“The most satisfying thing for me was to see the script disappear entirely into the film,” states “Nickel Boys” co-writer Joslyn Barnes about the process of penning screenplays. “I just felt like that was the most beautiful thing, to see the actors transform, make it live.” We talked to Barnes along with Justin Kuritzkes (“Challengers”) and Azazel Jacobs (“His Three Daughters”) for our “Meet the Experts” panel of film writers. Watch our roundtable discussion above. Click each name above to view that person’s individual chat.
Barnes continues, “To see all of the expertise that was brought to the film by everyone who participated in it and to know that there was a strong architecture inside it that would give everyone the freedom to do that for me was the most beautiful thing.” Film, of course, is a collaborative medium where numerous artists and craftspeople take the words on the page and transform them into sounds and images in a theater.
Kuritzkes agrees that “the collaboration is part of what sets writing screenplays apart from writing other kinds of stuff.” Before screenplays, he wrote novels, and “what’s exciting about that is that when you’re done, that’s it. That’s the complete work of art. You hand over this manuscript and maybe they put a cover on it, and that is part of the experience, but for the most part the book is the thing and a screenplay is always two things.”
Jacobs is gratified to develop and refine his craft. “I feel like I finally understand structure. That’s taken so long for me,” he says. “There’s a rhythm that now clicks, that makes sense to me when I’m writing. That took me many years to get to.” Then there are those surprising moments where you get to say something meaningful that previously went unspoken: “That thing that I thought was gone forever and was never going to happen suddenly can fit in right here, and I can express it in this way. And I love that when that happens.”
