. I’m OK with embracing that, to a certain point, if that makes sense.

Scott: Well, we’re talking about characters. How do you all go about developing your characters? Are there any specific routines or rituals or tips or tools that you use?

F. Scott Frazier: It’s part and parcel to what I was just saying. I usually come up with that inciting incident first, that’s usually where my ideas start from, and then out of that I figure out who is the character that’s going to be screwed up the most by that kind of situation. That’s usually where my character comes from.

Scott: Then how do you develop it further?

F. Scott Frazier: Oh gosh. I don’t know. The Numbers Station, just as an example because people could see it if they wanted to, it started out with I heard about these short range radio broadcasts and I thought I wonder where they come from and maybe they come from a secret underground lair. Then I thought wouldn’t it be cool if the people that work there got trapped there because what they have is very important and so bad guys want it?

Then, of course, the broadcasts are all female voices so I thought there’s a girl but then wouldn’t it be cool if there was a guy that had to protect her and he’s not really protecting her, though, he’s protecting the broadcasts. Then, from that, it came out with how would that guy end up in that situation? I came up with this idea that he didn’t protect a girl earlier in his life and so he’s kind of messed up in the head about that, that there was a girl that he could have saved and he didn’t.

Now his job is that he has to protect the broadcasts but his want is that he wants to protect the girl and atone for his sins in the past. To me, that’s enough of a character, that’s enough of a plot, that’s enough of a situation to start writing. I think that any other character bits that come out of that are just organic to the process of me writing and typing something and thinking that’s cool, I don’t know where that came from.

Scott: That sounds like what Justin was saying where it’s like character is plot, plot is character.

F. Scott Frazier: I agree. I think that movies are way, way closer to short stories than they are to novels because they’re just bite‑sized pieces. I think that if you look at a lot of short stories, they’re usually all based around an inciting incident and a character. There are very, very few short stories, I don’t even think I ever read one, that are based on plot.

A lot of fiction and a lot of novels all revolve around their plot, like the Jack Reacher series. They set up a character in the first book and then the series of books are all how that character reacts to multifaceted plots.

Greg Russo: I’m not opposed to character breakdowns, either. I don’t know if anyone else uses them. If we’re going to see 90 minutes of this guy’s life or this girl’s life, as a writer, what can you tell me about the other 34 years? I feel like if we’re creating this character we should know that.

If you try to figure out who this guy is outside of the events of the movie or the story that you’re telling, I think that will help flesh the character out more. Even if that stuff never appears, it will add subtext and color to it.

Chris McCoy: I do character bios and I just mine the weirdest, darkest, funniest parts of my friends and I pull from real life as much as I possibly can because I feel like if you’re writing a character and you have a seed in that character that reminds you of someone from some part of your life I feel like it’s easier to tap into who that person is.

Chris Borrelli: Is the belief that many writers just really write one character, even if they create twenty, whether it’s books or screenplays or whatever, I don’t know if that’s exactly right. Besides horror I do action-thrillers and I’ve had some pretty good luck. In one of them, “Wake” has a character who’s a criminal sociopath and “Sad Jack” has a character that’s a schizophrenic hitman, basically, and another character who has ADD but he has to solve a mystery.

I have these things but in a very basic way there’s a cheesy sounding thing where it sounds like Disease of the Weak kind of movie that I’m doing in an action-thriller. But really, I get to love these guys and I start off with them and I put them in a situation where they have to react to a series of events. I write pretty similar to Frazier in that once it gets going I let them lead me. I just stay with the character and follow it.

I also probably do draw a lot from friends and my own family. I get a lot of material from my family, I have kind of a crazy family, so that’s fun.

F. Scott Frazier: I think the realization that I’ve come to this year, kind of similar to what you were saying about how we all write the same character, is I’m realizing that I’m just writing the same movie over and over again. I kind of have gotten to the point where I’m embracing it.

One could be a giant action adventure and another one could be a low-key character drama. At the end of the day, thematically, I just keep doing the same thing over and over again. I don’t necessarily know that there’s anything wrong with that, maybe there is, but I definitely see the same kinds of stuff constantly coming up in what I’m doing.

Chris Borrelli: I do the same themes. Usually redemption is in almost every script of mine in some way or another and there’s other themes that interest me and that’s what gets me to write in the first place.

John Swetnam: I have a trick that’s worked well for me. I just basically ask myself what would Channing Tatum do and whatever that answer is usually works.

Chris McCoy: I feel like you could also do that with Tom Hanks and always have your character be sympathetic.

John Swetnam: See?

Scott: What about dialogue? How do you go about finding your characters’ voices?

John Swetnam: What does Channing Tatum sound like?

[laughter]

F. Scott Frazier: I’d just hire him to come in and read all the lines for me.

John Swetnam: That would be awesome.

Scott: I’m serious. For an aspiring writer, they’re sitting there like how do I do this? Is it just an innate thing? Do you even think about it? How do you go about finding the dialogue?

Chris Borrelli: I think how can someone get a point across in as few words as possible? Not making every character into a Clint Eastwood-like character. Again, the dialogue is just an element of it. We were mentioning earlier, I forget who mentioned, go out in the world and see how people do that. Go out in the world and see how people talk to each other.

Maybe that biography will help. If your character comes from the South or he comes from the Northeast he or she is going to speak in a different way. Dialogue, to me, is natural and it takes time. I think more people can do it than they probably realize. For me, it’s always been a natural thing.

Greg Russo: I think you’re right. I think it is natural. I think that’s one of the inherent things about being a screenwriter. There’s a rhythm to it. And some people have an ear for how that rhythm ebbs and flows.

F. Scott Frazier: The only thing that we’re writing that people experience is dialogue. I come at it from a I’ll do my vomit draft and then I’ll just overwrite the dialogue and the scenes are really long and then I’ll just go back in and edit. I think a lot of my dialogue just comes out of the editing, and being like, that sentence is terrible, so I just delete it.

You’d be surprised how many lines of dialogue you can fix just by deleting sentences and words and that sort of thing. For me, character voice is weird. I don’t know if I think about it that much just because the character voice is going to be whatever the actor is that they hire. Obviously, people have different ways that they talk and characters have different ways that they talk.

When they hire Bradley Cooper he’s going to say the dialogue how he wants to say it. The exact same words given to Channing Tatum are going to sound completely different. To me, I always focus more on making sure that my dialogue is funny and it gets the point across and there’s as little exposition as possible.

Otherwise, I feel like if I think about it too much more than that I just overthink it.

Justin Rhodes: I feel like the better you know the character the more specific that dialogue is going to be and it’s going to flow. You’re going to know what that character is going to say next. That comes from being as specific with that character as possible.

F. Scott Frazier: Yeah, I guess I’ve noticed that. When I go back and I’m in the seventh or eighth revision of a script dialogue is just coming out really, really fast whereas on the first draft it’s almost a chore to just get out one sentence. The further that you get into those characters you kind of know just how they’ll respond.

Chris McCoy: I also write comedy, and a good rule of thumb is I try to think about what would make my sickest friends laugh. That seems to work pretty well.

Scott: Do any of you read your scripts or read your dialogue out loud?

Chris Borrelli: Oh, yeah, I look insane. I do voices, like women’s voices. It doesn’t matter. I absolutely do that. I think it’s contributed to me talking to myself, just more regularly. I look absolutely insane sitting there at my desk, like reading out the dialogue.

I’ve had times, before I was at a career at this, and I’d just go to friends for advice, who weren’t screenwriters. I would read them the script, the entire script, because they wouldn’t feel like reading, and I’d get advice that way. Anyway, I think it’s good to hear it. That’s just me, but I do like to hear it out loud, and usually I’m the only person around.

Chris McCoy: I’ll read with you, man.

John Swetnam: I think it also comes down to everybody’s process is completely different. I know some writers that do three, four, or five-page bios on their characters. Some can just do a paragraph. When I was first writing a lot of specs, I would actually cast them myself. I would, even with Evidence, I had pictures of the actors above my computer that was my dream cast.

I would always, at least, have kind of a touchstone, like if I was in the middle of a scene, I could look up and see, “Oh, it’s Kyle Chandler. OK.” It would just help me to keep that character consistent. That was a little trick that I did for a long, long time.

It was fun to, when you’re sitting in your room, to cast your movie, and imagine the best possible actor. Your character will become its own person. But it helped me stay consistent through the scripts.

F. Scott Frazier: I’ve actually gone one step further, and I’ve given characters names based off of the actors that I think would be good in the roles. Just like first names, so that when somebody’s reading it, it’s almost subconscious that they think of that actor that I’ve associated with that role.

Scott: That explains why you have so many characters named Scarlett.

F. Scott Frazier: Oh, yeah.

Scott: What are your actual writing processes like? Borrelli was saying he writes five days a week. Do some of you not do that? Do some of you tend to write in clumps, or do you write every day, or do you write in public, or do you write in private? What are your writing processes like?

F. Scott Frazier: I do five days a week, Monday through Friday. I have an office at my house. I tend to start in the morning. I’ll write through lunch, and then stop in the mid‑afternoon or so. For me it’s more about page count every day than time. I give myself six pages a day to get through. If you do six pages a day you have a script in a month that way. It’s a pretty simple process.

Justin Rhodes: I write every day, even if I just do a few hours. I feel like the way that you get to do this for a living is that you treat it like a job. Everyone, in L.A. especially, everyone is always “working” on a script, but nobody knows what that means. You’ve just got to look at it as a job, as a career. Do it every day for at least a few hours. It’s always surprising how much product you end up generating because of that.

John Swetnam: I agree, you do have to treat it like a job. But for me, I just hate the word “job.” When I moved out here, my main dream was I just don’t want a job. That’s all I ever wanted was to not actually have a job. I think when you do what you love it isn’t a job. For me it’s more of an obsession. That’s probably why I’m such a fucked up person.

It’s an obsession. I can’t stop. For me it’s not a nine to five. It’s a 24/7. In the back of my head there’s something, some story, some idea, some actor, some packaging, some shot, and I can’t stop it. Luckily, I’m not in a mental institution. For me, I treat it like an obsession more than a job. I love it though. It doesn’t feel like work. It’s about the coolest thing ever. I’m afraid it’s going to end, so I don’t stop.

Scott: Do you not say, “I’m going to write one to five today.” I mean just like, you actually sit down, butt on chair, you write whenever you feel like it?

John Swetnam: Yeah, I’m in my chair, on the phone all day. But again, it’s not just typing pages. It’s thinking about stuff. It’s coming up with ideas. It’s meetings with finance people, writers, directors, actors, or other producers. The whole moviemaking machine, and television and all of it. I just love it all.

Scott: Justin, how about you? What’s your writing process?

Justin Rhodes: The honest answer is, “Who the hell knows?” I’m not a morning person, so in the morning, I hang out with my family. I do an early lunch. I usually write from about noon to five or so, and then I go home and I have dinner, and do the family stuff. Then I come back and I do another session from eight or nine o’clock to whenever I get tired, so around one or two.

Scott: Do you have an office?

Justin Rhodes: Yeah, I have an office, like in an office building. My old office used to be in my house, and then my daughter was born. Now everything’s pink with curtains. I had to come here. I’ve actually found it’s nice, because I get in a car and I drive to work. I feel like a grownup, finally.

F. Scott Frazier: What’s the space like? I’ve actually been thinking about that.

Justin Rhodes: You mean like what is the office like?

F. Scott Frazier: Yeah.

Justin Rhodes: I’m in Burbank. I’m right by Warner Brothers. I’ve got three big windows looking out at the mountains, which is kind of nice. I’ve got, I don’t know, I’ve got a couch, a desk, a credenza and a fridge in there. It’s not huge. It’s like 13 feet by 10 feet maybe. It’s big enough just for me to come in here and do this. It’s like I read on the couch, and I type at the computer. It’s been good for me.

F. Scott Frazier: Nice.

Scott: Greg, how about you? What’s your writing process like?

Greg Russo: Silence and solitude. I could never understand how someone could go and work the trenches of a coffee shop with all that godawful noise. To each his own, but that sounds like torture to me (literally). I need a lot of silence. My wife and I have a place in L.A. and in Brooklyn.

For me, if I’m feeling stuck, I’ll just fly out to New York, or vice versa and work there for a little while. I’ve come to learn over the years, that I work best, when I can get out of my space every now and then and return to the living world.

I’m a daytime guy and I try and go at it every single day if I can. Of course there are days when you can’t get the creativity going. But as writers, we’re blessed with these awful guilt complexes, these internal critics that keep us in constant check.

If I’m not working, the guy inside my head will tell me that I’m lazy and a terrible person and to get back to the keyboard. So if procrastination happens, it doesn’t last very long.

Scott: Greg, that reminds me. I worked on a pilot for NBC, a one‑hour pilot, with Roy Huggins, who created the “Rockford Files” and “The Fugitive.” He used to get in his, I think he had a Jaguar. Whenever he was stuck on a story, he would just get in his car and drive. One time he said that he drove, and finally solved the problem, and realized he’d driven to Arizona.

Greg Russo: It happens! I’ve spaced out behind the wheel and almost killed multiple people. Luckily, it’s L.A., so psychotic driving doesn’t warrant much attention.

F. Scott Frazier: I’ve solved so many problems in the car than any other place, easily.

Chris McCoy: I run every day. I live on Venice Beach, so I just run the beach. I feel like you could probably gauge how effective my writing is going by how thin I am. You can tell from my body if I’m going on an eight‑mile run because I can’t figure something out, versus if I’m happily sitting and eating Twizzlers and writing away.

Scott: Is this like a spiritual thing, or is it just the physicality of moving?

Chris McCoy: Sorkin does the same thing where he says that he writes in the shower. I think it’s that thing where your mind is just focused on something else, like a mundane task that you have to do. The machinery behind-the-scenes is working and spits out answers for you.

Scott: I’d like to ask one last question. Then if you all have something you want to talk about go at it. We talked about there were so many great movies last year. I think this year has actually had a lot of great movies, too. Is there one particular movie, or maybe a script that you’ve read this year that just really inspired you? You just thought, “Wow, that is just great.” Any things jump to mind from what you’ve seen or read in 2013?

Chris Borrelli: American Hustle, because not only did I love it for so many reasons, but it really is, I mean every performance is so on, but the dialogue is fantastic. I loved it. In a smaller way, Nebraska, as well, for a small movie. I thought it was terrific in its simplicity. But I came out of American Hustle on a small high.

It was just a really enjoyable experience for me. It was kind of a classic film. In some ways even simple and sort of good‑natured. I loved the dialogue, and I loved the characters.

Chris McCoy: I’m still recovering from Her. Just blew my mind. I’ve been trying to process it. I can’t get it out of my head, so that’s the one.

F. Scott Frazier: I think for me, maybe Pacific Rim. Just because I think it’s so damn hard to get a movie of that size and that quality made, and just be the level of imagination that was on the screen, and on the page. That thing was just awe‑inspiring. If I set a goal for myself, it would be to write the next Pacific Rim.

John Swetnam: I think for me it was, I’ve been trying to figure out, everybody always talks about elevated genre. So the two movies for me this year that I just have been studying a lot are World War Z, which I just thought was, if you really look at the structure and the plot, it’s actually, in my mind, seems like a pretty simple sort of movie.

It’s an A to B kind of thing, but it was just so elevated in my mind. I mean the dialogue and the character work and the little subtleties. The other one was The Conjuring, which I thought was amazing.

Greg Russo: For now, it’s Fruitvale Station, it just blew me away. The way that they were able to take a day of this guy’s life, and you felt like you knew him for 20 years. I thought it was remarkable. Quite an accomplishment.

Justin Rhodes: The movie that I think impressed me the most was All is Lost. The way that you felt and understood, pretty much, everything that was happening in a meaningful way, without any dialogue. That’s amazing, like the script for that is something like 30 pages. That’s the one where I just came out of there going like, “Holy shit. This is like a feat.”

Scott: Have any of you seen Short Term 12?

F. Scott Frazier: It’s terrific.

Scott: Let’s end it with that pull quote: “F. Scott Frazier says Short Term 12 is terrific!” A nice plug for a wonderful movie. Thanks, everyone! Continued best of luck with all of your projects!

For more Go Into The Story interviews, go here.