“[My dad] really started to inhabit the characters, especially Ray, speaking as him during the writing process. That was when I realized this was going to be its own kind of special beast. Working with him taught me so much as a writer and storyteller; by the time we got to set, we had a shorthand for everything,” says director and co-writer Ronan Day-Lewis about writing the script Anemone with his father, Daniel Day-Lewis.

The film Anemone, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Sean Bean and Samantha Morton, paints a portrait of a family torn apart as they struggle to come to terms with their past and present after their harrowing experiences with the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. Isolation, shame, regret and the true meaning of brotherhood are themes explored in this hyper-focused family drama.

On today’s episode we sit down with Ronan Day-Lewis to find out more about his edgy first feature film, what it’s like writing a screenplay with Daniel Day-Lewis, and Ronan’s personal connection between his visual art and the imagery in the film.

Ronan also shares this advice to screenwriters tackling family and generational stories: “Whatever you can fall in love with, latch onto that: an image, a feeling, a character. Don’t put pressure on approaching a script a certain way. Stay open, be patient, and keep sight of what originally gave you the impulse to enter that world. Over time, the story will reveal itself to you.”

To learn more about this surprising and deeply emotional film, listen to the podcast.

“You have to love all your characters. Even if you're writing a bad guy. You, the writer, have to write them with love and empathy, and treat each character, give each character, a full life and a full arc in your story, even if their screen time is small. Essentially, if you were following that character, they also have a full story, a full life,” says actor/writer Brett Goldstein about how he approaches writing characters in film and TV.

On today’s episode, we chat with writer/director Will Bridges and writer/actor Brett Goldstein about their new film All of You, starring Imogen Poots and Brett Goldstein. The film centers on two best friends, Laura and Simon, who harbor an unspoken love for one another even after a futuristic test matches one of them up with their supposed soulmate. Though the set-up of the story sounds like science-fiction, the movie stays firmly grounded in reality and examines the human need for love and how we often sabotage that love.

If you’re a fan of the show Black Mirror, you likely know Will Bridges’ Emmy-winning episode “USS Callister,” the only Black Mirror episode to get a sequel. Brett Goldstein is perhaps most famous for playing Roy Kent on Ted Lasso, where he was a writer on the show before acting on it. He talks about his self-taped audition for the show and how taking that one risk changed everything for him.

Bridges and Goldstein talk about working together on an early project where they were forced to bunk in a “spider infested Airbnb,” and they also discuss the nuances of their writing in the film All of You, including why they left out all exposition. “We never wanted to be too specific about where Simon and Laura are in their relationship, but we want to draw you in quickly. We want you playing detective: Where are they now? What's going on with them? So we just trusted the audience would get it,” Bridges says.

They also discuss why you never see Laura or Simon separate from each other. “One of the rules of the film,” says Goldstein, “we only see them when they're together. We don't see their lives when they're apart, and that's kind of fun and interesting to me, that we are watching the film of them. We are not watching the film of what it’s like to be Simon, what's it like to be Laura, we only know what it's like to be them.”

To hear more, listen to the podcast.

On today’s episode, we speak with director Joe Wright whose new limited TV series Mussolini: Son of the Century, explores fascism through the early political career of Italy’s Prime Minister Mussolini in the 1920s. The show is incredible storytelling from beginning to end, mixing opera and techno rave music while drawing chilling comparisons to the current rise of fascism around the world.

“We all have a dark side. We all have the choice to be the best of ourselves, or the worst of ourselves and we usually land somewhere in the middle. Working on Mussolini allowed me the opportunity to look at my relationship with my own masculinity and it helped me understand the man I want to be,” says director Joe Wright about the way he personalized Benito Mussolini’s story to make it more accessible to a modern audience, adding, “I wanted the audience to be at times seduced by him, and then in a Brechtian sense, to kind of pull the rug from underneath their feet, and ask them to apply some critical distance.”

Wright also discusses what he learned about storytelling growing up with his parent’s puppet theater, his early films like Pride and Prejudice, and dealing with his own self-doubts as a filmmaker by making a movie about Winston Churchill called Darkest Hour.

“Darkest Hour is a movie about doubt. When I made that movie, I just made a movie called Pan, which the critics hated and lost a huge amount of money. I was sort of consumed afterwards by self-doubt. I was thinking, what have I got to say? I can't reach audiences anymore, I'm out of step. So, then the opportunity came along to do Darkest Hour, and I immediately perceived it as a story about a little man who was consumed by self-doubt, and who was doubted by others all around him. Yet he persevered and overcame enormous odds to lead a nation at their darkest hour. So, for me, that became a story worth telling,” says Wright.

To hear more, listen to the podcast.