Ep358 - Andy Siara, Screenwriter ‘Lodge 49,’ ‘Palm Springs,’ & ‘The Resort’

“I needed to make a change in my life,” said Andy Siara about the origin of his screenwriting career. “I was in a band with my brother for a while and we decided to call it a day in 2012. He was making responsible adult decisions, so I thought I had to do that too, so I applied to the only school that didn’t require the GRE.” Two weeks later, Siara was enrolled at AFI. “To hedge my bets, I applied to the producing program and the screenwriting program,” he joked. “I stayed up all night writing my first screenplay and I got into both programs—so I decided to do screenwriting.” Andy refers to this as the non-romantic version of his path into screenwriting, but if you go back a little further, the real fascination came when Andy was a 7-year-old and his dad took him to see Jurassic Park. “Oh, okay, this is what I gotta do now,” he said. “I saw that like nine times that summer and developed a true love for movies and then TV in the early 2000s.” Today, Siara is best known for his work on Lodge 49, the movie Palm Springs, and the recent series The Resort. “In order to not hate myself the rest of my life, I knew I had to at least try it,” he said of screenwriting. “I had to back myself into a corner and try it.” Andy’s work is all very unique in nature, giving him a signature for the unusual quite early in his career. His most recent project, The Resort, has been described as “one foot on the banana peel and the other in the grave.” It all goes back to a short story he wrote around age 12, called “Stuck in the Past.” Subscribe for video interviews on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBUux6BkhC-dtP4Vj1GcgMA If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts? It only takes about 60-seconds and it really helps convince some of the hard-to-get guests to sit down and have a chat (simply scroll to the bottom on your iTunes Podcast app and click “Write Review"). Enjoy the show!