2014 Screenwriters Roundtable (12 Part Series): Chris Borrelli, Brian Duffield, F.

2014 Screenwriters Roundtable

My conversation with Chris Borrelli, Brian Duffield, F. Scott Frazier, Chris McCoy, Justin Rhodes, and Greg Russo.

Between them, they have sold more than a dozen spec scripts and have multiple original screenplays on the Black List. Here is the 2014 conversation featuring Chris Borrelli, Brian Duffield, F. Scott Frazier, Chris McCoy, Justin Rhodes, and Greg Russo.

Here are links to all twelve installments of the interview:

Part 1: “Someone can be totally capable of writing a movie. At the same time they can still completely flub it in becoming a screenwriter. There are so many things going on.” — Chris Borrelli

Part 2: “Everything else I’ve set up, you have that euphoria of setting it up, and then you sit down and they say the one note that you aren’t even thinking someone’s going to say because it’s so bad, typically.” — Brian Duffield

Part 3: “It always seemed like I wasn’t good enough to write it yet. Every time I’d write it, I’d always have that shame of, ‘I know that something good is here, I just haven’t found it yet.’ I never showed it to a lot of people until early last year, when I was happy with where it was headed.” — F. Scott Frazier

Part 4: “I had a meeting with Keanu [Reeves], and he gave me some of the smartest notes I’d ever heard… Originally, it was conceived as something for a 18‑year‑old rookie soldier, and I was talking to a guy who was about to turn 50, what does that do to your conception of what the character is?” — Justin Rhodes

Part 5: “For me, the most helpful thing was that because I wrote the script, I knew those characters inside and out… I could tell my actors, ‘You are doing this because of this.’ I could explain it in a way that maybe if I was directing someone else’s thing, I wouldn’t be as intimately able to do.” — Chris McCoy

Part 6: “With television right now, people are willing to take risks that they weren’t willing to take before, and the networks are being leaned on a bit, by the expanse of cable, and all these other broadcast platforms, that are taking all kind of risks.” — Gregg Russo

Part 7: “I am a night owl. I stay up really late, and a lot of what I ended up doing is, I would have an early lunch and work on one project until about dinner, and then take a break. We eat early like five, because we have a toddler, and I would eat with the family, put them to bed, and be done with that, at about eight. I’d write the next thing from eight to two in the morning.” — Justin Rhodes

Part 8: “The advantage to what we do is that we are not actors. We don’t have to wait around for someone to hand us material that inspires something within us. We can sit down and write the kind of movie we want to see.” — Chris McCoy

Part 9: “I don’t think anybody really cares about that stuff. Look, you deliver on the big stuff, have your structure down and your characters defined, write the hell out of that story.” — Greg Russo

Part 10: “Many of those guys haven’t sold scripts. I actually ended up at a seminar… It was so calculating the way this guru spoke. He pretended to remember little things from his time in Hollywood. I looked up his credits on IMDB. It was that one credit he talked about.” — Chris Borrelli

Part 11: “At the end of the day, regardless of what movie you’re pitching, they’re handing you the keys to the car at that point. They want to be comfortable doing that, and so you need to be good in a room.” — F. Scott Frazier

Part 12: “I went through a really, really rough year, a couple of years ago. The only thing that got me through it was other writers… Writers reached out to me because they’d gone through similar stuff. It completely kept me living in Los Angeles and writing screenplays.” — Brian Duffield

Entire Roundtable Conversation

On Twitter:

Brian Duffield: @BrianDuffield

F. Scott Frazier: @ScreenWritten

Chris McCoy: @thatthere

Justin Rhodes: @twopointfour

Many thanks to Wendy Cohen for logistical help with the roundtable.

For other screenwriter roundtables:

2011

2012

2013

Thanks to all involved and the best of luck in your writing careers! We look forward to seeing the many movies you write hit theaters in the future.

For more Go Into The Story interviews, go here.