Friday, December 18, 2015

The Hollywood Reporter Writer's Roundtable

The Hollywood Reporter recently sat down with Amy Schumer, Aaron Sorkin, Tom McCarthy, Nick Hornby, Meg LeFauve, and Emma Donoghue for a Writer Roundtable. Here are some of the highlights:

What was your biggest mistake and how did you recover from it?
LEFAUVE Just a small question to start with.
HORNBY I started trying to write scripts before I wrote books. And I didn't know what I was doing, who I was writing for, and there's a lot of time I won't get back. If I'd known what I know now, I would have saved myself quite a lot of work.

Have you revisited those scripts?
HORNBY Oh, God, no! I don't even know if they exist. They weren't written on a computer. They were written on a typewriter.
SCHUMER What's that? (Laughter.)
SORKIN Just recently, with The Newsroom, the show's relationship with the critics ran hot and cold, and in addition, I really struggled writing it, except for the last season. It always felt like I had a pebble in my shoe, that there was something wrong with my swing. And there was a lot of noise about it. The way you get past it is you start the next thing. And if I can, I try to start the next thing before the last thing is over. So while we were shooting Steve Jobs, I was writing the next screenplay.

When you're not writing, do you all tweet?
SCHUMER I tweet sometimes once a day. I'm a Twitterer. I've gotten a lot of death threats.

Were the death threats real?
SCHUMER I'm here.
SORKIN The Internet in general I find troubling. The anonymity has made us all meaner and dumber. This thing that was supposed to bring us closer together, I see it doing the opposite.
SCHUMER The things that you're afraid they're going to say are so much worse than anything they actually say. But you've already put your nervous system through that fear. With Trainwreck coming out, I was like, "Everyone's going to say, 'She's not pretty enough to be in this movie.' " And then only one dude wrote that, and people really attacked him, and then he redacted that and wanted to date me. I've been waiting for this rainstorm of hate, and it's never really come.
DONOGHUE But as a research tool, the Internet is the best thing that ever happened to writers.
SCHUMER According to the Internet, I was in Newsies.
MCCARTHY You were great.
DONOGHUE You have to know how to use it. Like if you're looking up your warts, right? You don't just go for Warts Are Us dot-com.


Read the full roundtable at The Hollywood Reporter.

No comments:

Post a Comment