Genre Smash! with Ash Miller and Zack Stentz
This evening I had the absolute pleasure of meeting the writers of Thor and X-Men First Class, two of my all time movies.
I only just made it to the event at Nerdmelt on Sunset Blvd and my God was I fangasming from the start. Both writers were incredibly funny, charming us by making digs at how they basically invented Coulsen but how awful SHIELD is and how Banshee is kind of a rubbish mutant.
Nerdgasm aside, they gave a lot of good advice and insights.
The highlights from questions people asked were as follows:
Q. How did you get your break?
A. Andromeda. They met each other debating on a Star Wars fansite and have written together since. With X Men, they illustrated how taking meetings today could help you in a years time; if people remember you, they’ll call upon your talent when they can.
Q. How do you deal with LE BIG BOYS giving you notes?
A. They said the take away message should be this: producers will give you solutions to problems in the script because they feel that they ought to. Oftentimes the problem identities will be valid but the solution will be rubbish. In these instances, remember that you are being paid to come up with the solution so politely remind them of such by coming up with better solutions to thief concerns.
Q. How do you write to a budget?
A. Learn everything about production so you can understand how that world views the writers world. For example, they know that certain scenes would require a stunt man on wire and that this wire would cost $18k to remove in post, so they write around it.
Q. If they wrote the first Thor, why didn’t they do the second?
A. They weren’t invited to because by then they cost too much!
Q. Where should aspiring writers start?
A. Apply to writers programs; Marvel has one, as does WB. Also get experience in Production to understand that side of the world.
Q. How do they write as a pair?
A. Outline together and then break the story down into pieces and work on them individually.
Q. Why do THEY make you rush things? Why did you only have 10 days to write X-Men: First Class?
A. Studios get strict deadlines for release dates depending on 100 things like May holidays etc. You could write an incredible script but if you miss releasing by a day the studio could automatically lose 100s of millions. Ash said it’s actually better to write something quickly than lose those millions which I was sad to hear from a craft POV.
The general sentiments I got from them is that it’s all about networking and working from the bottom.
