2022 Hollywood Reporter Writer Roundtable

It’s an annual tradition: The Hollywood Reporter Writer Roundtable. This year the writer lineup: Jordan Peele, Rian Johnson, Martin McDonagh, Chinonye Chukwu, Tony Kushner and Daniel Kwan.

Here’s an excerpt:

I’d like to close with a few process questions. First, do you outline?

MCDONAGH No.

KUSHNER You don’t outline?!

MCDONAGH Never.

PEELE That’s cool. So you just —

CHUKWU You just write? You just go?

PEELE You have an incredible amount of plot twists in your film!

KWAN If he can surprise himself, he can surprise the audience.

MCDONAGH Exactly.

KUSHNER I write outlines and then they change because suddenly I realize, “Oh, I’m completely wrong about this,” or, “This character is not going to do this thing that the outline says they’ll do,” so then I throw out the outline and re-outline. I do like 80 of them. But if I don’t have some phony-baloney ladder so that I can at least pretend I’ve got something to hang onto, it’s too scary.

KWAN Ninety percent of it is outlining for us as well. I say that structure is where thesis emerges. We wanted to make a movie that starts structurally as The Matrix and ends as Magnolia, but we always were playing with, “How do we arrange the big pieces?”

JOHNSON That’s just the way I learned how to write: The first 90 percent of the writing process is structure, similar to what Tony and Daniel said.

KUSHNER Did you see what David Lynch said? “You get 70 three-by-five index cards, you write a scene on each of them, then you walk away and you’re done.” (Laughs.)

Kushner is right! Here is the Lynch quote:

“If you want to make a feature film, you get ideas for 70 scenes. Put them on 3-by-5 cards. As soon as you have 70, you have a feature film.’’

You may read more about Lynch’s approach here.

You may read the 2022 Hollywood Reporter writer roundtable here. For previous years:

2017
2018
2019
2020

For 100s more interviews with screenwriters and filmmakers, go here.