Go Into The Story Interview: Daniel Kunka

My in-depth conversation with the 3-time Black List screenwriter.

If you follow him on social media (@unikunka), you may know Daniel as the #writeyourspec guy. He knows what he’s talking about having sold multiple feature spec scripts including Agent Ox, Bermuda Triangle, and Lift which became a hit Netflix movie.

In this 2013 interview, we talked about his creative journey which led him to screenwriting, his passion for writing specs, and his thoughts on several craft related questions.

Scott: Let’s start from the beginning. Where did you grow up and how did you find your way into writing?

Daniel: I grew up in the south suburbs of Chicago, in a place called Palos Heights. I wasn’t very much of a film kid growing up, I was much more into TV. I liked my creative writing class in high school and there was a creative writing magazine for high schools, I don’t even remember the name of it, that had an article about the film adaptation of the movie The Crucible that starred Winona Ryder.

They had an article about turning the play into a movie and they had actual screenplay excerpts. That was the very first time I ever remember reading or even knowing that there was a thing called a screenplay. Then I found a few other examples. The Pulp Fiction script paperback was available at Barnes and Noble. I got excited about screenwriting and when I told my parents I wanted to go to the undergraduate screenwriting program at USC, they amazingly didn’t have a problem with it. I had no idea what I was doing really. I hadn’t even seen The Godfather or Citizen Kane but there I was basically in a trade school for screenwriters. I had a lot of catching up to do.

Scott: I assume you did a certain amount of that when you were in college, watching movies, reading a lot of scripts.

Daniel: Yeah, the program is great. The undergraduate screenwriting program at USC is a four‑year intensive program where it’s you and the same 20 people who have come in as freshman. You’re not very intermingled with the rest of the undergraduate film class. There’s production, there’s critical studies, and then there’s the writing program. The very first weekend you move in, you go to this weekend crash course on screenwriting taught by this guy Vincent Robert, you learn about the broad ideas of what it is to write a screenplay, then you get a couple of books to read and then you start writing.

You write a full screenplay over the course of each of your sophomore, junior, and senior years. You workshop it together, you learn some things about how to become a writer, and then they kick you out the door and you try to go and do it.

Scott: Most of the scripts you’ve written have an action or sci‑fi action component. How did that happen you zeroed in on that?

Daniel: I think that’s all about finding your voice. In college I wrote a lot of historical fiction. I think my sophomore year script, my first feature length script, was about the stockyards in Chicago at the turn of the century. The screenplay my junior year was about the Lost Colony of Roanoke. Then my senior thesis was a script about a small army operation after the bombing of the US military base in Beirut in the ‘80’s.

I still like a lot of those ideas, but I didn’t really find my voice until after college. I started working in the industry and read a lot more and that helped me narrow what I wanted to do which was more broad, fun, action-type scripts. I think in college you have a tendency to go with the crowd, and the crowd is often about the smaller, more “important” ideas, and while I love going to see those types of movie, it’s not the type of writer I am. So it was just a matter of figuring out what I wanted to do and then taking the steps to be that type of writer.

Scott: Was that strictly about what your voice was or did commercial considerations enter into your thinking?

Daniel: I think when you graduate, especially from a four-year program about screenwriting, your only commercial consideration is “I’m awesome at writing, I can’t wait for them to pay me”. Which of course isn’t the case. I mean at the time, there were two major success stories that had come out of the program. One was Josh Schwartz, who setup a pilot at MTV while he was in school then setup The O.C. not long after, and Jamie Vanderbilt, who sold a script called Independence, Missouri two days before he graduated. I think everyone who graduated assumed they would find success like those two guys. But at that point of being a writer, I hadn’t quite figured out what was and wasn’t commercial. I had no idea how the business actually worked.

After school a lot of my friends got jobs at video stores or whatever to just wrote and tried to break into the business that way. I went the opposite and got an internship in the Universal Studios Story Department then worked for Kevin Misher, who was President of Production at the time. I think part of finding my voice was working for a studio and having access to scripts written by professionals so I could see how everything worked. I saw what was selling and what wasn’t. And it wasn’t just the ideas, it was the nuts and bolts. You pick things up from professional writers. Scott Frank starts a lot of his action description using the word “And –“ to convey movement. Steve Zaillian uses a lot of “-ing” verbs to do the same thing. Or Tony Gilroy writes in very short staccato sentences, with lots of dashes, and as you read more scripts that work, you pick up on what will work for you. And I definitely had periods where I wrote exactly like those guys almost to a fault, but that allowed me to find my own thing, which is just as much apart of finding your voice as anything else. It’s “how do I get this story in my head on paper in a way that will make my reader have a visceral reaction to it?”

The other thing I think helped me develop my voice after college was being apart of the actual machine in Hollywood. I was one of those assistants who would read five or six scripts in a weekend. I saw which scripts got passed along, I saw how executives and agents talked about a script, I saw what went into selling a script to a studio. That was all very important in my evolution as a professional screenwriter.

Scott: You’ve just given a testimony to two of the most important aspects to learning the craft. One: Read scripts. It’s probably the single most important thing an aspiring writer can do, apart from writing and, obviously, watching movies, particularly recent scripts that sell, to understand the sensibilities of writers, their style, voice and all the rest. Second thing: Understand the buyer’s mentality, how they think, because you don’t write in a vacuum, you write in a context of what they’re buying now, what their business sensibilities are.

Daniel: Yeah. I always find people in Hollywood, struggling writers, and they say, “Oh, the game is rigged” or “the machine is broken, they only make the same thing over and over.” That’s like complaining the sky is blue. If you just want to write for yourself and don’t care about finding financial success, you can. You don’t have to read other material, you don’t have to care about what’s selling. You can just write and do whatever you want. But to try and find success and make it a career, it’s impossible to not know the game you’re playing. It’s like trying to be an electrical engineer and never taking a physics class.

It’s the same with reading scripts. It’s not just new material — you can learn a lot from reading scripts of produced movies. You can see what’s different in the script from the finished film. You can see why things work. Most importantly, you can start to think critically about how these different stories are told.

Scott: Let’s jump into some of your projects. You were working as an assistant in the story department four or five years. How did 12 Rounds come about?

Daniel: After college I had written a script called Copies. It was sort of a Minority Report-esque futuristic thriller about human cloning. I was young and working and making pretty decent money, so it took three or four years for me to really get it rewritten and working as a script. And of course, just as I did, the movie The Island came out which was pretty much exactly like my script and that movie didn’t do very well so my script was dead and that sucked.

The script did go around town though, and from that I went on a bunch of general meetings. Through those meetings I met a guy named Josh McLaughlin who worked at the Mark Gordon Company. Josh loved Copies and we hit it off on a personal level so we just decided to come up with a new idea and go from there. It was during those meetings that the idea for 12 Rounds was born.

But it was far from an instant success. We tried to sell it as a pitch, but that didn’t work mostly because I was the worst pitcher in the world. Then I wrote it as a spec and it wasn’t very good and it didn’t sell either. The script actually got to the point where it was pretty much dead. I think we tried to sell it in February, nothing happened with it, it was sitting on the shelf. I had moved on. By this time I had quit Universal to be a “full time writer” or at least give it a shot and I had run out of money. I had to move in with my girlfriend, I started tutoring high school kids for the SAT. I drove a delivery van.

But Josh was a great producer. He kept bringing it up in meetings, trying to find different ways to do it, and finally he did. He took a meeting with the professional wrestler John Cena and John said the WWE was committed to making a movie with him at the end of the year but they had a script they didn’t like. Josh said “read 12 Rounds”. John did, he got it to Vince McMahon, Vince loved the script and in two days we had a text from Vince that said “Let’s make the movie”. It was surreal on every level. By the end of the week we had a deal. They bought the script in May, I did a bunch rewrites on it, and we went into production the following March.

Scott: Your typical overnight success story.

Daniel: Yeah, right? It’s amazing. You work hard. You try to do everything “by the book” without success and then it’s literally one phone call and I go from sitting on my couch eating Cheetos to being on set in New Orleans with the producer of Saving Private Ryan and Speed and the director of Cliffhanger while a trolley car plows through trucks on Canal Street. It was an amazing movie experience.

Scott: You followed that up with the spec script “Agent Ox” in March of 2011 that sold to Columbia. That’s described as a human spy on an alien planet who’s trying to stop an invasion of the Earth. How did you come up with that idea?

Daniel: Sheer desperation. As great as the 12 Rounds experience was — it got me into the guild, it got me health insurance — this town for a young screenwriter is about “what can you do for me now?” I wasn’t at the point where studios were knocking down my door begging me to work for them. I’m still not. The movie came out, it didn’t do very well, so even though my name was out there I still had to bring a new idea to the table.

And for a few years I tried to recreate the same thing that happened with 12 Rounds. I wrote two or three action-thrillers much in the Taken vein that just weren’t me. The scripts were fine scripts, but nobody cared. I got a lot of “this is great” reads and that was it. I think the success I had getting the move made put me on a path where I tried to take the easy road and I thought I would hit the lottery again and it just didn’t happen.

It’s a lesson that was valuable to learn though. I wasn’t writing to my voice. I was writing to what I thought Hollywood wanted. And Hollywood, she’s a fickle mistress. So Agent Ox was my response to that. It was my return back to what the script Copies was that I had written all those years before. A big, fun, genre movie. It was still marketable, it was still trying to give Hollywood something that would hopefully sell, but it was my version of that, my voice, and not some watered-down other thing.

That decision really defined who I became as a writer. It had taken four years of college and maybe eight years after and I had a movie made and I still didn’t quite know until I started writing Ox. And that original idea of the script, it was so simple. I made a document called “High Concept Story Ideas” and just brain dumped a bunch of stuff down for two or three days, and the very last idea in this document were the six words “Human Spy on an Alien Planet” and I knew that was it.

I always joke in meetings now that those were the six words that changed my career and how I think about writing screenplays, but it’s the absolute truth. I started writing three weeks before my son was born, I finished it during his midnight feedings and then I sold it ten days before my WGA health insurance ran out. The first sale is always special, but it’s the second one where you really start to think you can do this as a career.

Scott: That six word thing. You’re really talking about drilling down the high concept so they can see it. Like what’s the simplest thing you can convey, and it’s really important because the people on the other end are so busy, you really want to have that concise description, yes?

Daniel: For sure. I know that people don’t like that concept. Like they think that it lessens an idea or it lessens what you do as a screenwriter, but again, this is the game we’re playing. If you want to write at a studio level, you must be able to communicate big ideas in simple terms. That’s how specs climb the food chain. If an assistant reads your script and loves it, that six-word idea will make it that much easier for the assistant to sell it to his or her boss, and then for that producer to sell it to the studio and that studio to sell it to marketing and hopefully, marketing to sell it in a three minute trailer to the entire world to get people to come see your movie.

Even if you’re trying to write a more independently-minded movie — what are the six words that make your independent movie different from every other independent movie? I don’t want to diminish the actual craft of telling your story and creating memorable characters and dialogue and conflict and emotion, but I also think younger writers don’t necessarily think of the bigger picture as well.

Scott: That’s a perfect segue to talk about “Bermuda Triangle” which sold as a spec script to Warner Bros. in just April of this year. They’re keeping the plot under wraps, but basically what’s been made public is the studio’s ambition to use the Bermuda Triangle mythology and turn it into an action franchise. With Hollywood’s obsession with brands and pre‑awareness, certainly the Bermuda Triangle qualifies on both fronts because everybody’s probably familiar with the name and the mysteries associated with it. Did the pre‑awareness factor play much of a role in your decision to pursue this as a spec script?

Daniel: Absolutely, 100 percent yes. The idea was out in the ether, and as you say, there was definite pre-awareness. But it was a nut that hadn’t quite been cracked yet. For whatever reason, I tend to be drawn to those types of ideas. I like figuring out the puzzle. I spent most of last year writing on the project Crime of the Century that I sold as a pitch to Universal with the director Dan Trachtenberg. It’s a very complex script and in the process of getting notes from the studio I knew I was going to have a little bit of time around the holidays where I wanted to write something else to just give my mind something else to process for a few weeks.

I had taken a lot of meetings over the course of the last couple of years and the Bermuda Triangle thing was always out there. I would bring it up to producers or producers would bring it up to me and it definitely had that commercial appeal of an idea that would sell, which in and of itself wasn’t enough for me to engage with it. For me it was that the paths it seemed everyone was going down never quite lead anywhere. People would always say to me “The Bermuda Triangle is related to Atlantis” or “The Bermuda Triangle is related to aliens” and I never really thought either of those explanations worked or were as interesting as they could be.

So I started thinking about what could fulfill the promise of the idea, I came up with a few key pieces, and then I went from there. But to your original question, I knew the idea was out there and I knew it was marketable to some extent, but it was really the take I came up with that got me excited about sitting down and pounding out 110 pages on it.

Scott: It seems to me one of the biggest challenges in this type of script where you have this huge canvas, the Bermuda Triangle basically running amok, how do you humanize it, balance the big story with the little story?

Daniel: Well, it’s always about the characters. No matter what the concept is, no matter what spectacle you put out there, nobody cares if there’s not an empathetic way into the story and you only get that with the characters you tell the story through.

Every big story idea has to be followed up with “why is this concept important to someone.” It’s the writer’s job to find that someone and then figure out how and why that person relates to the audience and then go about building your story around that. For me, especially on this project, it related back to the plot and the action set-pieces that I knew would happen at the end of the movie. I knew what I wanted to have there, and then I thought to myself, “Who would be the one person in the world who this action would mean the most to?” So in this case it was related to the stakes and action of the movie. Once I had the character of our hero, I started to fill in other parts of the story much the same way.

Scott: One theme that creates empathy and also ties together some of the subplots is regret. Multiple characters carry a significant remorse about something in their past. Is that accurate, and if so why did you decide to explore that emotional territory?

Daniel: I think part of your voice as a writer relates not just to the stories you tell, but also the character choices you make either consciously or subconsciously.

For me, I love making my main characters the sort of reluctant hero. Or maybe it’s the unlikely hero. I don’t know why, it’s just something inside of me that’s drawn to that. For Bermuda Triangle, I focused very early on to the idea that this semi-horrific global disaster would be a chance for a few of our main characters to gain redemption. And to gain redemption, you have to start with some sort of regret. So it became a theme of how I wanted to relate to this particular group of people.

On a more general note, I think regret or self-doubt is just incredibly empathetic. Even the most confident person in the world has some things about himself that he’s unsure about. It’s a universal truth and as they say, those make the best stories.

Scott: So you write this script, it goes out, and Warner Brothers buys it. Where were you when you found out that they stepped up to the plate and acquired the script?

Daniel: I was cleaning my house. Seriously, it’s the most nerve‑wrecking and exhilarating thing in the entire world. I love writing specs, but it’s terrifying. When you’re writing it, you think you’re making this huge mistake. Then you give it to your agent and your manager and they have a notes and then one day it’s, “Okay, we’re going to try and sell this thing now.”

So it goes out early in the week. The producers, hopefully they like it, they’re taking it into studios. But none of them actually call you. You get very little feedback as the town reads your script. And then it goes into the studio, and then the junior studio executive reads it and loves it, and then holy crap, your script is literally sitting on the desk of one guy who can say yes or no and either ruin your year or make it.

Like I said, nerve-wrecking. And it never gets easier. But then you get the call, the script sells, you’re totally euphoric and then you hang up the phone and your kid is crying and you need to make dinner and it’s “all right, I get to be a professional screenwriter for another year.” And that’s just about the best thing in the world cause who wants a real job? I love it.

Scott: How about some craft questions. How do you come up with story ideas?

Daniel: Who knows? It’s a lot of surfing the Internet, reading news articles, looking at old movies. For me, I like to marry ideas that might not have a lot in common. For Agent Ox, I love spy thrillers, so it was taking that but putting it on an alien planet. For Bermuda, it was the concept of the triangle but marrying it with a disaster movie.

I definitely think that it’s something you can train yourself to do. It’s about going to movies or reading scripts and seeing how ideas work. Once you learn to think critically about other scripts, you can start to see why the writer did this or that and that will eventually get you to think the same way about your ideas.

For me, I usually find an idea somewhere out there in the ether and then I just jot it down or start a new document for it on my computer. Then I just let it sit for awhile, and if I find myself coming back to it and thinking about it more I know it might have a chance.

Scott: How important do you think the story concept is to the overall strength and commercial viability of a spec script?

Daniel: It’s pretty darn important. I know when I was younger, I would be in writers groups or just talking to other struggling writers and there was always this feeling that “writing trumps all.” Meaning as long as the script was written well it would find a home. But I don’t think that’s necessarily the case in today’s marketplace, or if it ever really was the case at all, we just didn’t know any better.

Just take a look at scripts that are on the Black List that never get picked up. They’re exceptionally well written and publicized, but it doesn’t always equal success as a spec script. Now obviously the flip side to that — and this was the case for me in that the 12 Rounds opportunity came directly from a script that didn’t sell — is you take meetings, you meet the town, you can find rewrite gigs or land other jobs.

But my thinking is, if you’re going to take the time to write a spec, aim high. You want it to sell. And if it’s going to sell, the concept is key. It has to be a movie. To me that’s the path of least resistance to making screenwriting your career, by giving the buyers scripts they have to buy.

Scott: How much time do you spend in prep writing, and which of the aspects of prep do you tend to devote the most time to?

Dan: Every script I write, I start with a treatment. I open up a document and I just brain dump the idea. What’s the concept, who are my characters, what are some set pieces and plot. I just get everything I can about the idea down on paper.

Then I spend some time writing out the beginning and the end of the movie. I’m not usually as concerned about the second act. I want to make sure I have a sound first act, that I know where my characters start and how the action starts. Then I want to make sure I have a very strong end of the first act, that there’s an active decision that starts the second act and drives the rest of the script.

Then I focus on the end. This tends to be broader strokes, but how is the action going to dovetail, where are my characters going to end up, what’s the climax of the story. Once I have that written out — usually anywhere from eight to fifteen pages — I’ll start writing actual script pages. The second act I leave a little bit to self-discovery. I probably know a few things that have to happen, but as long as I know where my story and characters start and I know where they end, I’m confident that I can find the middle as I go.

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

Daniel: It’s a process. For me, dialogue is the most revised part of a script, and I think for a first draft, what you want is to be as minimalistic as possible. So I approach dialogue on a “need to know” basis. Then in a second draft it’s rewriting and trimming and adding jokes where you need them and just figuring out exactly how your characters would react to situations now that you’ve gotten a whole draft to know them.

I think everyone goes through an Aaron Sorkin or Quentin Tarantino phase where they try to write these intricate dialogue passages but to me those guys are the exception and not the rule. Brevity is almost always better, especially when you’re a young writer, and bad dialogue kills, so a lot of time less is definitely more.

Scott: How about theme? How important is that to you? Do you hit it at the beginning of the process, during the process, at the end of the process?

Daniel: Through the entire process, really. But for me, theme is usually something I find as I write through the first draft. I probably have a general idea when I start, but theme becomes the unifying factor as I go. I always work better sort of discovering it rather than coming up with something early in the process or even before I start writing pages. That’s not to say it’s not there, but I don’t consciously make the decision “this is my theme.”

I think theme is directly related to voice. A lot of my themes are similar, because those are the stories I want to tell. And it’s not planned, it just is. Because of that I’ll sort of trust my theme to tag along with me until I’m done with the first draft, then the second draft is when I’ll go back in and add a few lines here or there to highlight some things that will help take the piece to the level I want it.

Scott: What do you think about when you’re writing a scene? Do you have specific goals in mind?

Daniel: “Start late and get out early,” right? That’s the old adage and you might think it’s hogwash but it’s one hundred percent true. I’m a big believer in making sure every scene has a purpose. So usually when I’m staring at the blank page it’s “what are we doing here and what’s the point?” Some scenes move along the plot, some scenes move along character, but good scenes do both. I try to write those scenes as much as possible.

I was talking to someone else the other day about this, but one of the best examples of screenplay scenes I’ve seen is, oddly enough, in the children’s book Goodnight Gorilla. I know that’s a strange example, but each page of that book is a picture of a scene, and what’s great about it is there’s very little dialogue. So you’re forced to connect the dots of what’s going on as the story moves forward. And that’s a lot like screenwriting. You want to construct your scenes in a way that moves the story forward but it’s not just telling, it’s showing and connecting. Goodnight Gorilla forces you to be an active participant in putting the story together.

The hardest scenes to write are exposition, and unfortunately when you write about the Bermuda Triangle going crazy or a human spy on an alien planet, there’s a lot of exposition. For those scenes I always look to find a way to get the exposition to come out of conflict or character or something else that’s just not “hey, can you tell me exactly what I need to know here?” Those scenes always take the longest and are the most frustrating to write. Ninety-nine out of a hundred times if a scene is flat it’s cause there’s no conflict or no purpose to the scene. Even one line of dialogue that hints at an underlying goal for your character can be enough to turn an entire scene around for the better.

Scott: Since you write action, and action‑adventure‑science fiction‑science projects, this is an important question: What keys do you have to write entertaining scene description?

Daniel: Again, brevity is key. You don’t want to bore your readers with details. I think you always start with more than you need, then each draft you make it tighter and tighter as you go.

What I try to do is paint a picture with as few brush strokes as possible. So instead of writing out an entire fight sequence between two guys, I’ll keep it very general except for two or three key moments that make the fight unique. Just something for the reader to grab on to. When I had to describe an entirely new world in Agent Ox, I was very conscious of choosing two or three specific details that stood out, and even then I made sure to describe enough early on so people had an idea of the world, then let them fill in the rest of the details as we went later on.

Scott: What is your actual writing process?

Daniel: I write alone. I’m not a coffee shop writer. When I was younger I would write at night a lot, but now that I have a family I’m more of a nine-to-fiver. I’m usually at my computer by nine o’clock, do an hour or two of emails and other things, then start in writing from about ten to two. Then I break for lunch, maybe do a little swimming, then back at it from about three to seven before I have to put my kids to bed. When I’m really on a roll, or I’m on a deadline, I’ll add a late night writing session to that as well. I’m not one of these guys who can lock in for a few hours, do an awesome amount of work, then just check out. I tend to live my scripts when I’m in them, for better or worse.

Scott: What is the single best excuse not to write?

Daniel: It’s hard? Yeah, I don’t know. You don’t need an excuse not to write. It’s pretty easy to watch TV or watch movies and convince yourself your furthering career. Or you know, you take your kid to Disneyland and you’re like “I’m a great dad today, who needs writing?”

The thing for me is — this is my job. I tell people I write everyday, and even if I don’t turn out actual pages, it’s the truth. There are very few days where I don’t have some sort of writing orientated goal I’m not focused on, whether it’s brainstorming ideas or reading scripts or catching up on movies and TV. When you’re a younger writer, you have to push yourself to make this your habit cause it’s so easy not to do it. Then once you get used to it, you can’t think of working any other way.

I guess truthfully the best excuse not to write for me is when the Chicago White Sox play games on the east coast that start at four or five here in Los Angeles. Those games kills me. Thankfully we suck this year.

Scott: What do you love most about writing?

Daniel: What don’t I love about it? It’s the most frustrating thing in the entire world. It’s exceptionally difficult, which all sound like things I don’t like about it. But to me, that’s what makes it so satisfying. I can’t think of doing anything else.

And what better way to spend an afternoon then by going to an alien planet or having the Bermuda Triangle swallow the northern hemisphere? It’s an amazing life and I’m blessed I can earn a living doing it.

Scott: Finally, what advice can you offer to aspiring screenwriters about learning the craft and breaking into Hollywood?

Daniel: There’s the stuff we covered. Reading screenplays, seeing movies, learning to think critically about why movies do and don’t work. Then there’s the nuts of bolts of the actual writing. Learning how to convey your ideas in the most dynamic way possible, figuring out and trusting your voice, seeing how stories are told concisely.

Then there’s the business side of things. You’ve got to know what’s selling, what movies are getting made, which ideas are out there. I know not everyone will subscribe to this, but I think it can be a real asset in furthering your career, so if the opportunity is out there, I strongly urge you take it and learn about the business.

And then it’s just about the work. Being a writer is like being a company. You need to turn out product. You need to come up with ideas. You need to write specs. You need to prove to people you can write. And spec scripts are great because it’s one of the few ways a writer can actually have the upper-hand in a relationship with a producer or studio. It’s your script, and if they want to buy it hopefully, you have the power.

For those that have had some success but are still struggling to break through, I would say don’t chase open writing assignments. Don’t focus on pitches. Just write ideas that people want to buy. And if it doesn’t sell, write some more. Learn to rewrite. All these things will help put you in position to find success.

It might seem like a lot, but this is an all-in kind of endeavor. You need to do the work to really get to that point where you can ask “Do you want to say goodbye to your old career and say hello to your new one?”

You can read my follow-up 2022 interview with Daniel here.

For more Go Into The Story interviews with screenwriters, filmmakers, TV producers, and industry insiders, go here.

For dozens of my interviews with Black List writers, go here.