This is a transcript of the Final Draft Insider View, a podcast that takes you inside the screenwriting industry to talk with screenwriters, television writers, executives, and industry influencers. To listen to this podcast click here. To listen to other podcasts visit podcasts.finaldraft.com.

Pete D’Alessandro: Hello, I'm Pete D’Alessandro. Welcome to another edition of Insider View, a podcast that takes you inside the screenwriting industry to talk with screenwriters, television writers, executives, and industry influencers. Our guest today is filmmaker Andrew Jenks. You might know him from MTV or his documentary that he started when he was in college, Room 335. Andrew, thank you so much for being here.

Andrew Jenks: Thank you, Pete.

Pete D’Alessandro: I just want to run down your credits because it's kind of an amazing list of stuff that doesn’t necessarily match each other. I mean, you covered the presidential election for MTV; you've cofounded a film festival; you've even got your own book, My Adventures as a Young Filmmaker. Is it stretching you to put your hands in so many different things or is that just how you work?

Andrew Jenks: I enjoy storytelling and so it's really hard for me to say no to projects, and a part of me is still that 14-year-old kid that can't believe that I'm getting opportunities so a lot of times when people call I'm just like, “Are you serious?” “Yeah, of course.” And so I guess I'm probably stretching myself a little bit then, but I also love it. I'm really grateful to be able to make movies, and so Saturdays and Sundays for me are the same thing as a Monday or a Tuesday. Those are actually usually the best times to work because there’s no phone calls or emails coming and you can just sort of be creative and work on those sorts of projects that you really want to be working on.

Pete D’Alessandro: So some of the other projects you do have going probably are better known than the stuff I just read. I was just looking at It's About a Girl, your web series on YouTube, and most notably the MTV show World of Jenks. Where do you really spend most of your time at this point?

Andrew Jenks: I'm spending a lot of time right now on a documentary about a guy named Ryan Ferguson who was put in prison for a murder that he did not commit. When he was 19 years old he was charged and given a 30-million-dollar bail, the highest in the history of the United States, and it turns out it was all based on another individual’s dream that he had. It was a murder that happened in Columbia, Missouri, and this murder was the first unsolved murder in the history in Columbia, and so we started following him, interviewing him in prison. He was there almost for 10 years and we thought we were going to make this movie, and then if we were lucky we could help, when it was released, contribute to awareness and help him get out. And he was actually released because he has this incredible lawyer and an incredible father and family that really helped his case, and so now we're following him as he’s out of prison and a free man. He lost his 20s and it's sad but it's also inspiring in how he's taking it all on. So I'd say that takes up most of my time.

Also, this film festival, the All-American High School Film Festival, is something that started more or less over 10 years ago when I was in high school and we'd make videos my friends and we'd only play them in my parents’ basement, and I thought, “Well, there's the all-American high school basketball game, why isn't there something for filmmakers?” And so we had our first annual All-American High School Film Festival last year and had upwards of 20 colleges come for college fair. We had submissions from all over the world and judges ranging from Kristen Stewart to Morgan Spurlock to Academy-Award-winning writers, directors.

And then the coolest component is just seeing, and this may sound a bit earnest, but seeing hundreds of high school filmmakers descend upon New York City from October 4th to the 6th and be at AMC Theatres in Times Square and watch their three-minute films on the big screen. And not only were these movies amazing, I mean truly, truly amazing and you can go on YouTube/hsfilmfest.com and check them out, but they are not only amazing but the kids or the students are also just so humble, which was particularly kind of shocking and also inspiring to me to see these kids with so much talent… It's like, can you imagine if at the all-American high school basketball game those guys were like humble and not like roaming around bragging about their three-point shots or dunks. So anyway, that’s probably the thing that takes up most of my time.

Pete D’Alessandro: So where are you guys at right now in the process of the film festival?

Andrew Jenks: Right now we are getting prepared for our second year. So the submissions now have come from I think almost all 50 states. Maybe it's only 48, and even we're getting submissions from countries all over the world and it's on October 24th to the 26th. We have panels with different professionals in the industry. We have technology fair, college fair, opening night party, closing night party, and so it's a nice chance to celebrate the films that students have made and also a chance to learn about the future technology but also learn about what kids across the country are doing, how they're similar and how they're different.

Pete D’Alessandro: There's still time to submit to the festival, right? You have until August 1st, is that right?

Andrew Jenks: Yeah, that’s the final deadline. We encourage students to certainly get them in. It's always funny, we always get like a pile of films there at the last second, which I can totally identify with. I remember when I was younger and submitting to film festivals and be counting it down to the final minute and be like, “Oh, I got to export this and send it in.”

Pete D’Alessandro: I'm sure every last minute you can possibly edit and tweak that final cut would be invaluable. So back to the Ryan Ferguson project, what are you guys doing now? I mean, have you shot all the footage? Are you just doing post?

Andrew Jenks: We were thinking we'd be in post now, that’s for sure, but a lot of great documentaries sometimes go in places never expected and this is certainly one of those areas where we thought we'd certainly be wrapping up and instead we are in the midst of just figuring it all out. We interviewed him a few weeks ago to see how he was doing and I will probably interview him some more. So we're editing now but we also are editing with the understanding that it's still a bit of an open film and we're still seeing where Ryan’s life takes him. It's a tricky process but it's really interesting and he's in his 20s, he's white, he has a great smile. And the reason I say all of those things is only because a lot of times we think of those that are locked up behind bars and shouldn't be are people who are minorities or don’t have a good education and “it wouldn't happen to me,” and I think after you watch this movie and get to know Ryan you sort of look around and you're like, “Oh wow, this could happen to anyone.”

Pete D’Alessandro: It's really enlightening to go into somebody’s life that much who has been through something that gigantic. I mean, life-altering doesn’t begin to describe it.

Andrew Jenks: You have to experience it I think to understand it, and hopefully with this film you get a taste of that experience, and I certainly have learned quite a bit from Ryan and I think that the viewers and audience will learn from it but also kind of empathize with his story and with the 10%, probably more, of those that are locked up in America that shouldn't be.

Pete D’Alessandro: So I was curious, this is not like some of the other projects you've done. This subject has obvious barriers around information that would be there as far as legal precedence, and just getting into something that is obviously a mistake on someone’s part there's got to be a lot of people trying to contain how much you guys can learn. Does that present special challenges?

Andrew Jenks: There are always challenges when it comes to access, and in this scenario when Ryan was behind bars it was certainly much more difficult. We were only supposed to film with him one hour at a time and the first day they didn't stop us after that first hour so we just kept going. We didn't know if we'd be allowed back. It's obviously just not an easy process to get an interview in prison with anyone much less Ryan, who had become a bit of a public figure at that point. But it's also interesting in that because a lot of the information has happened in court, we are able to access those videos and that information and get it for free. So even when they interrogated Ryan back when he was 19, we have those videos and it's open in public. So at points it's certainly tricky but at other points it's been surprisingly not as hard as I would have thought going into it.

Pete D’Alessandro: Switching the topic, I wanted to talk about It's About a Girl because I think it's such an interesting web series. I mean, I haven't watched the entire thing, but is it all essentially silent and dialogueless?

Andrew Jenks: Yeah, I just had a break between Season 2 of the MTV show and then working on three other documentaries and I just wanted to kind of mix it up and do something different. And Taryn Southern is a really smart actress who is really funny and we get along really well, and I thought, why not do something that kind of showcases New York City? Doesn’t need to be anything convoluted or have some big twist and five different layers and what we've come to sort of expect, just sort of make it simple and let it be a kind of classic, old-school love series, and certainly it's no Manhattan but it went for that vibe. And it was just a nice break. It wasn’t something like we normally do where it's on the more serious end. It wasn’t about cancer or autism or gang-related violence, which are all topics that I've covered and are really important, but for me I guess personally it was a nice break from all of that.

Pete D’Alessandro: Let's talk about the beginning of your career with Room 335. I've read that you started that because your grandfather got sick and you wanted to see what an assisted living home would be like. What was the process of actually getting a documentary together? What did you have to do first?

Andrew Jenks: My grandfather had dementia and I was really close with him, and when I saw him in that sort of state, forgetting my name and this sort of thing, I was in college at the time and not having a good time at all, I really wasn’t enjoying it for a variety of different reasons and just wanted to kind of get out, and I thought, “Well, what if I moved into a nursing home and made a documentary about what that was like?” My grandfather was in a nursing home and I really felt for him in a profound way. And so they wouldn't let me film in his nursing home and I started calling 30 or so different facilities around the country, and we finally found one that would give us full access in Port St. Lucie, Florida, and I asked two of my buddies if they would drive down with me and we took someone’s grandmother’s van that they weren't using and borrowed audio equipment and bought a camera for a couple of hundred dollars off of eBay and went down there for five weeks and just filmed 200-plus hours of footage, and then returned back to my parents’ basement at the end of the summer and started editing and really had no idea what I was doing, just submitting to film festivals and such, and it was a journey that I obviously wasn’t expecting but one that was a bit of a risk. I'm happy I took it and grateful to the nursing home and the people, the senior citizens that were there that I befriended that were so willing to open up.

Pete D’Alessandro: And when that was all finished and you had it to look back on, what did you take to the next one?

Andrew Jenks: In terms of the filmmaking process, it was understanding that whether it's scripted or not, sometimes having to let go what you envisioned in the beginning. And so going into the movie I thought that it would be focused on all of the different residents at Harbor Place, which is the assisted living facility, and just getting to know every resident and the different sort of ins and outs of everyday life, but I ended up becoming close with really five or six of the residents and refocused primarily on them and they were all very different.

One was an awesome guy named Bill, 80 years old. Another was Tammy, 96 years old. Tammy would tell…she didn't really have…her hearing was greatly impaired and couldn't really see all that well and was in a wheelchair, but her mind was totally intact and she was able to walk around and tell sex jokes and keep everyone’s spirits high in a home that can get quite depressing and demoralizing. And then there was Bill who, like I said, was 80 and was able to walk and was really strong but was suffering from dementia, but he would walk every day or, as he said, would escape every day from the nursing home and go to a local dollar store and pick up some candy, and he did have a memory where he knew which resident liked which particular candy, so Skittles or Twix or Snickers, and he would remember that of all things and would come back and give them to the residents.

So I definitely learned just from these friends, really, how take what you have left and make the most of it and try and give it in some way, shape or form, and that definitely never left me and probably contributed to why I sort of stuck with doing those sorts of projects moving forward.

Pete D’Alessandro: It's very apparent from all your work that you really wound up being friends with almost all these people on some level.

Andrew Jenks: Yeah, there's a trust that you have to develop from the get go, and I'm not a Michael Moore or a whistleblower type of filmmaker. I'm kind of more interested in the human side of things. These days there's a lot of people that enjoy picking apart the bad pieces of everyone, and there's good in everyone, and so why not kind of enjoy and have fun with the people that are doing that opposed to sort of picking fights and sorting out what’s wrong with this person or that person? There's obviously a place for that and there are plenty of films and filmmakers and producers that do that type of work. I sort of found this little pocket where there's a lot to be said for the other side of the spectrum as well.

Pete D’Alessandro: When you approach a documentary like that, obviously 335 comes from something very personal. That's what inspired you to start that. Is it always kind of a similar experience when you decide to tackle a subject for the show World of Jenks?

Andrew Jenks: A lot of times I'm sometimes interested or have a personal relationship with the world or the subculture that we are tackling, but more often than not it's actually something that I don't know what it's like at all.

So in that sense it's very different than Room 335. I couldn't imagine what it would be like to have two different types of cancer at 22 years old, which is what Kaylin faced who is on Season 2 of our show, and I had no idea what autism was about and so that’s why we followed Chad, and I had no idea what mixed martial arts in the UFC was and so that’s what landed us Anthony Pettis who is an extraordinary young man and happens to have now gone on to be a UFC champion. So a lot of times it's me just saying, “God, I have no idea what this is like,” and a lot of people talk about it, and so then we go out and try and find these sorts of people, and it's a bit more difficult in that we're almost looking for individuals that would never normally be on television much less a mainstream network such as an MTV. And so it's not like we put out some casting call and we have people responding to it. It's us really trying to find these people and a lot of times convincing them that they can trust me and they can trust my team and that we won't be exploiting them. And so it's certainly a different process than a lot of other shows.

Pete D’Alessandro: Now, I'm curious, once you've got one of the subjects and you start shooting, back to what you said about the storytelling and loving the storytelling, characters are a big part of that and you have to paint these people as characters in half an hour or whatever it is depending on the venue you're working in, but how do you wind up doing that? Is that something that comes out of the organic process or do you really need to find moments to show them to the public?

Andrew Jenks: Whenever we're going into one of the worlds that we're exploring, there are definitely sort of pillars or points that we want to touch on and we know are there that will be good for our story. So like we were following Chad, he has autism, and we knew that he had a prom and graduation and these big moments in his life that would be part of his story, but it's kind of like a basketball team where you come fully prepared for the opponent and the great teams usually know in the first quarter, they realize their opponents are doing something entirely different than they'd expected and everything that they had prepared for is sort of quickly thrown out the window and they have to get ready to quickly adapt and change, and so a lot of times we do have some moments that we know who we're following are going to be going through, but more often than not it's sort of the unexpected that ends up being the rich material that we use on the show.

Pete D’Alessandro: We talk more about fiction here, but we write first, we plan, that’s what we're going to show, that's the idea we're going to express. Obviously, you're mentioning a lot of that comes during the process and after the process, but there's still a lot of writing to be done in a documentary. So what are the big challenges in actually doing that writing?

Andrew Jenks: The challenge in writing a lot of times, for me anyway, is the balance of staying honest with what your experience was and then also staying honest and understanding who your audience is. And so for me, the first movie that I made where I moved into the nursing home was entirely mine. I made it with no audience in mind other than what I would want to watch. And with MTV, it was more of a preparation for knowing that I'd be speaking to 17-year-old girls and realizing that when I was writing out what I took away from each experience that the audience was different. And that's not in an untruthful way, it's just in a way of making sure that I'm communicating in a way that they can respond to and relate to.

So the writing process is walking that fine line, which is true with scripted projects. If you're writing a script for HBO, it's like, okay, well, you can use curse words, something as simple as that. If you're writing for TBS you're certainly not going to be using curse words. So I think that is an interesting process because you don’t want to compromise your integrity but you also want to make sure that you're providing a piece of work that will resonate with the audience that typically watches whatever that outlet may be.

Pete D’Alessandro: Can you think of an example where you had something one way and you realized, well, for the MTV or whatever channel you're going for, that you actually had to change something and found something else to do?

Andrew Jenks: I don't know if I've ever heard that question. That’s a good question. I'm trying to think of a good example in which that were the case. I think one component that is really hard with doing a television show is commercial breaks. Also, the fact that it's not really a 30-minute show, it's more of a 19-minute-and-20-second show, or Season 2 was an hour long and it's not really an hour long, it's 44 minutes long. I remember in Season 1 I interviewed…there was this young man out of Texas who was a high school football star and had everything going for him, but a lot of people didn't know about his back story which was that his mom was in prison and he hardly had ever seen her. And I went and interviewed her and the interview was at least an hour long and it was incredibly moving, and at the end of the day we had to make it two or three minutes long, which really restricts what you're able to show. So I think timing is usually the most difficult to kind of swallow and be like, “Wow, we're not going to be able to use this or that.” And so that’s usually the toughest part.

Pete D’Alessandro: MTV had you cover the presidential election back in 2012, right? So at that point, what did you apply from what you'd learned in storytelling to doing something like that where it's so drastically different?

Andrew Jenks: It was very weird to go from me being kind of in charge or knowing that we're going to film on this day and also there may be a million adjustments or changes, and then to be so heavily restricted and kind of treat you like cattle when you're on the presidential election. And you know, the whole premise of the show and some of the films that I've done is to really get to know people, and in politics they don’t want you to get to know them really in any way other than exact as they see fit. And so it was an extremely demoralizing process, a tough road for a few months because you just saw the system at large and how deceitful it can be and how there's really very little honesty involved, and then all of the reporters that are almost all in on it as well where they kind of know what’s going on but it's all based on sources and background information that they can't reveal, and kind of left thinking like the whole thing is a criminal enterprise. So it was difficult. I didn't leave thinking, “Man, I really nailed that one.” I kind of left thinking that this would take a lifetime to even try and move the needle a little bit.

Pete D’Alessandro: Obviously you're not foaming at the mouth for 2016 and doing it over again.

Andrew Jenks: No! No. I mean, I would love the challenge but I think there are too many other opportunities and really two other individuals out there that if I'm lucky enough to capture I would love to do so. There are certainly a lot of activists and political activists out there that are making a mark and I'm not sure that I want to go there again.

Pete D’Alessandro: Right, got you. Then you have a book that came out last year, My Adventures as a Young Filmmaker. Can you give us kind of an overview of the book and is it from your experiences making and advice to other filmmakers?

Andrew Jenks: The book is really a behind-the-scenes I guess of how all of these projects came to be, a little bit of what we've been talking about. In a lot of the projects, there are a few exceptions, I happen to be in front of the camera as well, but really the show or the film is about who I'm following. And so the book is my own narrative and what I felt going through living with a young person who was an animal rescuer or living with a rapper or living with someone who was faced with an awful disease or living with senior citizens, living with this guy Ryan Ferguson. And so that more than anything is what the book is about, and then just the process of finding all of these different people and editing it and kind of all those stories that you don’t get to see in the TV show or in the movies.

Pete D’Alessandro: So, kind of an overall behind-the-scenes of your career.

Andrew Jenks: I wasn’t like shopping around a book idea. It wasn’t like I said, “Well, I really need a book about myself.” Maybe going back to your first question about doing a lot of different projects, comes to you like Scholastic, you know, they did The Hunger Games, and I'm like, “Okay, they want to do a book with me? Alright, yeah, sure.” So that was definitely what happened in that scenario.

Pete D’Alessandro: So after you're through with the Ryan Ferguson project, do you know what’s on the plate next after the film festival and everything?

Andrew Jenks: Right now it's Ferguson. I have a movie coming out in the fall about HIV and AIDS around the world. We follow three different young people, one in India, one in South Africa and one in Indiana. And I don't know yet where that will be released but it's a feature doc and we're currently right in the midst of figuring out where it's going to land. And so that’s a project that's coming up soon, and then I just had an ESPN short documentary called Posterized that’s out now on Grantland and is about Sean Bradley who was known as a bit of a laughingstock during his NBA career and he was a 7-foot-6 center, and it kind of goes through his career and a lot of the parts that people don't know about.

Pete D’Alessandro: So we have those to look forward to.

Andrew Jenks: Yeah, totally.

Pete D’Alessandro: Thank you for coming and taking your time to talk with us. This has been really great.

Andrew Jenks: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Pete D’Alessandro: If you're listening out there and you're in high school and you're a director, you still have about a month left after you hear this podcast to submit to the All-American High School Film Festival. Take advantage of that. It's a great opportunity. So Andrew, thank you so much.

Andrew Jenks: Yeah, thank you, man. I appreciate it.

This podcast was brought to by Final Draft. When inspiration strikes, strike back. With the Final Draft Writer App for iPad, you can write, read and edit your script anytime, anywhere. Available on the Apple App Store. Be sure to join us next time as we meet new writers and discuss the craft and business of writing for film and television.