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“…When we think about traditional television series, there are certain confines of the narrative structure. We have to be able to sustain a half-hour or an hour every week. But one of the things that I think is really exciting about Web Series is, because Web Series are so short, you can kind of blow the roof off the house…you have the freedom to do it your way”

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The Big Sick is a hugely successful film adaptation of Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon’s true life story. But the structure of the film actually differs in many ways from the true life events that inspired it. In this Podcast, Award Winning Screenwriter Jacob Krueger discusses how to adapt a true life story, and how to navigate the pressure between truth and fiction to get the real story on the page.

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“…There’s no doubt that some of the most successful movies ever, from Dead Poets Society to Little Miss Sunshine, have more than one main character. And at the same time, there are genuine risks when we start telling a story from the point-of-view of more than one main character. In this podcast, Award Winning Screenwriter Jacob Krueger shows you how to write a script with more than one main character and how to avoid the pitfalls when building this kind of complicated screenplay structure…”

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“…For all its many structural problems, Atomic Blonde does succeed in its extraordinary fight sequences for the same reason that Iron Man succeeds: because the writer knows that guns are no fun.

If Iron Man is going to work, you’ve got to get him out of the all-powerful suit. And if Atomic Blonde is going to work, you’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of both the good guys and the bad guys. Because the guns are just too darn easy to use– too darn easy to kill with– if they’re used properly.

Exciting action sequences don’t come from having the all-powerful weapon– but from having the challenging weapon; having the knife, having the high heel, having the hand to hand combat,…

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Dunkirk is a particularly interesting script to look at as screenwriters because it breaks pretty much every rule that you’ve likely been told about screenwriting.

This is a war movie that (for the most part) isn’t about winning but about losing.
It’s a war movie in which planes don’t explode in spectacular fashion but rather disappear silently into the ocean. A movie in which fighter pilots are more concerned with running out of fuel than with bad-ass lines of dialogue.

It’s an action movie in which the “good guys” don’t always win, and in which the bad guys can actually shoot.

Dunkirk is a movie that flies in the face of every traditional notion of star-power and how it’s supposed to be used in a big budget feature.

In…