Interview: Chris McCoy (2007, 2009, 2011 Black List)

One of the best ways to learn the craft is read what professional screenwriters have to say about it. To that end for the next few weeks, I will be featuring interviews I have conducted with Black List screenwriters.

Today: Chris McCoy is pretty unique among screenwriters in that he has three scripts that have made the Black List: “Get Back” (2007), “Good Looking” (2009), and “Good Kids” (2011). That alone is enough to warrant significant curiosity about this young writer. The fact his screenplays are highly entertaining, distinctive, and filled with quirky characters and strong dialogue makes it even more so. And Good Kids is Chris’ first writing-directing gig, the movie starring Zoey Deutch, Nicholas Braun, Israel Broussard, Demián Bichir, and Ashley Judd.

Here are links to all five parts of my March 2012 interview with Chris:

Part 1: “Comedy is such a great delivery system for subversive ideas — as long as you make people laugh, you can say whatever you want.”

Part 2: “There’s a Kurt Vonnegut quote about this that I love: ‘Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.’ That is so great.”

Part 3: “In my work, I like introducing a big concept — i.e. a service that matches you to your soulmate with 100% accuracy, which changes the world overnight — and then getting that concept out of the way as quickly as possible in order to focus on the characters.”

Part 4: “When you’re working with a bunch of characters, it’s important to really have their arcs hammered out beforehand so you don’t lose them within the context of the scene. As long as you know where they’re all going eventually, you have a sense of what you need to do with them when they’re together.”

Part 5: “I think that good dialogue comes from character development — the better you know your character, the more specific the dialogue is going to feel.”

Chris is repped by the Gotham Group.