Screenwriting From Iowa

Following the recent Morgan Spurlock post about Being Platformagnostic, this weekend I came across this Q&A with filmmaker Kevin Smith: Q: When you’ve said in the past that you will retire after Clerks 3 what did you exactly mean? Kevin Smith: It’s not just me walking away. It’s just not me doing movies for movie theaters […]

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“You need to be very ‘platformagostic.’ You want to find an audience wherever that audience is. So think about the web, TV, and theaters. Open yourself to as many possibilities as you can imagine. Today you cannot be just a filmmaker; you have to be a marketer, accountant, publicist, writer, and businessman. You have to […]

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“You want to find an audience wherever that audience is. So think about the web, TV, and theaters. Open yourself to as many possibilities as you can imagine. Today you cannot be just a filmmaker; you have to be a marketer, accountant, publicist, writer, and businessman. You have to understand the economics of making a […]

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“I get to say the think that all writers must tell themselves to start writing—which is nobody has to see this thing. I can throw it away. I’m alone with it. No one has to know what an idiot I really am. And I can burn it. And if it don’t work, if it really […]

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“The most ordinary conversation in the south has a theological basis.” Harry Crews “There are fierce powers at work in the world boys. Good. Evil. Mud (Matthew McConaughey) Mud written by Jeff Nichols One of the reasons I’ve been blogging in and around the movie Mud for the past week is because Nichols has done what I think […]

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“Writing fiction or plays or poetry seems to me to be a very messy business. To be a writer requires an enormus tolerance for frustration, for anxiety, for self-doubt.” Harry Crews When writer/director Jeff Nichols mentioned in a recent interview that one of the books that influenced his writing of his film Mud was the […]

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“I can remember very vividly in high school getting my heart-broken and it was like a physical pain. I was physically nauseous. And anytime there is an emotion that is that strong, or that I can remember or feel that strongly in the present day, it’s worth hanging a movie around.” Writer/Director Jeff Nichols While […]

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“I just write character first. I put plot second.” Writer/Director Jeff Nichols (Mud) The reason I’ve spent all week writing about Jeff Nichols and/or his film Mud is not just because he is currently a screenwriter/filmmaker based outside of Los Angeles—but because I think Mud will end up with Oscar-nominations for Best Picture and best original […]

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“I feel like when you write, you have to have a personal core to a story if you have any hope of it translating to an audience. There are certain emotions you have throughout your life that are palpable, you can feel them; they hurt. Every film I’ve made, I can point to one of […]

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“[Jeff Nichols] was way beyond most students with narrative. Of all the students I’ve seen in 10 years, he’s probably the best with just taking a story from beginning to middle and end. He was raised right, as we say in the South.” Filmmaker and Instructor Gary Hawkins (now at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies) Storytelling Son of […]

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