Reflections of the 2021 Black List New Zealand Feature Writer’s Lab Participants
Writers who participated in this year’s inaugural Black List New Zealand Feature Writer’s Lab reflect on their experience.
In 2013, the Black List began its educational outreach with what has become an annual feature writers lab. This year, they extended the program all the way to New Zealand. Over the course of several weeks in June, I, along with other Hollywood screenwriters, mentored six talented writers from New Zealand. Even though it was a remote Zoom experience, it was a big success.
The writers and their scripts:
Claire Barclay, Long Gone
Anna Nuria Francino, Bara
Shuchi Kothari, Navratri a.k.a Nine Nights
Taratoa Stappard, Marama
Finnius Teppett, I.O.U.
Yamin Tun, Hong Kong Story
Along the way, these writers met with producers, managers and agents, and studio and streaming executives. The main point of focus: Their scripts. That’s where I came in. Two workshops, one before mentor meetings, one after. The goal: Identify what works in their respective scripts, what needs work, and land on a path for each writer to improve their script in subsequent rewrites.
Here are the writers’ reflections on their Black List lab experience.
Claire Barclay
As a New Zealander in London, late night calls from home come with an ‘uh-oh’. Good news waits until morning. Not this time. My shrieks of delight at having been selected for the NZFC Black List New Zealand project woke the dog … the children … the neighbours.
Over the course of a month, I was to discover a Black List lab is the best film masterclass a writer could participate in. All the great bits about movies — character, plot, theme — with the other stuff taken out … you’re going to talk about filters? Really?
It started with Scott Myers — just call him Legend — leading us on a deep dive into our projects. This was the moment I realised my script was going to undergo forensic examination, from Scott … my co-writers and …
… my mentors Pete Bridges, David Rabinowitz and Victoria Strouse. Yup. I got notes. From writers I worship. Armed with their feedback, I’m itching to get on with the next draft, instead of glowering at my screenplay like a sworn enemy.
Though I wasn’t in the same hemisphere as my fellow writers Anna, Finn, Shuchi, Taratoa and Yamin — man I wanted to wake up and smell the coffee with you guys! — it was such a joy to be in a Zoom room of super talented New Zealanders. I’m hugely grateful to Annabelle Sheehan and Leanne Saunders from the NZFC, and Franklin Leonard and Megan Halpern from Black List, who cooked up the idea of a NZ Black List hybrid and made it fly. Amy Tarleton at the NZFC got us off to a cracking start and I had amazing support from Te Rautaki Māori, with Karen Waaka introducing me to my producer Desray Armstrong. Who says blind dates don’t lead to relationships?
The Black List team assembled panel sessions for us with a brilliant group of Hollywood insiders, undaunted by the challenge of working across four time zones, with a nineteen-hour difference between NZ and LA. Such is the ambition, reach — and ridiculous charm — of Franklin, Megan, Scott, Claire and Tayo, if Barry Manilow showed up to your birthday lunch, and crooned that famous song to you, having reworded it you write the films you’d shrug and say — after applying smelling salts to your mum — ‘oh that’s just another day at the office for the Black List peeps.’
When it comes to supporting and celebrating emerging writers — wherever they may be — the Black List are irrepressible.
Now for the rewrite …
Anna Nuria Francino
I’ve always been reluctant to open the door to strangers. I wrote a screenplay about a mute recluse. Bara, my protagonist, braves the outside world in order to unlock her voice and save herself from a life unlived. She does this with the help of a new community, peopled with generous souls, who root for her to succeed. The Black List NZ Project was, for me, a classic case of life imitating art. I’m so grateful to the NZFC for partnering with the The Black List to make this whole experience possible. Megan Halpern and her team created an environment in which even the most introverted of writers could feel at ease. The imposter syndrome struggle can be real but finding myself selected for this programme; participating in illuminating panel sessions; receiving generous, detailed, and expert feedback from three incredible mentors; learning directly from Scott Myers; and sharing the ride with my talented and hardworking peers… it’s all been quite the shot in the arm. My confidence is at an all time high. I am about to delve into a re-write heavily influenced by the past month and can already feel the pieces falling into place. I once heard someone say that the story remains the same, each new draft just finds a better way to tell it. My thanks to every single human whose vision or effort made this transformative chapter of my life possible. I can now wholeheartedly recommend opening the door to strangers.
Shuchi Kothari
Sometime in May 2021 I recieved a call from New Zealand Film Commission’s then CEO Annabelle Sheehan. I’m the co-founder of the advocacy organisation The Pan Asian Screen Collective, so when NZFC CEO calls my first thought is “oh no, yet another IP battle, or a case of represenation gone wrong.” I was gobsmacked to learn that my project Navratri aka Nine Nights — entirely set in India, with no New Zealand characters — was selected by Blacklist and NZFC for this stellar programme. I’d heard Leonard Franklin speak at a symposium in New Zealand a few years ago, and love many films written by Blacklist’s alumni so was ready for an exciting, intellectually rewarding month. What I didn’t expect is the sheer warmth and generosity with which this programme is delivered.
1. The luxury of immersion in my own project and having the best in the industry engage with my writing was GOLD. Thank you to my mentors David Rabinowitz, Sonu Patel and Pete Bridges for their questions, suggestions and affirmation. When my one-hour session with David turned into 2 and half hours, I started to believe in divine intervention. The calibre of mentoring is also a testatment to Leonard Franklin and Megan Halpern’s mana in Hollywood. So thank you both too, deeply.
2. You don’t the need Black List to realise the sheer font of knowledge that is Scott Myers. Anyone who writes would already have an ongoing relationship with his blog. Thank you, Scott for your insights, engagement and TIME.
3. Having the course spread over a month gave us the opportunity to process opinions, practice changes, and connect with peer writers. So thank you first cohort of Blacklist/NZ writers for your gravity and bouyancy.
“There is nothing to writing really; split open a vein and type.” Sure, but this programme gave us the best surgeons, high grade steel scalpels, and wonderful post-op care. As you can tell, I’m happily blacklisted.
Taratoa Stappard
Being selected to take part in the inaugural month-long Black List New Zealand Project was a huge honour.
My script, MĀRAMA, is a Māori revenge horror set in Victorian England. It’s also my first feature-length script. So the prospect of receiving 1–2–1, in-depth feedback from some of the finest screenwriters in the world was… daunting.
But of course my legend mentors, Phil Hay, Kiwi Smith and Charlie Wachtel were all brilliant. Easy and generous with their expertise and forensically detailed in their suggestions on how I might consider taking my story forward.
I would say that meeting my cohort of five fellow New Zealand screenwriters and having the opportunity to read and discuss each others scripts was another highlight of the program — alongside the wealth of bang-up-to-date information we were able to learn in sessions with the Hollywood industry elite from studios, indies, streamers, law firms, agencies and management companies.
My sincere thanks to the New Zealand Film Commission for choosing me and my story — and to Franklin, Megan, Scott and Claire at Black List for making my experience so special and rewarding.
Ngā mihi nui.
Finnius Teppett
Being a part of the Black List Lab was an honour, a privilege, and a pleasure. It was a joy to be lumped in with five brilliant writers for a few weeks of trans-Pacific zooms, where the quality of chat was so high it was almost possible to forget it was 7:00am in the middle of winter, until I lost view of my screen again through a cloud of my own condensed breath. The entire Black List team are miracle workers, troopers, and heroes, who I would hand-on-heart recommend for their region’s highest civic honours. The panels they set up for us took us through all the different bits of the big, scary Hollywood machine: the studio system, independent producers, the streaming market, and representation. Over a few weeks, my very sketchy picture of Hollywood was filled in and coloured. It was an extremely valuable lesson to meet the people behind the institutions and get an insight into their lives and brains — only to learn that they are, in fact, largely regular human people. Hollywood has never felt closer.
Money could not buy the kind of feedback I got on my script from real life actual Hollywood screenwriters, whose movies I had not only seen, but really liked. I was lucky enough to spend time with Phil Hay, Kiwi Smith, and Charlie Wachtel, and basically couldn’t believe my ears or eyes for a second of it. Having that kind of attention to my work was an immeasurable honour, and their feedback was pure and rare. I walked away fizzing from each meeting, rearing to get stuck into the next draft. The confidence the whole thing gave me is similar to what I imagine it’s like to walk around with a big diamond in your pocket. I’m grateful to all Black List crew for organising and running the lab, and for facilitating the community of writers around them, and to Scott for his measured calmness and wisdom, and for having an answer for everything. I look forward to attending next year’s lab.
Yamin Tun
I am in outback Australia as I have been for much of this work with Scott Myers and The Black List. I am in national parks of dreaming sites, trees, rocks, parrots, snakes, lizards, crocodiles, gums, grasses — eminences of all things that are, things that live, things that breathe, things that be — surround me. I am blessed to do the group dreaming of The Black List and Scott’s workshops in this environment of utter primordial significance.
The rock art I am surrounded by is the oldest art in the world. They describe perhaps the oldest extant stories in the world. They continue a lineage of teaching and enthralling of the oldest living culture in the world. They never lose significance. This is the ambition for my art. I do not think it is a lofty one, I think it the most humble one of all, because I do it as a mere tribes person, and perhaps one day I will become an elder.
I used to think writing was an affliction, but since my own dreaming has allowed me to be visited by my great great grandfather — a shaman of his own tribe — I realise it’s just a task I’ve been given for this lifetime. I do not have to take it — we live in modern times and my tribe no longer needs a shaman storyteller — my tribe barely exists — but somehow the urge for storytelling seems to have found me. I am still on the fence about my chances. I did not undergo an apprenticeship since childhood as tribes people once did. Or maybe, all that voracious reading of literature since I was a child is my apprenticeship, my own modern one I picked and chose and I have to piece together my own way to stories.
Writing seemed like an affliction to me also because it felt so lonesome. When you’re able to be part of a workshop like the one I’m part of through The Black List, it takes the edge off the lone and adds some to the party.
Through the workshops with Scott and The Black List mentors and panels, my day began pre-dawn. Sometimes I was regaled by cockatoos and lorikeets chorusing. Without fail a glorious sunrise marked the midpoint of a session, and soaring sunlight ended it. You’d think with such wondrous nature, nothing else could compare.
And yet, our own internal worlds are just as exciting to discuss and discover. Foraging in the exquisite realm of the soul is eternally gripping — feeling around in the space where things that will be have not yet formed. As Niels Bohr said, everything that is real is made of things that are unreal. This warm blackness, nu — nothing that is everything, is spaciousness that yields pearls once we start diving. We did not know what we would find. We did not know anything was there, but of course — it always was.
We just had to start looking.
Since 2013, I have participated as a mentor and workshop leader in every Black List feature writers lab. For those counting at home, that is 17 labs. Each has been uniquely engaging and inspiring. This New Zealand lab was particularly memorable because of the participants, a wonderful group, and their stories. In their own way, each writer’s story connected with the singular influence of indigenous people on the country’s present and past, as well as Southeast Asia. I found their stories fascinating and had many eye-opening cultural experiences in my conversations with the writers.
This tiny dot in the universe we call home, our Earth, is expansive geographically. And yet, the humanity we share ties us all together.
The stories these talented writers are creating drive home that point: Our commonalities as people are much greater than our differences.
In this fractured day and age, these are precisely the type of stories that need to be told on screens large and small.
I am thankful I had the opportunity to share a slice of life with these writers.
Hey, Anna, Claire, Finn, Shuchi, Taratoa, and Yamin: Best of luck with your current script projects and all of your future creative endeavors. As discussed, I encourage you to stay in touch as a writers group.
As always: Write because you love to write.
