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Contained Thriller
Every episode covering Contained Thriller.
DZ-28: Containing Your Script
How do you keep contained movies engaging?
AI✦The episode uses contained thrillers as its anchor genre, examining how films locked to a single location maintain tension and engagement across scripts like LOCKE, EVERLY, and THE ONE I LOVE.✦
Listen if you're writing a contained thriller, drama, or any story limited to a single location
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Contained Thrillers* *seem to be a genre that never goes out of fashion. But being contained is not just limited to thrillers. It’s a way of telling stories on a lower budget, regardless of genre. So - while allegedly easier to make / get made - limiting a story to a single location also limits the tools that maintain an audience’s interest. Changing audience or character point of view, intercutting between locations or characters are all much harder (if not impossible) in contained films. So how do good contained films hook their audience and keep them… →
DZ-125: Oscars One-shot - BLUE MOON
What craft tools make a low-budget, contained, period drama riveting?
AI✦The film stays mostly in one bar location across a single night, and the episode examines how to keep a low-budget, talky, contained period drama riveting without physical action or location changes.✦
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… →
Films:
Blue Moon (2026)
DZ-42: One-Shot - Character Worldview & Macro POV in SPLT
What screenwriting lessons can be we learn from SPLIT?
AI✦The episode uses SPLIT’s contained spaces as a lens to understand how restriction of geography and information shapes character individuation and audience experience.✦
Listen when you're writing a twist and need to earn it through point-of-view rather than surprise alone.
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In our first (and perhaps last) one-shot, we take a close look at the M. Night Shyamalan’s SPLIT. Rather than having one topic with many examples, we use the one example to look at many topics. Well, okay, a few topics… →
Films:
Split (2017)