There’s a reason they don’t make many movies about writers (this year’s Trumbo excepted). As Anne Thompson of Indiewire who flawlessly moderated the Screenwriters Panel at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival discovered when she asked her panel of Oscar award-winning scribes to recount their daily routine. The panelists described a grueling regimen of naps, long lunches, meandering research, procrastination, and waking up in a pool of sweat fearful of the next deadline. Somewhere in there the writing gets done.
Then there was Alex Garland (Ex-Machina) who likes to enter a “flow state.” When Garland reaches that point he writes in rapt concentration uninterrupted for weeks, even months. Without a sympathetic spouse he wouldn’t eat or drink either.
Each year the SBIFF brings top-class screenwriters to its Writers Panel at the Lobero Theater to talk about their craft. This year some of the most sought after in the business were there, including Pete Docter (Inside Out), Emma Donoghue (Room), Drew Goodman (Martian), Jonathan Herman (Straight Outta Compton), Charlie Kaufman (Anomalisa), Phyllis Nagy (Carol), Charles Randolph (The Big Short) and Josh Singer (Spotlight).