At SFIFF, screenwriters talk about inspirations and profound ideas

On Friday, October 19th, diversity has teamed up with the Santa Fe International Film Festival to celebrate its 10 Screenwriters to Watch. All ten honorees met at the Lensic Performing Arts Center in Santa Fe for a lively conversation about their path to screenwriting and the work that earned them their place diversityis the annual list of the entertainment industry’s most promising young writers.

The panel discussion began with a conversation about the films that made them want to become screenwriters – and in some cases gave them the idea that writing for film and television was a job they could pursue. “Fancy Dance” co-screenwriter Miciana Alise cited John Huston’s “Annie” among her answers (“Carol Burnett just takes up the whole screen”), while her partner Erica Tremblay recalled that “The Last Emperor” left a lasting impression left behind; Noah Pink (“Eden”) said “Jurassic Park”; Tory Kamen (“Eleanor the Great”) and Nora Garrett (“After the Hunt”) agreed that “Juno,” and especially the work of Diablo Cody, was crucial; and Patrick Cunnane (“Eternity”) wrote “Home Alone,” “Beauty and the Beast” and the Sinbad comedy “Houseguest.”

Additionally, Dan Brier (“Sweethearts”) stated that “Napoleon Dynamite” changed his life; Jocelyn Bioh (“Once on This Island”) chose “Coming to America” (“I had never heard anyone on a television screen or in a movie speak remotely close to my parents”); Chandler Baker (“Oh. What Fun”) chose “Gone Girl”; Khaila Amazan (“K-Pops”) said her outrage over the death of a character on “Law and Order” inspired her first-ever screenplay; and Cameron Alexander (“Heart of the Beast”) said that “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” was the film that made him “seriously think about pursuing a career as a writer.”

Next, the screenwriters shared information about their backgrounds. Bioh said her “ultimate goal” as a child was to become a Fly Girl on the sketch comedy series “In Living Color.” At the age of 12, this ambition developed into working in musical theater. “I took a playwriting class,” she remembers. “My professor said, ‘I think you’ve had a really good year of dialogue and I think you should keep writing.’ And if she really hadn’t said that, I wouldn’t be here.” Kamen, on the other hand, set off after discovering the joys of storytelling early on, albeit under slightly morbid circumstances. “Even as a child I knew that I liked writing. I realized this at my grandfather’s funeral.”

“My mother gave a eulogy and got a lot of attention, and I thought, ‘I have to do this,'” she remembers. “I was seven when I went home and wrote the eulogies for my parents…they are still very much alive, by the way.”

After working for seven years under then-President Barack Obama, Cunnane wrote a television pilot on a whim. A connection to the White House led to his work becoming visible. “I came into contact with someone who was touring the White House and he said, ‘I always thought political writers could be screenwriters,'” he recalled. “I did the scary thing and said to myself, ‘I have a pilot if you want to read it.’ But the guy called me… and now he’s actually the producer of ‘Eternity.'” Brier initially tried to break into Hollywood through improv comedy, but after turning to writing, a decidedly unexpected connection gave him his first break in the industry. “My dad is a lawyer and his client was in prison, and the guy in prison said, ‘I know a guy in Los Angeles,'” he revealed.

Tremblay traced her own idiosyncratic journey back to the moment—at age 21, she confessed—when she discovered, wrote and directed films for women, not just men. “I was watching a movie called ‘High Art’ and saw ‘written’ [and] “Directed by Lisa Cholodenko” at the end of the film, and I thought, “Wow, I can do this for a living?” She shared, emphasizing the fact that this would be a particularly significant career change from stripping, which was how she made money at the time earned. “I thought, if I can save $2,000, I’ll drive my Mitsubishi Mirage to LA. And I went to LA and worked as an assistant for a few years.”

Garrett’s own experiences working in the trenches of Hollywood would later form the backbone of After the Hunt. “As an assistant for almost a decade, I experienced a lot of really interesting power dynamics,” she said. “Having lived in this dynamic for so long, and also what happened with cancel culture and this punitive way of looking at people’s behavior, I often asked myself the question: Do we deserve to be punished for this? the worst thing we’ve ever done for the rest of our lives?

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “And the main character in ‘After the Hunt’ was really a person who had to deal with the extenuating circumstances that really lead her to grapple with her identity in that way.”

Her colleagues also revealed the different sources from which they draw their inspiration. For example, Alise said that she gets ideas from observing the people around her. “I just listen a lot,” she admitted. “I find that when you’re sitting in a coffee shop and you hear the table behind you talking, ‘Oh my God, and her boyfriend left her, and you know what he said?’ This way you will get a lot of character information. So I just have this log of experiences or things that I’ve heard from people that will inspire me.”

Pink’s growing body of work often includes stories about real people and events. However much material a biography or historical document may provide, he said he tries to discover more universal truths beneath the details of a real person’s life. “I feel like we’ve experienced the stories we’re experiencing now,” Pink said. “Because of this cultural amnesia, we somehow forget that we are always living in a new moment, but if you just look back and read a little, we keep repeating the same mistakes. And it’s fun to look back on very, very specific moments [from] A hundred years ago or 50 years ago, and people are people.”

For the script for “K-Pops,” Amazan worked with musician Anderson .Paak, who not only directed the film but also starred in it alongside his son. Not surprisingly, she said the resulting experience was a family affair and cathartic even for her. “I felt compelled to let him take the lead and say how can I make your story come true,” she explained. “And when I look back on this film, it’s part of my personal story now, too.” Instead of drawing on someone else’s story, Baker said she chose her own for “Oh. What. Fun.” “I had the idea of ​​writing a short story about the matriarch of a family who goes missing after her family labels her Home Alone over Christmas, and it came up at a time when I was just I was in the process of becoming a mother. I am responsible for my own family’s holidays.”

Meanwhile, Bioh’s current project, Once On This Island, is an adaptation of a Caribbean-set one-act stage musical based on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. Although the source material already reimagines a mythology deeply familiar to audiences, her approach to it reflects the particular perspectives that define her colleagues’ work diversityThe list of 10 Screenwriters to Watch is so remarkable: Bioh tapped into something deeply personal within himself to give the story a specific, resonant, and even therapeutic perspective.

“I have spent so much of my life feeling the sadness and depression that comes with being a dark-skinned woman and have come a really long way to owning and feeling my own beauty as a dark-skinned woman “To have that is my place in the world,” she said. “So it’s really important to me to give the impression that it can speak to another young girl like me, who might be in the middle of the journey right now – and maybe speed up the process.”