It's not easy coming up with all the beats, but what if someone else already has done it for you? I've written almost 20 feature-length screenplays on my own, and each one was hard. There are no easy scripts to write. But when you have a lot of them, the hardest one is always the next. You wonder if you're ever going to come up with another movie idea again. Trust me, I've been there. I'm there a few times a year. Writer's block is an absolute train wreck. But one thing I did recently that helped was give into the worry. I stopped writing. And I started watching a bunch of older movies. So I could steal them. I devoured everything on the Criterion Channel. I reached the annals of Amazon Prime, and even the odd classic on Netflix. I went deep into Tubi and even consulted my Blu-ray shelf. The result was an idea that felt like a pastiche of Coens, De Palma, and Jane Campion. I sat down, and suddenly I had the ability to write dozens of pages a day. It wasn't that I had given myself time to rest, which definitely helps. It was that I gave myself the freedom to steal what I needed to get ahead. Read More...
Published By: NoFilmSchool - Wednesday, 12 January, 2022