Film & TV, The Creative Process: Acting, Directing, Writing, Cinematography, Producers, Composers, Costume Design, Talk Art & Creativity

What are the unseen challenges faced by diplomats, and what role do they play in maintaining global order? How do TV shows influence our understanding of real-world politics? How do women navigate power, and what does it take for them to lead in politics?

Debora Cahn is the Emmy-nominated showrunner and executive producer ofNetflix’s The Diplomat, a political thriller series starring Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell. She’s worked with television’s leading showrunners, including Shonda Rhymes, Terence Winter, Steven Levinson, and Howard Gordon. Her career began working on Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing which has led to projects such as the hit Showtime series Homeland, ABC’s long-running medical drama Grey’s Anatomy, and HBO’s Vinyl, which was co-created by Martin Scorsese. She’s the winner of two Writers Guild of America Awards for The West Wing and FX’s limited series Fosse/Verdon and the 2023 Quincy Award for Responsible Statecraft.

“The question of who's good and who's bad is always front of mind for me because my basic goal is to get to the place where no one is good or bad; everybody is in an unspeakably complicated situation. From the very beginning of the series, this event happens. We believe that it was perpetrated by Iran. Fairly quickly, we learn through the relationships that have been built over time between our heroes, Kate and Hal, and people in other countries that they’ve negotiated with that the assumptions we're making are completely incorrect. In fact, the people we assume have some sort of malintent toward us are being falsely accused. Someone else is playing on the stereotypes we have of those people in order to send us off in the wrong direction.

I feel very fortunate that the medium I’m in is television, which is a very long form of storytelling. You're not telling a single story; you're telling a world. You're inviting people into a world and asking them to live there with you and these characters for a period of time. The best I can do is build a world where people grapple with these important questions and try their best. All I can expect from people and from myself is that we're trying to do something larger than ourselves.”

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image credit: Netflix

“The question of who's good and who's bad is always front of mind for me because my basic goal is to get to the place where no one is good or bad; everybody is in an unspeakably complicated situation. From the very beginning of the series, this event happens. We believe that it was perpetrated by Iran. Fairly quickly, we learn through the relationships that have been built over time between our heroes, Kate and Hal, and people in other countries that they’ve negotiated with that the assumptions we're making are completely incorrect. In fact, the people we assume have some sort of malintent toward us are being falsely accused. Someone else is playing on the stereotypes we have of those people in order to send us off in the wrong direction.

I feel very fortunate that the medium I’m in is television, which is a very long form of storytelling. You're not telling a single story; you're telling a world. You're inviting people into a world and asking them to live there with you and these characters for a period of time. The best I can do is build a world where people grapple with these important questions and try their best. All I can expect from people and from myself is that we're trying to do something larger than ourselves.”

Debora Cahn is the Emmy-nominated showrunner and executive producer ofNetflix’s The Diplomat, a political thriller series starring Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell. She’s worked with television’s leading showrunners, including Shonda Rhymes, Terence Winter, Steven Levinson, and Howard Gordon. Her career began working on Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing which has led to projects such as the hit Showtime series Homeland, ABC’s long-running medical drama Grey’s Anatomy, and HBO’s Vinyl, which was co-created by Martin Scorsese. She’s the winner of two Writers Guild of America Awards for The West Wing and FX’s limited series Fosse/Verdon and the 2023 Quincy Award for Responsible Statecraft.

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image credit: Alex Bailey / Netflix

"I think all great work comes from the need to say something. And so this is the challenge for young artists and also maybe one of the essential elements that can never be completely taken over by AI because there has to be something you feel has not been said, and you feel an urgent need to say it. In fact, you can't not say it. That need to express is what gives birth to unique expression, which is where all of our visual, performance, and creative arts come from."

Alan Poul is an Emmy, Golden Globe, DGA, and Peabody Award-winning producer and director of film and television. He is Executive Producer and Director on the Max Original drama series Tokyo Vice, written by Tony Award-winning playwright J.T. Rogers and starring Ansel Elgort and Ken Watanabe, as an American journalist in Japan and his police detective mentor. Poul is perhaps best known for producing all five seasons of HBO's Six Feet Under, all four of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City miniseries, My So-Called Life, The Newsroom, Swingtown, and The Eddy, which he developed with director Damien Chazelle. His feature film producing credits include Paul Schrader's Mishima and Light of Day, and Ridley Scott's Black Rain.

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0693561
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2887954/

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As we're entering a world of advanced AI, what is the future of books? What makes stories enduring? And what role do literary agents play in nurturing authors and bringing great stories to the world?

Mark Gottlieb is a Vice President and top-selling literary agent at Trident Media Group. He represents a wide range of authors across genres, many of whom have been awarded prestigious prizes and have secured places on the New York Times bestseller list. Among other achievements, Mark has successfully optioned and sold books to film production companies where they were adapted into blockbuster hits, beloved by audiences and critics.

In addition to his work as an agent, Mark lectures on his experiences and craft at such noted venues as the Yale Writers’ Workshop, Cambridge University’s MSt in Creative Writing program, Columbia Publishing Course, and Sarah Lawrence College Writing Institute. He founded Emerson College's Wilde Press, and the Stamford Literature, Arts & Culture Salon (SLACS), where he currently serves as president.

"We look at books in terms of all of the manifestations that a book can take. It could be an audiobook. It could be a film or a TV show or in some cases for some of our authors made into merchandise like T-shirts or calendars or toys. Oftentimes our books find their way into other mediums and so we work across a very wide space between fiction, nonfiction, children's books, and graphic novels. There are a lot of people who work at the agency because we happen to be book publishing's leading agency by number of deals and amount of money for deals going as far back as the year 2000.

We also work with very literary authors like Michael Ondaatje who wrote The English Patient and that movie that got tons and tons of Academy Awards and nominations. We have a very big-name children's book authors, representing Wonder by RJ Palacio, which is a #1 New York Times Bestseller. It's still in that spot on the list years after publication, published in over 50 countries. And the movie with Julia Roberts is set to be a Broadway play with the producer of Hamilton. And it's won every major award and is required reading in schools."

www.tridentmediagroup.com/agents/mark-gottlieb
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Michael Begler is showrunner, writer, and executive producer of Perry Mason, which debuted as HBO’s most-watched series in nearly two years upon its premiere in June 2020. The critically-acclaimed show stars Emmy-winner Matthew Rhys, Juliet Rylance, Katherine Waterston, Hope Davis. In the second season of the Emmy-nominated series, the scion of a powerful oil family is brutally murdered. Power, social justice, immigration, LGBTQ rights, and what it truly means to be guilty, are among the issues raised by the series.
Begler’s previous series include the Peabody Award-winning The Knick, starring Clive Owen, directed by Steven Soderbergh, writing/producing credits also include comedy series The Tony Danza Show, The Jeff Foxworthy Show and the film Big Miracle starring Drew Barrymore and John Krasinski.

“I call it the percolating trauma inside him, and I think that it's a combination of things with Matthew Rhys who plays Perry Mason. Again, it's holding onto this trauma that happened a dozen years ago in the war, that this is not something that he has really dealt with. And I think that you can't take that lightly. It doesn't go away with time. It doesn't heal. It's still inside you, and it's still informing who you are. And I think that was important in coming into season two because here is a man who's now thrust into this whole other battle. He's now an attorney. And how does he put lives in his hands?

So he is gone through this in season one, and now we're coming into season two knowing that he's haunted by the fact that he thought he saved somebody. He put Emily Dodson's life in his hands only to have her commit suicide. So now he's wrestling deeply with the flaws in himself and his character that these soldiers put their lives in his hands in the war.

Emily Dodson put her life in his hands in the trial. And now he's going to take on these two boys who could swing on a noose. Does he want that? Does he have enough inside him? And that's why we play with the imposter syndrome because he doesn't know if this is who he really is. And does he still have that fight inside him?

And so I think that's the sort of push-pull I think that you're alluding to inside and that he's trying to hold it in and trying to hold it all together. And we do see those moments when he can't hold it back. When he punches the guy in the face in episode four when he steals the horse. These are things that he needs to release that valve because it's so much he's trying to hold onto to get to the result that he wants to win the fight because he hasn't fully won a fight yet. And that's hard.”

www.imdb.com/title/tt2077823
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