Draft Zero — Screenwriting Podcast & Deep Screenplay Analysis
Recent Episodes
DZ-125: Oscars One-shot - BLUE MOON
What craft tools make a low-budget, contained, period drama riveting?
Listen if you want to understand how narrative POV, screenplay format, and dialogue craft can elevate a contained biopic into an Oscar-nominated film
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BLUE MOON is a talky, period-drama that film about an obscure songer-writer in the 1940s. Yet, it attracted world-class talent AND Academy Award nominations, including for it’s script. Join Chas & Mel as they explore how narrative POV, interweaving relationships, hooky dialogue, and even the screenplay format itself make the script for BLUE MOON so great…
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What gives your sequences their intensity?
Chas and Stu are joined for the fourth time by the inestimable Stephen Cleary - this time to take a deep dive into sequences. A real deep dive. A 3+ hour deep dive…
→Listen to understand how dramatic questions shape audience engagement and pacing through sequences.
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How does setting up rules help you build a world?
In our most epic/longest episode yet, Chas and Stu tackle world building in films. Specifically, how the rules make something a world and not just a setting. Starting with world-centric genres like sci-fi and fantasy, we also cover horror, crime drama and - er - “other”. We discuss a variety of techniques for setting up the rules of the world, including cold opens, voiceover, title cards and outsider characters! We’ve limited ourselves to the opening 3-5 pages... mostly... because (so the theory goes) they’re the pages that teach the audience how to read/watch your story/film…
→Listen when your opening pages feel like exposition dumps (which is bad, okay?)
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How can you dramatise your theme on a scene level?
As part of their ongoing exploration of scene-work, Stu and Chas apply their earlier thinking on theme and character worldview to individual scenes. Can examining a scene from a thematic perspective impact the drama, conflict or stakes of the scene? How does your character’s conscious and subconscious world views dramatise the overall theme of the work? How can an individual scene reflect the larger themes of the overall story? Do any of these questions or approaches lead to writing better scenes…
→Listen to discover how a character's worldview becomes the engine of conflict inside a single scene.
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How does removing character and plot question force your audience to engage with theme?
Chas and Stu are joined, once again, by the inestimable Stephen Cleary. This episode is a spiritual sequel to our last episode with Stephen, the one on sequence structure. That episode explored how sequences could be broken into plot, character, and plot/character sequences…
→Listen if you want to make theme your primary driver (for a sequence)
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How can your characters' worldview dramatise your theme?
In this episode, Stu and Chas tackle one of the more esoteric topics in screenwriting (and writing in general): theme! To help us tackle this topic, we decided to look at television pilots, because we felt that television requires the theme to be more explicit. Our zig-zagging (and long) discussion covers thematic engines, music themes, thematic loglines, punishment vs reward, and - perhaps most of all - the worldview of characters…
→Listen if theme feels abstract - we talk how how to make it visible through what characters believe.
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How do you make unlikeable characters compelling to watch... in drama?
Stu and Chas revisit a topic from a year ago: how do screenwriters make unlikeable characters compelling? This time, we turn our focus to dramas and analyse how AMERICAN HISTORY X, YOUNG ADULT, NIGHTCRAWLER all make their asshole protagonists compelling to watch. We expand our original list of five writer’s tools to include a few more for your tool belt…
→Listen when you're writing a protagonist who does terrible things but you need the audience to keep watching.
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"It’s not a creative tool. And not to mistake, okay, it’s not a recipe. This is how you need to think about the story. It’s simply, once you have the story, look at how it falls into chapters and say, okay, what drives that chapter? Is it plot or character? Or is it a kind of blend?"
DZ-43: Driving Sequences - Character and Plot Intensity
