Star Trek Beyond: Find The Emotional Core Of Your Screenplay

*Please note this interview was from 2018.   Jake: This week, I am so excited to be doing something we’ve actually never done before on the podcast: we have two different writers, Doug Jung and Emily Dell. Emily tends to come at things from more of the independent film side, and Doug has been involved in some very famous blockbusters and big name TV shows like Star Trek Beyond and Big Love.   And what’s really cool is that both of these writers have transcended a lot of the genre conventions in their writing-- doing everything from really beautiful, personal, character-driven stories, to big budget action movies and sci-fi. I want to start by asking you both-- when you first broke into the industry, what do you think it was that led to your success? And in the face of the commercial and genre demands of so many different kinds of projects, how do you hold onto who you are and continue to grow your voice as an artist? EMILY: I want to say this, I am still finding my way in, I think this is a long term process and in fact maybe  that one of the biggest “aha!” moments for me being early mid-career but not quite mid yet. I feel like my writing has grown and expanded through the help of friends who are also mentors who have given me feedback and Doug has been one of those. And on the content side, always trying to write what I believe in and write what is connected to me, but also to see how that fits into an organic brand that maybe was part of my identity-- never having a difference between who I am and what I write is a clear part of the way that I look at my art. And I think that is what makes people connect both to it and then to me, and then makes it easy for people to be like, “hey here is this Emily girl and she writes grounded emotional genre because that is also what she loves in life.” So that is one thing that I found to be really helpful lately. But also, as I have been in LA for a while more than a couple of years and I have developed friendships and working relationships, I really tried to listen as much as I spoke, learn as much as I can, ask questions from the people whose work I admire and whose work I seek to emulate, and use that to improve. But also if they someday become comfortable even me and want to form an organic working relationship, then that is something I am obviously very open and welcome to. Doug:  I ended up in a very fortuitous way getting some work in television which you know literally like these sort of freelance things for weird shows, and that enabled me to quit my day job. At that time I also had a very lucky stretch where I managed to bank a little bit of money. But I was able to take this time and I wrote a script that ultimately was picked up, then optioned, and then eventually made. And I suddenly had, in a very lucky way, both a foot in the door in the TV world and a foot in the door in the feature world. And I have just sort of managed to stay in that position this whole time, which is great. But as much as I can say it was hard work and I applied myself, there is an element of luck. And for my case it took a long time, but I do believe that luck is a byproduct of other things that you are doing to put yourself in there. Jake: I feel the same way with my career, almost everything that ever happened to me that was good was luck, but I worked so damn hard to get to that lucky moment. And I think one of the places where I was luckiest was that it happened at a time where I had enough craft to actually back it up. Doug: There is this element that I always see with people in these kinds of panel discussions, or this meet-and-greet kind of thing that I have been to-- you know the most often asked question seems to be: How do I get an agent? How do I get somebody to read this thing? Totally valid, totally get it. But, nobody has the same origin story. Nobody has that thing where it was a particular path that you took. And you kind of have no control over that stuff. You write something, you put it out into the world. Someone is going to love it, someone isn't going to love it-- certainly you can have some direction in how it goes, where it goes, all that sort of stuff. So a lot times I get that question in like panels or film festivals or something and I say, “I don’t know…” I mean in the nicest possible way I say, “I am not really quite sure if you must know somebody, more importantly, what are you doing now?” Because, if you are just going to sit there and say, “I wrote this little nugget of gold, a diamond in the rough, someone just needs to recover it…” a lot of times it isn't like, “Hey, this is this great thing and we love it,” they go, “We like the potential this thing shows, what else are you working on?” Emily: Yeah, it comes along with you doing the work, and you having three or four things ready, or you having the one thing ready that when they do ask for it, and they read it, it is really, really good. Doug: That is exactly right. I think the other thing that you know there is this kind of cliché about writers being on a certain level of the totem pole, but another way that I always try to look at it is that we actually are in the most democratic position in Hollywood. We’re not directors, we’re not production designers. We aren't beholden. We start with nothing other than your time, your imagination, a blank page and you are off. So, you don’t need 50 other people to accomplish the creative thing you are trying to do. There aren’t many places out there, or not many positions other than being a screenwriter, where you can do a whole movie just by yourself. And I have found that as I have been lucky enough to have a career, and do these things, that, more and more, time becomes the greatest commodity. And how you spend that time. Because if you are lucky enough and you are good enough, at some point you can kind of say, “Well I can get work, but now how am I going to spend this time in the best way?” And one of the things that I always find really interesting about talking about mentors and mentoring relationships, there is this idea of “beginner’s mind”, this sort of Zen Buddhist idea that there’s nothing but possibilities, there is nothing but opportunities, and you aren't loaded down by experience, or you haven't developed all these bad habits. And you connect very easily to this part of you that is so wide open. You have access to all these parts of you that I think you can kind of lose a little bit as you start to get a little bit further on in your career. You fall into the conventional world and you start taking on those other voices in your head constantly. And a lot of times, it becomes about beating those voices back and getting back to your authentic thing. Jake: One of my really great mentors was a guy name Joe Blaustein, and he actually—he wasn’t a writer he was a painter—and I used to study painting with him in Los Angeles when I lived out there. And Joe used to say, “Don’t paint on canvas, paint on paper. If you paint on canvas, you are going to start thinking you are making art and you will forget what it is to really be an artist.” He said, “You want to paint on paper. Feel like you could throw it away.” And for me that was one of the most valuable lessons I ever learned as an artist, was this idea that rather than like trying to create the one product that is going to get me where I need to go, losing myself in like the joy and the play and the creativity of childhood. “Hey I want to make something, and I’ve got these characters that want to say something or want to do something,” and the practice of navigating back to that, even as you emerge into your professional career, is challenging, especially as you get an agent and you get projects. I am curious, how do you navigate yourself back to that place? Doug:  I have a hard time connecting with a project if I don’t find that thing in it that feels like it is a part of me. So, if a project is presented to me, or if I have an idea, really taking a lot of time to figure out, “What is appealing about this to me, and what is the thing that I want to say, or how do I connect with it?”   So, for example I recently adapted this graphic novel, a vertigo book called Scalped, which is a crime noir by this great writer named Jason Aaron and it is set on a contemporary Indian reservation. I really didn’t want to let it go, because I knew there was something really great in it and it took me a long time. So, I sort of came to this idea that it wasn’t that I had the direct experience, but what I saw in it was this idea that all of the people in the book are searching for some form of the American dream, like they are trying to get to that aspiration. To me that was an immigrant story, and I am Korean-American, my parents were immigrants. So, now I can say, “Well that is what I can always go back to.” I know that whatever the story and the plot becomes, underneath it all, in my mind I knew that what I am doing is a reverse immigrant story. Now I had a connection-- and when we got to the point of shooting the pilot, I could then talk to the Native American actors we had and say to them, “I am not trying to emulate something that I am not; this is my take on it.” And that is what enabled them to trust me. So, that was one example of finding yourself in some material that wasn’t originally yours, but it also maybe had a very on the surface disparate connection to how you had seen it on paper or whatever. Jake: You’ve done a lot of rewriting work, you’ve come onto a lot of projects where they didn’t originate with you.  I was thinking about your work on Star Trek Beyond where you really use that theme of unity versus independence. And I am curious when you are coming on to a project that already exists, where someone has already done a lot of work and maybe pieces are working and pieces a