Interview: Sam Regnier (2015 Nicholl Winner)
Sam Regnier wrote the original screenplay “Free Agent” which won a 2015 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting and has been set up at CBS Films. Recently Sam and I had an excellent phone conversation in which we covered a lot of territory, his background and how he got into writing, a deep analysis of “Free Agent”, and a discussion about the writing craft.
Here are links to the six installments of the entire interview:
Part 1: “We would go on these road trips to Colorado or Minnesota, and we would go for two hours, three hours, in the car, and nobody would say a word, because my dad’s driving, and the rest of us are reading. That’s the way we grew up.”
Part 2: “It can be really useful to brand yourself. I know in the back of my head that I have much broader ambitions or broader interests, and I am still committed to pursuing them, but we work in a business of creativity and ideas and things that are very ephemeral.”
Part 3: “I didn’t know it at the time, but I was writing about becoming a parent. This was within months of my daughter being born, and her befuddlement and lack of confidence in how handle this new interruption in her life was pretty much a carbon copy of what I was going through.”
Part 4: “I would say it’s 100 percent magic, and 1,000 percent hard work. Writing is such an iterative process, which is something that took me a long time to realize. You write a draft, realizing what pieces fit and which don’t. You do another draft, do the same thing.”
Part 5: “I was sitting, working on a data request at my job, a spreadsheet full of numbers. My phone rang, and he said ‘Hey, this is Greg from the Nicholl. Do you have a second?’ Immediately, my world went white.”
Part 6: “You can’t fake it. It doesn’t fake, not if you want to be able to do it again and again, to make a career. If you want to write great stories continually and stuff that other people can’t do, then it has to be personal.”
Sam is repped by Paradigm and Management SGC.
Twitter: @dadbasic.