Interview (Written): Susannah Grant

WGA Paul Selvin Award winner for her script “Confirmation”.

A Vulture interview with Susannah Grant whose movie credits include Pocahontas and Erin Brockovich, and the HBO movie Confirmation.

Your first writing credit was Disney’s Pocahontas in 1995. How has the business most changed for screenwriters since then?
On the most negative side, development budgets at studios have been slashed so the middle class of writers — like the middle class of our own country — has been gutted. It’s a lot harder for a straight-up screenwriter to make a living.

So the money that writers used to receive up front simply isn’t there anymore?
Yeah. Or, it’s “We’re going buy this script and keep it in our pipeline, but we don’t have a production or a release date for it.” Meanwhile, the profits of the entertainment industries have never been higher; companies are doing better than they ever have, but the downside is they’re making half as many movies as they used to. So that means half as much work for us. And I would say even less than half as much work because they’re also developing fewer films as well. On the upside, and there is a significant upside, changes in technology in the last 25 years have made the making of a movie really available to anyone. The democratization of the process is wonderful in that a creative voice like, say, Lena Dunham’s can emerge really quickly. She would have found her way eventually, but it was her ability to make her first movie inexpensively and powerfully — without interference from other people — that made people notice her enormous talent.

How did you land such a high-profile gig in Pocahontas so early in your career?
When I was still in film school, I’d won the Nicholl Fellowship, which I guess gets you a fair amount of attention. I met with folks at Disney Animation and they’d thrown out numerous scripts for the movie at that point, so they hired me, Carl Binder, and Philip LaZebnik. None of us had ever met. [Laughs] They said, “We have a release date and your first meeting is seven o’clock on Sunday morning.”

Are there films you’ve seen this year whose scripts made you wish you’d written them?
I can never imagine writing something that I didn’t. [Laughs] But the opening scene of Hell or High Water was amazing, and the rest of the movie really delivered, too. I thought La La Land was spectacular. And Moana. I loved how she was drawn to have such a strong body. It made me remember my first day on Pocahontas. She was already drawn, and had this crazy, hot body. A very Disney body. And immediately it became my mission — though I didn’t have kids at the time, I was close to two young daughters of a friend — that if kids were going to see this girl, I wanted to show that her body was first and foremost of great use to her; that she was in control of it. That’s why the movie opened with the scene where she’s diving and swimming. To see Moana depicted as a such a healthy girl, with strong, earthy legs, I think is a huge victory.

For the rest of the interview, go here.