I'll Breathe When I'm Dead

Or, your local working screenwriter tries to conceptualize the next phase of his career.

Sydney Sweeney as Penny Jo Poplin in National Anthem

I’ve locked picture on National Anthem. Meaning, the picture is now edited: scene by scene, shot by shot, transition by transition. With input from my producer, studio, and friends and colleagues, I’ve chosen the best takes, excised any unnecessary material, shaped the scenes, found the best pacing, and now the film pretty much is set in ink.

The next steps are to do the VFX, the sound effects, the ADR (new dialogue spoken off-screen and/or clarifying lines spoken on set that are unclear), get the music rights, and commission the original score, then mix it all together. Also, color timing. Months of work to do, but the movie is the movie now, from a storytelling point of view.

Now comes a pivot that it always takes me a minute to accomplish: transitioning from being in pure artist mode while working on some project — whether a script or TV show or feature — to suddenly thinking about the next phase of my career. Which means thinking as an entrepreneur of sorts, with my writing/directing/producing skills as my primary product.

It also means thinking a bit more holistically. The earliest that National Anthem will come out is sometime next year. It might change my career upon release. It might not. What do I do in the interim?

In my dream of dreams, in the next phase of my career, I would only write original material that I would then direct and/or showrun. That is, I would write in my voice, exploring my pet obsessions and themes, and I would control the execution of those scripts by either directing them (feature) or by directing and showrunning (TV).

Other things would be nice. I’d love to make a lot of money. I’d love acclaim and influence and awards. But those aren’t really the goal. They’re gravy. Maximizing my creative control from page to edit on projects that I believe in while telling stories only I can tell is the goal.

But I also have bills to pay and my childrens' educations to pay for. I make a good living right now, but I don't come from wealth. So both my wife and I need to keep working. We're like most people that way (if not most Hollywood types).

So more or less, these are the two masters I'm serving. A desire for originality and creative control. And a need to pay the bills. I feel like part of my creative responsibility is to create conditions by which I have as many paths available to try and serve both. Multiple paths are necessary because most things just simply don't get made.

This isn't meant to be revelatory. It's just me thinking out loud now that I'm coming out of an intensive year-long phase of making my first film and trying to figure out what’s next. Luckily, I do have a TV show already in development that I really love. It's tied with National Anthem as my wife's fave script of mine, and as she’s my toughest critic, I take that as a really good sign.

I can’t go into details, but this TV show is a rarity in that it kind of floated down seemingly effortlessly to me. A network executive with whom I’ve had very good past experiences with, and with whom I have a nice rapport and a shared sensibility, reached out to see if I’d be interested in checking out a piece of material they had optioned. I read it, loved it, and jumped on the phone with the producers and the potential star of the show, who was already attached. We hit it off and we agreed to give it a shot during the phone call.

It’s usually never that easy. But I won’t complain. So far, so great. Now that National Anthem’s edit is locked, this show in development is where most of my creative energy is going. While editing my film, I wrote this show’s pilot script — which was a total joy — and it has circulated around the network. Right now I’m figuring out the totality of the show and doing the necessary grunt work to try and get it made. Which means I'm working on a document outlining my vision for the show beyond the pilot.

But like probably any working non-famous screenwriter, I don’t ever have just one project percolating at a time. I can’t afford to have just one thing going. Or even two. Unless I’m in production or post-production, I usually have three or four things active.

So in addition to this TV show, I'm also about 65 pages into an original feature script called Street Legal that I also started writing while editing National Anthem and that I intend to be my second directing effort on the feature side. I plan on having it finished and polished by the time that National Anthem (hopefully) has a festival premiere.

My thought process: if my first movie lands well, that’d would be the perfect time to attract talent and potential buyers for my second one. If someone I want to work with loves National Anthem, I can immediately share Street Legal with them.

Next dream feature project percolating…

I also have about 50 pages written of a second original feature script — a small town hitman story called The Lives of the Saints — that I'd want to direct. This one I'm still playing around with in terms of total shape and may or may not be ready for me to devote my energies to completing. It may need to incubate for a bit longer. But if Street Legal and/or my TV show in development stall out, it’s nice to have another original project ready for me to jump into.

Like any working screenwriter, I also have other projects at different stages of life: some are completed scripts awaiting green light, or a second shot at a pilot order, while others are potential scripts for hire waiting to be set up so I can be paid to write them. All very normal.

But because I have a family and bills, I also have to be cognizant that both of my potential future directing projects outlined above are also spec scripts that I'm not getting paid to write, mostly because I want to be left free to control their creative vision.

This is where the entrepreneur brain kicks in. Now that I’ve locked picture on National Anthem, do I let my reps know that I'd be open to potential writer-for-hire gigs after telling them I'm not open to them for the last year or two? A year ago, that would be the obvious move, most likely. Take some meetings, pitch some ideas, and get someone to pay me to write a script before I start officially typing away. One complication, though.

After directing National Anthem, which has a really cool cast and which I think turned out great, I may have a potential window right now for becoming a full-on writer-director going forward. Which is my number one career goal, after all. A writer-for-hire job doesn't necessarily help me on that front — not at this key interval.

I don’t know how long this potential window will be open for, so I want to devote all of my creative energy and time to forcing my way to writer-director status. Six or twelve months from now, it might be a completely different situation. But right now, I want to double-down on potential paths to writer-director-ville.

Since I already have a TV show in development (rights controlled by others), and two potential directing features that I'm working on for free, the most likely thing I'm going to do next is work on a big, action-oriented original TV idea I've been nursing for awhile.

I think I can write the pilot for it fairly quickly, finishing it before National Anthem debuts and before the current TV show I have in development either goes to the next stage or doesn't. Luckily, this show idea features two juicy roles: one for a younger actress and one for an older actor. I would insist on directing it. Perhaps I could attract talent and take it to the market in the next year and straight up sell it? In an ideal world, in this scenario I would attend to my financial realities — getting paid — while also pursuing my creative ambitions.

One complication is that most places want to develop their own material, but my entire career — modest as it is — has been built on me writing weird long shot spec scripts for free on my own. And since this potential action TV show would be one among multiple possible paths to my next writer-director project, I'd feel comfortable taking that gamble again.

I was talking to a friend today and mentioned that I think writing the actual scripts is maybe like 30% of building a screenwriting career. The rest is just being relentless and unbreakable and creatively inventive in finding ways to tell the stories you want to tell while making a living doing so. So I thought I'd lift the lid a little on the thought process of how I make creative career decisions. Plus, I don’t think I have any new script principles to share.

I’ve talked before about how I think of spec scripts as bridges that you build to carry you to where you want your career to go next. In the first decade of my career, I’ve written spec scripts so far that have established me as a TV writer, as a features writer, as a showrunner, and now as a movie director. Which would make you think I could take a breath. But I don’t think it works like that. I think you have to keep creating potential bridges and possible paths until you run out of material and/or time.

Maybe, as a working screenwriter, you get to breathe when you’re dead?

A quick plug on this front: if you can find a copy of Steven Soderbergh’s Getting Away With It, it’s a much more clever and charming version of this substack entry. Interspersed with his interviews with Richard Lester (A Hard Day’s Night, Superman II, etc) are dozens and dozens of diary entries where he frets about unfinished scripts, difficulties in finding distribution for his recent films, frustrations with trying to figure out the shape of his career and what his next project should be, and so on.

I found it oddly reassuring to see a writer-director whom I’ve always just assumed has had an effortless go at a super-cool career actually worry incessantly about ever working again and to read about his little depressive episodes when a director he’s doing writer-for-hire revisions for totally dislikes his changes.