#171 | Keri Lee | Rat Bastards

Screenwriter and journalist Keri Lee on growing up between Utah and California, and her award-winning comedy scripts. Having spent her formative years pivoting between life with her Mormon single mom in Utah and her world-traveling, hard-partying dad in California, Keri Lee developed a passion for the wildly diverse people and worldviews that fuel her writing to this day. As a screenwriter, she writes provocative, character-driven genre comedies that explore everything from social alienation to ecological collapse. Her eco-horror-comedy feature RAT BASTARDS was Best Comedy Screenplay at Nashville Film Festival, and her MMA comedy CAGE LIFE was a Writers Lab finalist and a top-10 comedy finalist in Final Draft Big Break. As a newspaper and magazine journalist, Keri profiled everyone from award-winning authors and artists to an 11-year-old county fair livestock champion and an eerily accurate tarot reader named Taco. Today, she works as a freelance writer for nonprofit and film industry publications, including the P.G.A.'s flagship magazine ProducedBy. Keri has a master's degree in English from Claremont Graduate University and has taken film, writing, and acting courses at UCLA and UC Irvine. To learn more about Keri: https://keri-lee.com Chapters 0:00 Welcome Keri Lee 2:30 Podcast number one, alone in Istanbul 5:00 Swimming and an active childhood 7:32 Reality severed in lockdown 10:09 The first trip to China 12:45 More to China than the news 15:21 Humbled by language and travel 17:58 Tibet and Everest base camp 20:31 Learning to let go 23:04 Longer abroad than at home 25:39 On the cutting edge of the news 28:15 Growing up in suburban Toronto 30:45 An education in how the world works 33:20 The Sichuan earthquake 35:52 Looking over your shoulder 38:27 Freelancer versus bureau journalist 41:03 Corporate jobs and New York Times assignments 43:39 Learning photography from scratch 46:15 Making friends as an expat 48:53 Mentored by Howard French 51:24 Being in the right place 53:58 China's one-child policy 56:32 A terrifying motorcycle trip in India 59:03 The collapse of print 1:01:41 No reason to go back to Canada 1:04:17 Inspired to make TV 1:06:54 Building a journey from beats 1:09:26 Slogging through to the magic 1:11:58 The camel driver's wife sings 1:14:29 Too many stories about China 1:17:01 Covid testing chaos 1:19:34 Racing out of Ethiopia as borders closed 1:22:09 From 250 days filming to four walls 1:24:43 Still in the pivot 1:27:17 Sponsors and the dominoes falling 1:29:54 Making YouTube pay 1:32:24 Why Ryan loves podcasting 1:34:57 Back to photography 1:37:33 Only the right way back 1:40:07 The appetite for the real world 1:42:40 Bhutan's Snowman Trek 1:45:14 Photo books don't sell 1:47:48 Educating through travel 1:50:21 Sailing the fjords 1:52:54 Tanzania 1:55:32 Podcasting on the side 1:58:03 Remote work in the mountains The Ryan Pyle Podcast is ad-free by choice. If you enjoy these conversations, you can buy me a coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/ryanpyle Ryan's TV series are streaming around the world. Follow the Podcast X: https://x.com/RyanPylePodcast Facebook: https://facebook.com/ryanpylepodcast Follow Ryan Pyle YouTube: https://youtube.com/@ryanjpyle Instagram: https://instagram.com/ryanpyle X: https://x.com/RyanPyle Facebook: https://facebook.com/ryanpyle https://www.ryanpyle.com