“Fugler (Robert Carlyle) was a character that I really connected with from the beginning. I know it sounds a little strange that the Nazi was my way into this, but it really was that idea of, ‘How can we get inside his head and make sure that he’s a fully fleshed out person that way?’” says Josh Salzberg about trying to make his villain, a Nazi named Damien Fugler, a three-dimensional character.

Josh Salzberg wrote the screenplay for The Performance with co-writer/director Shira Piven. In this episode, Salzberg talks about the challenges of adapting a short story by playwright Arthur Miller that’s about a Jewish-American tap dancer (Jeremy Piven), who’s willing to compromise his own core values to find fame and fortune in Nazi Germany.

“The idea of all [the characters] is that they’re all performing on some level. They all have another life. And that’s true to show business, that we all have sides of ourselves that we’re not sure we want everybody to see or that it’s okay for everybody to see. And then in Berlin in the ‘30s, there’s all these different communities that were impacted – not just the Jews in Germany,” he says.

Salzberg also talks about his background as a film editor, how it helped him transition to screenwriting, and the challenges of writing morally compromised characters like his protagonist, Harold.

“I think embracing the mistakes that they make, embracing those flaws and leaning into that is important. Sometimes we can care about our characters to the point where we want them to be likable, which is a note we always get, but we’ve got to be okay with the mistakes – and the consequences for those mistakes. And that was a lesson that Shira and I kept learning as we were developing the script,” he says.

To hear more about Salzberg’s writing process, listen to the podcast.

Please note: this episode contains discussions regarding racism and anti-semitism.

“People think sequels are easier, and I’m like, ‘No, no, it’s much harder. It is much harder to write.’ They have never written sequels, those people, because you need to do everything as well as the first and yet better, and go to new places, follow all the world rules, but create new ones. I mean, it’s just so many balls in the air,” says Meg LeFauve, co-writer for Inside Out 2, along with Dave Holstein.

In this special live episode from the Writers Guild Foundation Library, Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein talk about tackling a whole new set of challenges as they wrote the sequel to the beloved movie Inside Out. They also discuss the 5-year Pixar development process that includes the concept of failing fast.

“They really want you pushing to things that are new and innovative, so they expect you to fail. They actually want you to fail but they want you to do that quickly, right? Because we only have five years, so it’s always like, hurry up, hurry up. You know, fail. Go again. Go again,” she says.

Holstein shared some very personal advice for writing coming of age stories, like the Inside Out movies: get micro-focused.

“Sometimes it’s better to zoom in than to zoom out. For me, it helps to zoom in on a detail and let the detail be a microcosm for the rest of it. I know that when we were writing this film, I was thinking about my anxiety at that age and where that came from. I had a speech impediment, I had a stutter, so I hated Spanish class because I had to read out loud, and my stutter always came out in front of people, which made me very, very anxious. And I feel like, for Riley, there’s a three-day hockey camp that could determine the rest of her life. That’s where I sort of sunk into and if I was writing a different story about me, I would have gone into those details. But for me, it was about finding something very specific and very small,” says Holstein.

To hear more about the writing process, listen to the podcast.

“The most subversive thing this show could do is make you cry… If you really boil down television, really cook it in the pan, it’s the character business. I’m in the character business. Movies are in the plot and spectacle business, for television, there’s a thing about laying in bed and watching someone in your bedroom or living room that you really care about, you’re inviting these people into your house. The more you care about them, the more your show will succeed. There’s no simple formula, but you could boil down every single TV show to if the characters work, that show is likely going to work. If the characters don’t work, no matter what that show is, no matter how much money you throw at it, that show is not going to work,” says Eric Kripke, creator and showrunner for The Boys on Prime Video.

In this special episode hosted by screenwriting career coach Lee Jessup live from the Writers Guild Foundation in Los Angeles, Kripke talks about the functions of a showrunner, the excellent training he got doing 15 seasons of the show Supernatural, and what it’s like when the real world mirrors the darker aspects of The Boys.

Kripke also shares his sage advice for writing dialogue.

“I was interviewing people about their life experiences – it was a romantic comedy so I was asking people about their love lives. I wanted to transcribe it, so I had about 20 hours of material that I’m just transcribing and that’s how I learned to write dialogue, just from doing that because you learn how people really speak. No one speaks in straight, declarative sentences. It’s this weaving thing where they’ll start and they’ll back away and throw in a new idea. When you start to pay attention to what real language looks like on a page, it’s very different than what you think it looks like. So, to know what it looked like and how to recreate it, was huge. I recommend everyone try that,” says Kripke.

To hear more, listen to the podcast.

You can also watch this episode here.

“If everything's being played on the surface, it's very hard to make that character come to life. You want hinterland, you want subtext. You want the things that are buried, the things that we don't know about them, the things that maybe they don't know about themselves. And always, the story is about this excavation of what's underneath the surface. One way or the other, that's kind of what story is. It's about bringing things to the surface,” says Conclave screenwriter Peter Straughan, about the importance of giving your characters secrets.

In this episode, we speak to Peter Straughan about his powerful film Conclave, starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow. Based on the book by Robert Harris, the movie follows five very different modern Catholic Cardinals as they go through the process of electing a new Pope. Straughan talks about why he loves a flawed hero, getting to tour the Vatican, what surprised him the most, and whether or not he thinks the real Pope will watch this movie.

Having also written the TV show Wolf Hall about Tudor England, Straughan also talks about the surprising connection between King Henry VIII and the modern Catholic Church.

“Both the world of the Tudors and the world of Conclave give us a way of looking at human behavior and the pursuit of power from a sort of angle that makes it particularly clear and fresh, without the clutter of the normal secular world of elections, that really anchors it in the human individual. So, Tudor England was maybe the last time where the sexual desires of one man was going to dominate the political landscape of an entire country. Maybe not the last time. Maybe this still happens in the world. But it becomes really pared down to basics, so you see very clearly what's going on. And I think it feels the same with Conclave, it's about the personalities and the morals of these few individuals,” says Straughan.

Just a warning, there are spoilers about the ending of Conclave in this episode, but we give you plenty of warning before they are discussed.

To hear more about Straughan’s writing process, listen to the podcast.

“There's no greater laugh than when you're at your most vulnerable. You're at a funeral, or you're in church and something's happening and there's great reprieve from the most human moments through humor. And even in those moments, something is funny or human and fumbling. And that scene itself [when Charles discovers Sazz’s ashes], when I was watching it, I really felt like this scene is encapsulating the whole experience of the best of this show for me when he is standing there and then watching him wipe her ashes off and he’s in deep pain over it, but caring so much. And then she pops in the doorway. I don't know, things like that just made me happy to have been able to do anything like that,” says John Hoffman, co-creator and showrunner for Only Murders in the Building, about balancing the humor and the grief in the show.

In this episode, we go deep into Season 4 of Only Murders in the Building with co-creator, showrunner and writer/director John Hoffman. He talks about writing from theme, shares details about that rip-roaring fight scene between Meryl Streep and Melissa McCarthy, and exploring visual motifs this season.

“The twins and the reflections made me think of so many of my favorite films and the way cinema is used to show reflections and to do parallels and the Bergman-esque stuff. And I mean, granted, none of that might relate to what you're watching on this show. But playing off that theme felt really good. We are a show that's about three isolated, very lonely people in New York City and finding connection and so I think that recognition of we're more alike than we're apart also plays a huge part in the telling of the stories of Season 4. I like organizing them that way,” he says.

Hoffman also shares his advice for writing great scenes: “Know what a scene is and know that a scene wants to move in a certain way, and flip in a certain way. It might not take you in the direction you thought it was going to, but sometimes it will give you something of great comfort. Check yourself over and over again… is it honest? And check yourself on the truth of a character's motivation. Would a human being do that, ever? And if not, what could compel them to do it? There are all those things that are just very basic to me,” he says.

To learn more about Hoffman’s writing process, listen to the podcast.

Please note: this episode contains mention of suicide.

“In most genre fiction where heroes and villains clash, the hero is intrinsically reactive. The villain starts making trouble and that’s the beginning of the story. If the villain had never showed up, the hero would have lived a pleasant and unremarkable life and had a lovely time. And nothing novel-worthy would have popped up. But the villain comes along and does something terrible and that makes heroic action necessary. So if that’s the function of the hero in the story, to be called to heroic action, then the first conflict that’s readily available to you is reluctance or a sense of being unworthy… and then after that, the hero will be called to take on a new shape and often that will be in response to the shape of the danger, in response to the shape of the wickedness a foot,” says Oscar-nominated screenwriter, Jon Spaihts, about the classic hero-villain relationship in Dune: Part One and Dune: Part Two, based on the books by Frank Herbert.

In this episode, Jon Spaihts talks about the importance of hand-to-hand combat in mythic storytelling, his favorite scene in Dune 2, and we do a deep dive into his most adored character, Lady Jessica, played by Rebecca Ferguson. We explore the nature of her mystical powers and why she’s so feared by the men in the story.

Spaihts also shares his advice about what it really means to get personal with your writing.

“When people say to make your story personal, they don’t really mean look at yourself. You are the least qualified person to say something meaningful about yourself. What people are really talking about is that you should focus on the things that obsess you. You can look at the things that are most plangent to your feelings, that are most itchy and sticky for your intellect, the things you can’t stop thinking about. You can focus on the experiences that have impacted you most profoundly. Those things – the things that push on you and pull on you – that is personal storytelling. You look not at yourself, you look at the things that have moved you, that have affected you, that have changed you, redirected your life and the things that preoccupy you. Those are your seeds of personal storytelling,” says Spaihts.

To hear more about writing Dune 1 and 2, listen to the podcast.

“As someone who’s been obsessed with vampires since I was a little kid, I don’t totally know [why we love vampire movies so much]. Obviously, sex and death are always interesting and in vampire stories, including the very earliest accounts of folk vampirism in Eastern Europe, that connection has always been there. Some of these early folkloric vampires didn’t drink blood but fornicated with their widows until they died. And then, being undead, rising from the grave, you know Dracula and Jesus have had the most movies made about them of any popular characters in Western cultures, so there must be something to that as well,” says Robert Eggers, writer/director of Nosferatu, starring Lily Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult and Bill Skarsgård.

In this episode, Eggers talks about the play-version of Nosferatu that he wrote and directed when he was in high school, writing the Ellen character (Depp) as a woman at war with herself, and making Orlok (Skarsgård) the villain without making him too arch or campy.

“[Orlok] has a sense of humor and he has a sense of poetry. He’s a well-learned man so that’s enjoyable. It’s fun to write dialogue for someone who had their heyday in the the 16th century and English was like their 17th language, that’s fun,” says Eggers.

We also asked Eggers about telling an old story but making it relevant to today. He says that while he doesn’t worry about making a film with a specific message, “I don’t live in a vacuum. So even if I’m not trying to write a film with a message, whatever is happening around me is coming out. Also, it’s interesting that the movie didn’t get made until when it did. The original Nosferatu came out a couple of years after the Spanish flu. This is coming out a couple of years after the pandemic. And I wrote all that stuff before the pandemic. In fact, they had face coverings originally, and I took them away because it felt too much on the nose. So, I think it’s all there for the taking,” he says.

To hear more about the power of vampires and Egger’s writing process, listen to the podcast.

“I would argue that the movies, the plays, the stories that endure and certainly that resonate in the most populist and global way are the ones where we’re not just observing a piece of storytelling, we’re participative in some way and it’s connective. How can any of us who are flawed humans connect with a flawless hero? The beauty of Wade [Deadpool] and Logan [Wolverine] is that really, they’re two anti-heroes. They do not abide by typical moral codes. They both have been scarred deeply. And I think one thing that’s really interesting about them is that the worst thing that’s ever happened to them is also the source of their superpowers. Which I think, by the way, is something worth thinking about in all our lives – that the things that we had to get over are also the source of our strength,” says writer/director of Deadpool & Wolverine Shawn Levy.

In this episode, we discuss the elements that Levy thinks make a great hero and also a powerful villain like Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin).

“There was something really juicy about [Cassandra’s] twinship with Charles Xavier, that this villain is a new villain who has never been in a movie, who has never been anywhere other than the pages of a Marvel comic book. But there is this connective tissue to deep beloved, extensive mythology with Professor X and Charles. So we did lean into her resentment, her envy of Charles. You know, I think maybe one of my favorite couplets of our writing in this movie is when Cassandra says to Wolverine, ‘He must have really loved you.’ And he says to Cassandra, ‘He would have loved you too. He would have torn a hole in the universe if he knew where you were.’ I get goosebumps saying it now!” says Levy.

We also break down that hilarious fight scene between Deadpool & Wolverine that takes place entirely inside a Honda Odyssey.

To hear more insights about the highest grossing R-rated comedy of all time, listen to the podcast.