Writers on Film - Neil Fox on Screenwriting and Screenwriters

Neil Fox on Screenwriting and Screenwriters

06/01/22 • 62 min

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Writers on Film

I talk to writer, film producer and academic about screenwriters and screenwriting.

Here's some information from Neil's own webpage:

My award-winning film work includes the short film It’s Natural To Be Afraid (2011), viewable here, and the feature film ‘Wilderness’ (2017), currently out for sale following a successful festival run. You can find my filmmaking site here.

I am the co-founder and co-host of the renowned film podcast The Cinematologists.

I write about music documentaries for The Quietus, and about film more broadly for Beneficial Shock, Directors Notes and others.

I am a contributing editor to MAI: Journal of Feminism and Visual Culture, and have conducted long-form interviews with filmmakers Hope Dickson Leach and Lynn Shelton.

On this site you will find details of current projects and articles alongside links to where you can find evidence of my bold claims.

My research interests include Film Education, Music Documentaries and Concert Films, and Podcasting.

By day I am a senior lecturer in Film at the School of Film & Television, Falmouth University, where I also lead a research and innovation programme on pedagogy. I teach screenwriting and filmmaking on the BA Film and MA Film & Television courses.

I have a beautiful wife and a daughter, Beth and Tessa, a cheeky dog called Bailey (aka Chaos Dog) and we all live in Cornwall, UK.

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I talk to writer, film producer and academic about screenwriters and screenwriting.

Here's some information from Neil's own webpage:

I am the co-founder and co-host of the renowned film podcast The Cinematologists.

I write about music documentaries for The Quietus, and about film more broadly for Beneficial Shock, Directors Notes and others.

I am a contributing editor to MAI: Journal of Feminism and Visual Culture, and have conducted long-form interviews with filmmakers Hope Dickson Leach and Lynn Shelton.

On this site you will find details of current projects and articles alongside links to where you can find evidence of my bold claims.

My research interests include Film Education, Music Documentaries and Concert Films, and Podcasting.

I have a beautiful wife and a daughter, Beth and Tessa, a cheeky dog called Bailey (aka Chaos Dog) and we all live in Cornwall, UK.

Get bonus content on Patreon

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Previous Episode

Kyle Buchanan on Blood Sweat and Chrome

A full-speed-ahead oral history of the nearly two-decade making of the cultural phenomenon Mad Max: Fury Road—with more than 130 new interviews with key members of the cast and crew, including Charlize Theron, Tom Hardy, and director George Miller, from the pop culture reporter for The New York Times, Kyle Buchanan.

It won six Oscars and has been hailed as the greatest action film ever, but it is a miracle Mad Max: Fury Road ever made it to the screen... or that anybody survived the production. The story of this modern classic spanned nearly two decades of wild obstacles as visionary director George Miller tried to mount one of the most difficult shoots in Hollywood history.

Production stalled several times, stars Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron clashed repeatedly in the brutal Namib Desert, and Miller’s crew engineered death-defying action scenes that were among the most dangerous ever committed to film. Even accomplished Hollywood figures are flummoxed by the accomplishment: As the director Steven Soderbergh has said, “I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film, and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.”

Kyle Buchanan takes readers through every step of that moviemaking experience in vivid detail, from Fury Road’s unexpected origins through its outlandish casting process to the big-studio battles that nearly mutilated a masterpiece. But he takes the deepest dive in reporting the astonishing facts behind a shoot so unconventional that the film’s fantasy world began to bleed into the real lives of its cast and crew. As they fought and endured in a wasteland of their own, the only way forward was to have faith in their director’s mad vision. But how could Miller persevere when almost everything seemed to be stacked against him?

With hundreds of exclusive interviews and details about the making of Fury Road, readers will be left with one undeniable conclusion: There has never been a movie so drenched in sweat, so forged by fire, and so epic in scope.

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Next Episode

Dana Stevens on Buster Keaton

Buy the book here.

In this genre-defying work of cultural history, the chief film critic of Slate places comedy legend and acclaimed filmmaker Buster Keaton’s unique creative genius in the context of his time.

Born the same year as the film industry in 1895, Buster Keaton began his career as the child star of a family slapstick act reputed to be the most violent in vaudeville. Beginning in his early twenties, he enjoyed a decade-long stretch as the director, star, stuntman, editor, and all-around mastermind of some of the greatest silent comedies ever made, including Sherlock Jr., The General, and The Cameraman.

Even through his dark middle years as a severely depressed alcoholic finding work on the margins of show business, Keaton’s life had a way of reflecting the changes going on in the world around him. He found success in three different mediums at their creative peak: first vaudeville, then silent film, and finally the experimental early years of television. Over the course of his action-packed seventy years on earth, his life trajectory intersected with those of such influential figures as the escape artist Harry Houdini, the pioneering Black stage comedian Bert Williams, the television legend Lucille Ball, and literary innovators like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Samuel Beckett.

In Camera Man, film critic Dana Stevens pulls the lens out from Keaton’s life and work to look at concurrent developments in entertainment, journalism, law, technology, the political and social status of women, and the popular understanding of addiction. With erudition and sparkling humor, Stevens hopscotches among disciplines to bring us up to the present day, when Keaton’s breathtaking (and sometimes life-threatening) stunts remain more popular than ever as they circulate on the internet in the form of viral gifs. Far more than a biography or a work of film history, Camera Man is a wide-ranging meditation on modernity that paints a complex portrait of a one-of-a-kind artist.

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Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices