Interview (Video): Zal Batmanglij & Brit Marling

Writers. Director. Actor. The Sound of My Voice and The OA.

I started following the careers of Zal Batmanglij & Brit Marling back in 2011: Link, Link, Link. Together they have created some distinctive, intelligent, and compelling stories including the movies The Sound of My Voice and The East. Their most recent creation is the Netflix series ‘The OA’.

Here is a SAG-AFTRA Foundation interview from earlier this year with Zal and Brit in which they discuss their collaboration process and ‘The OA’.

In talking about how they got into writing, I thought Brit’s comments were interesting:

We realized no one is going to hand you the job you want or even let you intern for it. Especially if you’re a young woman and you come out to L.A. There are not many great parts written for women and there are a lot of really great actresses competing for them who are already really well known.

So it’s really up to you and on some level, it feels like there’s a bit of moral imperative to write great parts for women because the storytelling is so unbalanced.

We both just felt, ‘Wow, if we want to do these jobs, we want to be storytellers as an actor and director, we have to start where storytelling begins which is with writing.’

We read a lot of screenwriting books. I read The Silence of the Lambs like five hundred times. It’s a great screenplay. I read a lot of plays. And we wrote a lot of really bad things. That’s how it begins.

Zal made this interesting comparison:

It’s a lot like surfing. You can’t just get up on the board and ride the wave. It’s not going to happen. You’ve got to do it slowly and you’ve got to be willing to fall and make an ass-et out of yourself, and be willing to say, ‘Hey, it’s hard to start something.’ You’ve got to be willing to give it three years.

To which Brit chimed in: “Or seven.”

If you’re an actor or director and you feel you have the temperment to sit down and write a script, it’s a great idea to try your hand at learning the craft of screenwriting. Instead of waiting around for an ideal script to drop through your virtual transom, you can CREATE it yourself. If you’re smart with the story choices you make, you can then go MAKE it as a movie.

But as Zal and Brit note, it takes time. And commitment. And reading lots and lots of stories, especially screenplays.

For more SAT-AFTRA Foundation videos, go here.

For hundreds more video interviews hosted on GITS, go here.