At The Santa Fe International Film Festival, Variety’s Screenwriters To Watch Reveal How They Use Personal Inspiration to Tell Powerful Stories

Todd Gilchrist

23 October 2024 at 3:01 pm·7-min read

At The Santa Fe International Film Festival, Variety’s Screenwriters To Watch Reveal How They Use Personal Inspiration to Tell Powerful Stories

On Friday, Oct. 19, Variety partnered with the Santa Fe International Film festival to celebrate its 10 Screenwriters to Watch. All 10 recipients gathered at Santa Fe’s Lensic Performing Arts Center for a lively conversation about their path to screenwriting and the work that earned them their place on Variety’s annual list of the most promising up-and-coming scribes in the entertainment industry.

The panel began with a conversation about the films that first made them want to be screenwriters — and in some cases, exposed them to the idea that writing for film and television was a job they could pursue. Among their responses, “Fancy Dance” co-screenwriter Miciana Alise named John Huston’s “Annie” (“Carol Burnett just takes up the whole screen”), while her partner Erica Tremblay remembered “The Last Emperor” making a lasting impression; Noah Pink (“Eden”) said “Jurassic Park;” Tory Kamen (“Eleanor the Great”) and Nora Garrett (“After the Hunt”) agreed that “Juno,” and the work of Diablo Cody in particular, was pivotal; and Patrick Cunnane (“Eternity”) credited “Home Alone,” “Beauty and the Beast” and the Sinbad comedy “Houseguest.”

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Additionally, Dan Brier (“Sweethearts”) indicated that “Napoleon Dynamite” changed his life; Jocelyn Bioh (“Once on This Island”) picked “Coming to America” (“I’d never heard people speaking even remotely close to my parents ever on a TV screen or in a movie”); Chandler Baker (“Oh. What Fun”) picked “Gone Girl;” Khaila Amazan (“K-Pops”) said her outrage over a character’s death on “Law and Order” inspired her first-ever script; and Cameron Alexander (“Heart of the Beast”) said that the film that pushed him “to seriously consider writing as a career” was “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.”

Next, the screenwriters shared information about their backgrounds. Bioh said that as a child, her “end game” was becoming a Fly Girl on the sketch comedy series “In Living Color.” By age 12, that ambition evolved into working in musical theater. “I took a playwriting class,” she recalled. “My professor was like, ‘I think you have a really good year for dialogue and I think you should continue writing.’ And truly has she not said that, I would not be here.” Kamen, on the other hand, set out on her path after making an early epiphany about the joys of storytelling, albeit under slightly morbid circumstances. “I knew that I liked writing as a kid. I realized it at my grandpa’s funeral.”

“My mom was giving a eulogy and she got a lot of attention, and I thought, ‘I’ve got to do that,’” she remembered. “I was seven, and I went home and I wrote my parents’ eulogies … they still are very alive, by the way.”

After spending seven years working under then-President Barack Obama, Cunnane wrote a television pilot on a whim. A White House connection led to getting his work seen. “I got connected to someone who happened to be doing a tour of the White House, who said, ‘I always thought political writers could be screenwriters’,” he recalled. “I did the cringey thing and was like, ‘I have a pilot if you want to read it.’ But the guy called me … and now he’s actually the producer on ‘Eternity’.” Brier initially attempted to break into Hollywood via improv comedy, but after he pivoted to writing, he made his first inroad in the industry through a decidedly unexpected connection. “My dad’s a lawyer and his client had gone to jail, and the guy in jail was like, ‘I know a guy in Los Angeles’,” he revealed.

Tremblay traced her own idiosyncratic journey back to the moment — at 21 years old, she confessed — that she discovered women, and not just men, wrote and directed movies. “I was watching a movie called ‘High Art,’ and I saw ‘written [and] directed by Lisa Cholodenko’ at the end of the film, and I was like, whoa, I can do that as a job?” she recounted, highlighting the fact it would be an especially significant career shift from stripping, which was how she made money at the time. “I was like, if I can save up $2,000, I’m going to drive my Mitsubishi Mirage to L.A. And I drove out to L.A., and I worked as an assistant for a few years.”

Garrett’s own experiences working in the Hollywood trenches would later form the backbone of “After the Hunt.” “Being an assistant for almost a decade, I experienced a lot of really interesting power dynamics,” she said. “Living in those dynamics for as long as I did, and also what was happening with cancel culture and sort of this punitive way of looking at people’s behavior, a question that I found myself asking a lot was, do we deserve to be punished for the worst thing we’ve ever done for the rest of our lives?

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

Their colleagues further revealed the disparate sources from which they elicit inspiration. Alise, for example, said that she draws ideas from observing the people around her. “I just eavesdrop a lot,” she admitted. “I find if you’re sitting at a cafe and you hear the table behind you talking about, ‘…oh my God, and her boyfriend dumped her, and do you know what he said?’ You get a lot of character information that way. So I just have this log of experiences or things I’ve heard people say that’ll inspire me.”

Pink’s growing body of work frequently features stories about real-life people and events. As much material as a biography or historical document may provide, he said that he tries to discover more universal truths beneath the details of a real individual’s life. “I feel like the stories we’re living now, we’ve lived before,” Pink said. “We kind of forget that because of this cultural amnesia that we’re always living in a new moment, but if you just look back and read a bit, we just keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. And it’s fun to look back at very, very specific moments [from] a hundred years ago or 50 years ago, and people are people.”

For the script for “K-Pops,” Amazan collaborated with musician Anderson .Paak, who not only directed the film but starred in it opposite his son. Unsurprisingly, she said that the resulting experience was a family affair, and one that proved cathartic even for her. “I felt a responsibility to let him take the lead in saying, how can I make your story true,” she explained. “And I look back at that film, and now it’s a part of my personal history as well.” Rather than drawing upon someone else’s history, Baker said that she utilized her own for “Oh. What. Fun.” “I had this idea to write a short story about the matriarch of a family that goes missing after she gets ‘Home Alone’-ed by her family over Christmas, and it came at a time where I was in the process of becoming the mother in charge of the holidays for my own family.”

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.” Though the source material already reimagines a mythology deeply familiar to audiences, her approach to it echoes the distinctive perspectives that make the work of her counterparts in Variety’s 10 Screenwriters to Watch list so noteworthy: Bioh tapped into something deeply personal within herself to give its story a specific, resonant, and even therapeutic point of view.

“I spent so much of my life feeling the sadness and depression of being a dark-skinned woman and having a really long journey to owning my own beauty as a dark-skinned woman and what I felt like my place was in the world,” she recounted. “And so it feels really important to me to make it feel like it can speak to another young girl who’s like me, who’s maybe having that is in the middle of that journey — and maybe hopefully speed up the process.”