2012 Santa Barbara Film Festival screenwriters roundtable

Longtime Hollywood film critic and writer Anne Thompson from IndieWire:

Per usual, this year’s batch of screenwriters delivered at the annual “It Starts with the Script” panel that I moderate at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

Both Writers Guild nominee Will Reiser (“50/50”) and Indie Spirit nominee Mike Mills (“Beginners”) were digging into their own lives for their often painful and self-revelatory fictionalized stories.

“When someone’s gone, like a parent, you’re not in the present in a clean way,” said Mills, who also directed his film, which stars Oscar front runner Christopher Plummer in a role based on his own father. “You’re constantly getting hijacked back to your memory and unfinished conversations, a really unfinished emotional place. Time is more emotional than chronological.” Beat. “That sounded good!”

“The original title for “50/50” was “How I Learned Nothing from Cancer,’” Reiser revealed. “People have this great notion that when you survive cancer, you reach nirvana and there’s clarity. I came out of it feeling like my life had been wrecked, and I didn’t really feel like anything changed.” It was the second draft that “really forced me to say all the things I didn’t know how to say when I was sick,” he went on. “Whereas the first draft was really just me vomiting up all this raw emotion, the second draft was me understanding what the experience was like.”

Here are some video clips:

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