Go Into The Story Interview: Travis Braun

My interview with the 2024 Black List writer for his script One Night Only.

In the 20 years of the annual Black List, no writer has had the #1 script in consecutive years … until 2024. That writer is Travis Braun whose script One Night Only topped the 2024 Black List, his script Bad Boy did the same thing in 2023.

Given all that, I knew I had to interview Travis. We had a great conversation and I’m happy to share it with readers.

Here is the complete interview with Travis.

Scott Myers: Travis, you’ve got an interesting backstory. A journey from a little town called Ovalo, Texas, all the way to Hollywood and working in TV and film.

Travis Braun: Yeah, born in Texas. Middle of nowhere. My whole family’s in auto racing, so I spent a lot of time on the road, with a lot of down time. I was always writing poems and short stories to pass the time.

Then I got ahold of Harry Potter when it first came out. I was nine. I tore through it, fell in love with that world. I came into my parents’ room, and I was like, “I want to do this.” And they’re like, “Yeah. I think you can finish the book.” I was like, “No. No. I want to do this. I want to write like this.”

My parents were like, “Great. You want to be a novelist? You’re going to starve.”

So I went to journalism school at Franklin College in Indiana. I interned at USA Today, then ABC World News. I was doing the journalism path — but it just wasn’t scratching the itch. It didn’t have the magic that fiction had for me.

When I was in New York, I met some TV writers who encouraged me to write a spec of my favorite show, which was The Office at the time. I did, and it was the worst script I think anyone’s ever written. But I fell in love with the craft, and wanted to learn everything about it.

Scott: You didn’t go to film school. You write this first spec for The Office. How did you start learning the screenwriting craft?

Travis: Online, trying to find any scripts that I could, reading everything. I was very focused on TV at the time because that, to me, felt like there was more of direct route.

This was 2010. The Black List was still pretty new. So I started writing specs of the shows I was watching. It was a little bit more just trial and error. Finding any TV script that I could.

I ended up as a writer’s PA on “Criminal Minds” for CBS. That I tell people was like my MFA in screenwriting. It was my first chance to be around 10 to 12 professional writers doing this every single day and getting to see the work that they were creating and comparing it to the work that I was creating and seeing how much I had to learn.

That was where I started to realize exactly what it takes to write at a professional level.

Scott: You’ve had quite a bit of success in children’s programming. “Vampirina,” “Muppet Babies,” “Monsters at Work,” “Fast Layne,” “T.O.T.S.,” “Pupstruction.” Just show after show after show. How did you manage to segue into doing that type of programming?

Travis: Yeah, pretty big pivot from Criminal Minds. I got into the Nickelodeon Writing Program, which was my first real step into kids and family content. I found my voice worked really well in that space. I wrote a short and a TV movie for Nickelodeon. Then I moved over to Disney to write on Vampirina, and eventually created T.O.T.S. for them.

That was back in 2016. I’ve been with Disney ever since. It’s been an incredible place to create. I feel so lucky that I get to do the Disney shows and then also work on features.

Scott: You get to explore different types of stories than you would for a children’s audience.

Travis: Yeah. I just get super excited about the concept. It can be something for ages 4 to 6 or 46. It’s the only way I know how to work. I get fired up about the idea, and that’s the thing that wakes me up in the morning.

Scott: Three scripts on the Black List, three years in a row. 2022, “Dying For You” logline: “A low‑level worker on a spaceship run by a dark god must steal the most powerful weapon in the universe to save his workplace crush.” That’s set up with Lord & Miller to produce.

Travis: Correct. It was probably the script that everyone would tell you not to write. It’s expensive. There’s no IP behind it. It’s a big genre bending sci‑fi, romance, comedy. But I couldn’t help myself. I just wanted to write something for me. No one asked for it, no one gave me a deadline. It was a total passion project. Just going, look, the chips will fall where they fall. If, it never becomes a movie, the joy of that experience was the victory.

Scott: It’s also a spec, you’re writing it on your own, far different than being employed and in the writers’ rooms with all these TV series. What’s the mindset there? What are you thinking when you’re saying. “I’m going to write something on spec?”

Travis: It’s a great question. For me, it’s something I realized maybe five or six years ago that I needed to have that thing that was just for me. That no studio, no network, no producer, no actor, no one was telling me to write this. It’s just something that I’m doing out of the pure love of it. And I think that’s why a lot of those scripts on the Black List have such a strong POV. They are coming from the heart. They’re coming from a writer just sitting down to tell a story they’re passionate about.

Scott: Well, I think you like dogs. I mean, “Pupstruction” is a dog‑centered show. This idea for “Bad Boy,” a rescue dog suspects his loving new owner is a serial killer. By the way, they just announce some a casting on that recently or just…?

Travis: Yes. We’ve got Ke and Lili Reinhart attached.

Scott: OK. Well, congratulations on that.

Travis: Thank you.

Scott: What’s the inspiration for that? Rescue dog, serial killer?

Travis: I love dogs, and I try to sneak one into everything I write. With Bad Boy, we’ve seen a lot of horror movies from the human POV, but I loved the idea of making the dog the protagonist. Someone innocent. Someone who doesn’t fully understand what’s happening — or maybe understands more than we think.

The challenge was telling a whole movie through the dog’s POV — without voiceover, without having the dog talk. You’re trapped in his perspective. That was scary as hell to write, which is why I knew I had to write it. I used to spend a lot of time on ideas that felt like other movies. Now, I look for the ones that don’t.

Scott: That was number one on the Black List in 2023, Bad Boy. I broke into the business. I sold a movie called “K‑9.” It starred James Belushi with a new police partner, a police dog.

Travis: I love that. You’re a dog guy yourself.

Scott: Yeah. I also helped a friend develop a TV series on PBS called “Wishbone.”

Travis: Oh my god. Are you serious?

Scott: Yeah, I wrote a few episodes for it.

Travis: What? That’s crazy. I loved that show growing up. We had two Chocolate Labs, and we would seek out anything that had a dog in it.

Scott: Let’s get to the script which was named the #1 script on the 2024 Black List: “One Night Only.” It’s the first time someone had back-to-back number one scripts… Logline: “Two strangers scramble to find someone to sleep with on the one night of the year when premarital sex is legal.” I believe it was just announced yesterday where Will Gluck is attached now.

Travis: Will Gluck attached to direct, and we’ve set it up with Universal. We are casting and trying to figure out how to hopefully get it going.

Scott: Where did that story concept come from?

Travis: I got married recently, and I found myself thinking back to how chaotic and lonely dating was — especially in the app era. That’s where the idea came from: What if all that dating pressure was crammed into one night? Just twelve hours? How selfish would people be, and how lonely would that experience be, trying to navigate that night and find someone that you actually connect with?

The hook is high-concept and absurd, but I wanted to tell a real love story within it. A grounded, emotional romance inside a world that doesn’t seem built for that. The broad sex comedy version exists — but I wanted to flip that. I wanted to tell something tender and true.

Scott: And in a compressed time frame.

Travis: Yeah, I always look for a box to write inside. Something that narrows the decision-making. I don’t trust myself with endless options.

With Dying For You, everything happens on a spaceship. With Bad Boy, you’re trapped in a dog’s POV. With One Night Only, it’s twelve hours. I need that box before I start. It’s the only way I can work — I have to know the boundaries I’m playing inside of.

Scott: You establish the reality of it. People have these biosensors or whatever that you know, it’s red to green when they’re able to start the sex-for-a-night process. Then there’s just one little TV thing with, like, three sides of dialogue from some congressman, and that’s it. You just sort of write it like “Here we go.” I thought it was very efficient.

Travis: The tricky part was figuring out how much world-building to do. How much setup do you really need before we can just go? I didn’t want to get bogged down in explaining the rules. I wanted to get to the characters. But that’s also just me being bored by exposition. I wanted it to feel fast, propulsive. But also human. It’s a love story first. The high concept is just the wrapper.

Scott: Let’s talk about these two lead characters. It is a lovely story between these two. First, Owen who we meet when his significant other announces that basically she wants to go have sex that night with someone else essentially breaking his heart. Maybe if you could talk a little bit about this Owen character and what we need to know about him at the beginning of the story.

Travis: Yeah, I wanted to start with both characters having their plans completely implode. It’s a night everyone plans for all year. So to have it blow up on them right as the clock starts — that felt really fun and relatable.

Owen thinks he’s in love. Thinks he has it figured out. But his girlfriend tells him she wants to sleep with someone else tonight. He’s blindsided. It’s that universal feeling of thinking you’re secure — and then the rug gets pulled out. Now he’s scrambling, just trying to survive this night emotionally.

Scott: Then you’ve got Hannah, who’s got a terrible boss, reminds me of some stories I’ve heard about needy development executives in Hollywood. She’s a romantic. She has this plan with this guy Sebastian, a Latin lover and going to replicate this intense sexual event that they had a year ago, and then that doesn’t turn out very well. Could you maybe talk a bit about Hannah and what we need to know about her at the beginning?

Travis: Yeah. Hannah’s a romantic. She has this big, cinematic version of what love looks like — and this night is supposed to deliver that. She’s got the flowers, the hotel, the Latin lover. She wants the sweeping romance. And then it all falls apart.

She hates everything about this night. It’s transactional, it’s gross — it flies in the face of the fairytale she wants. She’s still looking for her prince charming, and Owen comes into her night, and he’s the furthest thing from her prince charming. So you have these two broken characters together for this night.

Scott: Each with a similar goal. They both want to get laid. In the script, Hannah says, “What’s happening is I’m changing into some hot girl shit, and I’m going to go find someone.” Then later on, Owen has determined, like you said, that he thinks if he can just go and have sex with some random person, that’ll help him get over what’s happened with his girlfriend.

They both have a similar goal making them both active protagonists, which is a plus per conventional screenwriting theory. And setting them up the way you do, these parallel storylines, the reader anticipates, they’re going to meet up. Then they do meet up, then separate, then meet up, then separate.

The narrative falls into the frustration comedy story type, trying to have sex, and you up the stakes. What does somebody need to have casual sex with a stranger? A condom. Now they’re racing around trying to find a condom. When did that idea hit you?

Travis: That was sort of early on. That was one of the first things that I knew would be a plot complication. It seemed like the perfect MacGuffin for this movie. Also, an excuse to get them together again and have them in scenes together and competing against each other in a way also when they first meet.

Their external goal, of course, is to get laid, but more so they do have the same internal goal, which is they’re both extremely lonely on this night and desperate for connection.

Scott: Yeah. You hammer that home, too, because there are these little moments, like they’re just walking along, and everybody everywhere seems to be getting it on …

Travis: Who hasn’t experienced that? When you’re single or when you’re fresh off a breakup or something, and everyone seems to be with someone else, and everyone seems to be in the happiest relationship ever.

Scott: Yeah. Because it’s like a special kind of loneliness. Everybody else has this kind of intimacy, like, really intense intimacy, and you’re not.

The entire script is great, lots of great humor, but my favorite sequence is a 9 or 10-page sequence where it’s just Owen and Hannah talking to each other. In that part your script around the 40-page mark. You know what I’m talking about?

Travis: The section where they’re on the train, and he’s basically making the case for why they should have sex?

Scott: Yes. Exactly.

Travis: I’m glad you like that. That is one of my favorite sections as well. Because it’s two characters clashing, and it’s really two ideas clashing. It’s her holding on to this idea of, like, what romance is and him poking holes in it and trying to shatter that and get her to accept that they’re the best that each of them can hope for on this night.

Scott: You make some interesting choices from a screenwriting standpoint. Like, you do some things where we see Hannah. She’s changed her clothes. Now you go back in time. We see how she got to that point. You do that, like, two or three times. Do you remember what your inspiration for that was? Or was it just an instinct as you were writing?

Travis: It was definitely a process thing. The hardest part to crack was when they should meet, and how much time they spend together. I actually wrote an entire version of the movie where they didn’t meet until the last scene.

They were in the same locations, crossing paths, but never interacting. It was supposed to be this fun, frustrating experience for the audience… and it was frustrating. Too frustrating.

So I went back and restructured. I still liked the idea of intersecting their stories in fun ways, so those time jumps became a way to do that. It gave me opportunities to build tension, surprise, momentum. And as a writer, I get bored easily, so I’m always trying to find devices that keep the storytelling dynamic and fun without pulling focus from the emotional core.

Scott: Another thing you did too, which allowed you to explore the characters’ inner lives were the fantasies. One in particular in the pizza parlor. What was your instinct there? Why include fantasies in there?

Travis: That was a tough decision. I almost cut those. I don’t usually use fantasy or dream sequences, and it can feel like a cheat if it’s not grounded in character.

But in this case, it felt earned because it was only from her POV. She’s the romantic. She’s the one chasing this cinematic version of love. So it felt honest — like a glimpse into how she’s trying to rewrite the story in real-time. It’s aspirational, delusional, maybe even a little sad. But it tells us something real about her.

If the fantasy didn’t come from an emotional truth, I wouldn’t have kept it in.

Scott: That’s a really interesting point. I hadn’t thought about it. But, I mean, she’s the romantic. She would be the one who would be more prone to fantasy.

Travis: Exactly. Yep.

Scott: There’s one of my favorite quotes on writing from Javier Grillo‑Marxuach, one of the writer-producers on the TV show “Lost.” He said, “A great script creates an irresistible narrative flow that propels a reader to an inevitable dramatic conclusion.”

The ending of your script hits that perfect point where it’s both surprising and inevitable. It’s like you walk away going, “OK. I didn’t quite expect that, but you know what? That’s exactly how it had to end.” Do you resonate with that take on “inevitable dramatic conclusions?”

Travis: I couldn’t resonate more. I think that’s the job that we sign up for. We spend our time trying to figure out what that is. I’ve never written anything that I’ve felt good about until I’ve figured that ending out.

Scott: How long did it take you to get to the ending?

Travis: Took me a 60‑page draft that I threw away and then five or six different versions rebreaking the story until I figured out that ending. Then when I had the ending, I could start again from page one and rewrote the whole thing.

Scott: Well, I hope the development execs at Universal and your director say,” That’s it. That’s how we’re ending it.” In other words, don’t fuck with the ending.

Travis: [laughs] I hope not either. I would love there to be a more methodical approach to getting to a satisfying ending but I haven’t found it yet.

At some point, I had a theory that, “Oh, I’ll just start there.” Until I have that ending, I won’t start writing. I tried that with a few scripts, and I just never started writing them because I didn’t ever figure out what that ending was.

Every script I’ve done, it’s taken me writing basically a first draft to figure out what the heck that ending is. Then, having figured out the ending, starting again and rewriting the whole thing. It’s not an efficient process.

Scott: But isn’t that mostly about you finding the characters, digging down deeper like what do they need, why are they on this particular journey?

Travis: Exactly. It’s the butt‑in‑seat time.

Scott: I got two more questions about the script, which in Hollywood, they say it’s a good read. I mean, it’s just 99 pages, 98 pages. It just rolls along.

Travis: I’m a big fan of short scripts, and I’m a big fan of short movies as well.

Scott: Here’s the other thing. Another member of the Black List team is Kate Hagen. She’s like one of the most knowledgeable people I know about movies. We had a conversation several years ago about, where’s sex in movies nowadays? It’s, like, disappeared.

She ended up writing an article for “Playboy” magazine about this very subject. Then recently, I saw where a survey of Gen Z audience saying they wanted less sex in screen. So now here’s your script coming along. Yes. It’s a love story, but there’s sex as a central story point.

Were you at all aware of this trend? Was this just a case where, this is the concept, I love it, and I don’t give a damn about what the cultural trends are.

Travis: I feel like as writers, it’s so dangerous to follow a trend in any direction either away from something or towards something. I feel like as soon as you start, the trend is reversed. I wasn’t aware of it. I will say from my standpoint, my personal taste is less is more.

From the beginning, I knew I didn’t want this movie to be a raunchy R‑rated sex comedy. I thought the fun and the uniqueness of the concept was that that movie’s going on in the background. You’re getting glimpses of it, but it’s never takes center stage. It’s always told through the eyes of our main characters.

Scott: You’ve made the Black List three times. Maybe talk about what that’s been for you. Has it been significant in terms of your career as a film writer?

Travis: It’s been extremely significant. For my career, but also for each project. It’s like another attachment to the script. There’s an endorsement to it that carries some weight.

Scott: I’ve got a few craft questions for you.

Travis: Yeah. Hit me with them.

Scott: Here’s the most obvious one for me. How do you come up with story concepts?

Travis: I wish I had a better answer. I keep a running list in my Notes app — just fragments. A line of dialogue. A scenario. Most of them are terrible. But every once in a while, something sticks. And it’s the ones that hang around that I get excited about.

Because sometimes you fall in love with an idea, and three days later you’re like, “What was I thinking?” I’ve learned my lesson to make sure that it stands the test of time. If it does, if it’s still exciting after a few months or even years, I know that it’s something worth exploring.

Scott: Is this an intentional thing? Like, are you sitting out every day, setting out every day to say, I’m going to come up with story ideas, or is this, like, one track of your brain is just tracking what’s going on around you culturally, and you’re aware of things and going to put it down? I mean, how do you do that?

Travis: It’s more passive. I’m not sitting down with a whiteboard trying to crack new ideas. I’m just living life, paying attention. Sometimes something weird I overhear will trigger a “what if?” and I’ll jot it down.

Right now, I’m lucky to have a backlog. I’ve got three or four projects that I’ve been thinking about for over a year, and I’m just itching to get to them. That’s my favorite place to be — knowing what you want to write next, and just counting down until you can start.

Scott: Wow. That’s all those riches just waiting to happen here. What about your breaking story process? Maybe I’m thinking that because you’ve already worked in TV and, of course, most TV, I think, or if not all, you don’t go to episode, you don’t go to page until you’ve broken the story. I mean, is that how you approach features, or how do you do that?

Travis: Yeah, I usually do a super rough beat sheet. Nothing polished. Just for me. It’s usually three or four pages, broken out by act, with bullet points for the big movements — setup, midpoint, climax. It’s messy. And I might do three of those. Or I might do twenty.

And at some point I either get excited enough or frustrated enough to start writing. But I always give myself the freedom to throw it away if it’s not working. I’ve done that a lot.

Scott: Is it fair to say that there’s an aspect of freedom that you may have in writing features on spec versus the process of working on TV?

Travis: Totally. There’s no pressure, no notes, no deadlines. It’s just… play.

Scott: You’re actually writing on spec while you’re doing the TV series. It’s not like you go on hiatus and then write, or both maybe.

Travis: Yeah, it’s a lot of early mornings and weekends. That’s my break. My brain needs that to decompress and focus on something other than what the show is.

Scott: So clearly characters are, like, of primary importance to you. You mentioned that you do some writing and the discovering them through that process.

Before you get into the actual page writing, are there any particular kinds of exercises or things that you do to get to know characters? Like, some people will do interviews and biographies and that sort of thing. Do you have any sort of process to that at all?

Travis: Not really. To be honest, I hardly do any writing outside of the script itself. I just feel like no one’s ever going to see that work, and so I’m going to explore the characters through the scenes. And a lot of times those scenes don’t make it into the final draft, but they at least have the chance to. It’s character development and plot work that could potentially also be in the final product.

Scott: What about theme? You start with theme or themes, or discover them in the writing process?

Travis: It’s so elusive. I will say it’s something I never think about until deep into the process. I will think about what the story is about. A logline can be really helpful. I try to, early on, try to have a logline in my head as a North Star and have some sort of sentence of what is the emotion behind it.

Scott: One last question for you: What’s the one piece of advice you could give a person trying to learn the craft?

Travis: I think the biggest shift for me — and the thing that started to change the trajectory of my writing — was when I stopped trying to write something that felt like another movie or another show… and started chasing things that didn’t.

And I think that’s natural — when you’re learning, you mimic. You reach for familiar shapes. But at a certain point, I realized: those movies already exist. I go to the movies to seek novelty. I want to see something new. And I want to write something new.

I think that’s our job. How do we find a way to tell something fresh? Or take a familiar story and twist it. Or tell it from a different POV. Audiences seem to be sniffing out when we dust off the same old playbook. It’s not working anymore. We need to find something that feels fresh and challenge ourselves to take those risks. I want that because those are the movies I love.

Scott: Your lips to God’s ears, Hollywood.

[laughter]

Travis is repped by UTA and Echo Lake Entertainment.

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