I like to know what the beginning and end of a story is before I start, but I don’t mind if the way we get from A to B develops differently from our initial idea as the characters come to life. I tend to write in longhand in notebooks during the week and type it up at weekends. Karl: I write when I can fit it around the day job. My role is more about the broad strokes of story themes and plotlines. Jack: The way we work tends to be that we come up with the storyline together, then Karl does the first draft and then we get together again and talk about revisions. We’ve known each other for more than 10 years now and we’ve got a few projects that have our names on them, ranging from short films to TV pilots to two completed feature scripts and a third on the way.Ĥ) What writing habits work for each of you? Do you write in short or long shifts, binge writing or scheduled sessions? Karl & Jack: Not sure when we first started collaborating. ![]() So I understand the value of the script and this piqued my interest in screenwriting and getting involved early so the film production becomes the icing on the cake.ģ) How long have you been writing together as a team? Is this your only co-authored work? I’ve also experienced a lot of bad scripts and no matter how much smoke and mirrors you create you can never make chicken salad out of chicken shit. ![]() I’ve been fortunate to work on classic films like the The Thin Red Line and that is a script that I’ve held onto and cherished. Jack: Also no formal training but a lot of hands on experience as a cinematographer and director transforming scripts into motion picture images. Instead of imposing unbreakable rules about storytelling arcs and when to save the moggy, it simply points out basic mistakes that inexperienced writers make so you can avoid them and allows you to develop your own voice. I think the single most useful piece of advice I got was from a screenwriter called Philip Shelby who told me to read How not to write a screenplay by Denny Flinn. I’ve read all the books and watched a lot of movies, the good, the bad and the ugly. Like Karl, I started writing in the advertising industry writing treatments and ideas as a TVC director.Ģ) What screenwriting training have you received? Jack: I’ve been writing film and TV scripts with Karl for about 10 years. I wrote my first attempt at a film script about 15 years ago (I’m still rewriting that one from time to time), but in the last couple of years I’ve been really trying to spend more time on my film and TV writing. Karl: Well, I’ve been an advertising copywriter for thirty years, so I guess you could say all my working life. We asked the boys to answer a few questions for us, their responses are below: Karl and Jack recently penned a gritty one hour teleplay entitled “Born to be Wild”, which won top prize in Filmmatic’s TV Pilot Awards. Karl Mather and Jack Wareham are two very talented Australian screenwriters (Karl (left) and Jack pictured above just prior to hoisting a pint with “Mr.
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