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 writer Scott Neustadter. He is best known for 500 Days of Summer and his next movie coming out is The Fault in Our Stars, an adaptation of the novel. Scott, thanks for joining us.

Scott Neustadter: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Pete D’Alessandro: Well, I wanted to talk about your break-in story because it sounds like you have one of those moments where it was kind of up against the wall, all or nothing, you really wanted to make a break for it with 500 Days of Summer. Is that about right?

Scott Neustadter: Ah, yes, I suppose so. I mean, it was something that we wrote before we ever thought about writing as a career. People read it and liked it. It was how we got our agent and manager. But no one wanted to touch it. No one really wanted to make it or anything. But it opened up some doors for us and a lot of those doors were to make, you know, open writing assignments and projects that were really quite dissimilar from 500, for example the sequel to the Pink Panther movie, but we were suddenly kind of faced with this interesting situation where we could get paid to do this and it was really exciting, and that’s kind of how we got in. And I think when they ended up green-lighting the Pink Panther movie and making it, it made us less of a scary prospect, and 500 was made less than a year later. So it's kind of a crazy circuitous route to getting that get made, but yeah, it was a really fun thing for us.

Pete D’Alessandro: It sounds like it came together fast once it started.

Scott Neustadter: Yeah, it was an option. It had sat around, no one bought it, and they took a chance and the option deal was I guess if they couldn't put it together after a certain amount of time then they would let it go. They didn't spend a lot of money on it and that was how it worked, and luckily for us they found Mark, and then Joe and Zooey said that they were interested and we were off to the races. It took no time at all from when that happened, but obviously it took quite a long time from writing it to letting it become a movie.

Pete D’Alessandro: Now, once they were kind of moving forward with it and you knew you were going into production, did you guys wind up doing more rewrites at that point?

Scott Neustadter: Oh, that’s funny that there is literally one note Fox Searchlight had and that was it, and it was a brilliant, brilliant note that really, really helped the movie. It's actually where the reality expectations scene came from that was not in the first draft. So it was really like I look back on it as like the greatest thing that ever happened was this one note, which was basically that if you've seen the movie there's at least a little…it's not a normal structure, a thing that happens where you are led to believe that two people might actually end up back together. So it actually does mirror a few of those conventional kind of romantic stories, and that was not there in the original draft because it was a very autobiographical thing and in real life there was absolutely no scenario where me and the girl were going to get back together.

So we never wrote that scene, but when the Searchlight executive said to us, “You know, we're on board with this crazy structure you're doing but we would love to trick the audience to thinking it's not as crazy as it seems.” And that was their one note, like let's find a way to make the audience think as we get towards the last half an hour of the movie that there's a chance they're going to get back together. And yeah, the train ride scene came from that and the reality expectations came from that, which I think it's probably my favorite 10 minutes in the entire movie.

Pete D’Alessandro: Now, you have kind of an unusual situation. Your writing partner lives in New York and you live out in LA. Now, there's got to be some obvious challenges to that I'm sure, but are there also advantages to being separated and kind of being forced to part?

Scott Neustadter: We always say there are only advantages. When I lived in New York and we started writing together, we would sit together and talk and try to make each other laugh. But when the actual writing was happening, I would be on the Upper Westside, he would be on the Lower Eastside, and we'd be doing the same thing we do now from opposite coasts. So it's just a lot of emailing and talking on the phone, but the writing part of it has always been a very separate kind of a situation, and most of 500 was written while I was in England and he was in New York. So like really the further we are from each other, the better the stuff is.

Pete D’Alessandro: It's great that it works out that way.

Scott Neustadter: Yeah. Whenever he comes to LA for meetings or whatever else, we absolutely get nothing done. We're completely worthless. So it's good to have the separation.

Pete D’Alessandro: Well, you've touched on this a little bit, but how did the two of you start working together? And you said you were writing before you were really writing for a career.

Scott Neustadter: Yeah, I mean, I think the both of us always wanted to write. I never thought of it as a very practical way to make a living and I knew I wasn’t enough brave enough to like go for it, and so what I ended up doing was I went into the development side and I started interning every summer from when I was 16 years old on. And I realized that the one advantage that I had was that I loved to read and a lot of movie executives have too much to do and they don’t love reading as much as you would think they would and I just loved it, and I read very quickly and I just loved movies so much that I ended up taking on everyone’s material. So I would read all of the stacks of unsolicited scripts or whatever it was and I would do coverage on everything, and I would do seven or eight a day when the average going rate was maybe two. And I amassed enough of a following, let's say, in my coverage that I had like a paying job when I graduated college reading scripts, and I thought I'd go into the development side. I could do story, I could talk about scripts, I could sort of pinpoint what was working and what wasn’t working. And I never went to film school, I didn't really have much of a real educational…I didn't learn the regular way, I guess, but I just watched a lot of movies, I read a lot of books and I loved doing it.

And I got hired as the story editor at Tribeca Productions. I hired Weber as my intern. He was one of my first interns to work in the story department at the company, and so we just sort of realized we had a lot of the same kind of interests and we laughed at the same things and we liked the same movies, and we ended up sort of just talking a lot about these things. And he said, “We should write one ourselves,” and I thought, “You're absolutely crazy. I'm not doing that, I'm not doing that.”

But the more you read, and this was the thing that was sort of very eye-opening to me, I always believed that only the best stuff ever got made and I was not talented enough to write the best stuff. But when I was in the chair, my job was to read scripts and see what was selling. It was a breakthrough. It was amazing some of the very average or below average things that were making people a lot of money. And so I said, “You know what? Screw it. I think I can be average.” I don't think I could be Sorkin. I could never write a script that will blow me away, but maybe together we could write something that we enjoyed and it would be as average enough as it needed to be that we could have a career at this. And so we wrote one comedy script on the roof of the company, because neither one of us worked very hard, and it was funny and people liked it and they laughed but nothing ever happened, and I said, “Okay, that’s what I thought.”

And I went back to my development job and I got as far with that as I was going to get, and then I wound up quitting. I went back to school. I had sort of hit a ceiling. I wasn’t really interested in moving to LA and I wasn’t interested in doing the schmoozy thing that you have to do to like be a really good producer or development person. I'm too shy for all that stuff. So I left and I went back to graduate school, and the day I started I met this girl, and that's sort of how 500 Days of Summer started, so a very circuitous way to come back around to doing that stuff. But anyway, pretty crazy.

Pete D’Alessandro: I mean, it's fascinating that here are some of the internships that don’t go anywhere, but that's a great example of two that obviously really worked out.

Scott Neustadter: And I swear by it. I read about the interns who are suing and whatever else and it makes my stomach turn like, you know, you work for free when you're young if you can do it.

You know, I worked for free a few days a week and then I had a paying job the other half of the week.

Pete D’Alessandro: Right.

Scott Neustadter: But I really, like, you know, you have the right attitude and you impress the right people and you work hard and, I don't know, it just seems like, what a great sort of fortunate area of your life. It would be so great to, I don't know, take advantage of it.

Pete D’Alessandro: Right.

Scott Neustadter: It's there for you.

Pete D’Alessandro: Right.

Scott Neustadter: It makes me mad that people are suing. That’s my point. I'm going on a rant about it, but sorry.

Pete D’Alessandro: [Laughs] That’s okay.

Scott Neustadter: [Laughs]

Pete D’Alessandro: So you guys were writing together early on and back and forth and obviously there was some time off in between scripts, but how has your writing process as a team evolved over the years in all the things you've learned and what you've taken from the experience you've had?

Scott Neustadter: Strangely, it's exactly the same I think as it used to be. The one sort of difference is that we're not…when we first started, I think the test was, are we laughing? Was I making him laugh? Was he making me laugh? That was really what it was doing because we were writing for that kind of thing, and it was never my favorite genre anyway. I mean, even 500 Days of Summer I think has a melancholy note like sort of over it that it started out as a comedy but I don't think it ended up as one. And now when we're writing I think we're really looking to see if we care about the characters and are we invested in the emotions, and we're writing a little bit of a different thing than was that funny or did that scene make you laugh. So I think that’s really the only difference, but the process is the same. We're emailing scenes back and forth. At the beginning we talk extensively, outlining and doing all the things that I hate doing. The process is exactly the same as it was when we first met.

Pete D’Alessandro: Well, you talked about outlining. I've heard some other podcasts with you where you mentioned outlining. You do not like to do it, but forcing yourself through that you obviously do something. What is it that you wind up sticking to?

Scott Neustadter: Well, when it's an original idea, we talk a lot about like what are the things…what are we excited to write? What are the big scenes? I kind of always feel like every good movie, every good script, has about like five, sometimes less but let's aim for five amazing moments. So we kind of say like if you were telling your friends the story of the movie, what would it sound like? And then I'll sit down and I'll type it up into like an email, and then eventually that'll break down into scenes, and then it'll be like, “Okay, there's a huge gap here. How do we get from here to here? We've got to fill that with some things.” And then you realize, “Well, this can't go here because you're supposed to feel this over here,” and it turns into a weird outline. And we go back and forth with the email and fill in some gaps, and eventually we have kind of like a roadmap and it allows us to say, “Okay, you take the first four, I'll take the next four.” And a couple of days later we have the script, or not the full script but we have an act maybe, very quickly, and we can look at it and we know, “Okay, let's pick it up back up. We know exactly where…keep going. We have it written down. We have the roadmap.”

Whereas if I was by myself and there was no outline, I think that we…I've done this before, I will write 60 pages in a day and I'll be so excited about it. And I'll read it the next day and I'll be like, “Wait, this is actually really good. I'm so proud of these 60 pages. I did it one day. It's amazing.” Then I have no idea what 61 to 90 are supposed to be and I throw it out. I delete the whole thing because it just makes me crazy.

But at least with an outline you never get that lost. There are always a few moments where you're like, “Okay, something feels off here. Something’s broken. Maybe we should revisit the outline and see.” But having something down there was always really helpful, and we've been doing these book adaptations I think for a lot of the same reasons, because I love having a little bit of a compass. If I get lost, I end up…my pinkie is always on the Delete button as it is, but if I get lost then I literally will just delete the entire file. [Laughs]

Pete D’Alessandro: So have no fear of doing it?

Scott Neustadter: I've deleted more than I've written.

Pete D’Alessandro: That’s great. That’s actually a great insight into your process. As far as your other prep work, I mean there are outlines, but it strikes me because you guys have very common character elements and these very grounded characters through a lot of your stories. What kind of prep work do you do for characters before you start writing?

Scott Neustadter: Well, thank you for saying that. You know, I've read of people who do sort of like separate documents about the childhood of the character and like all those kinds of techniques. We've never done anything like that, although I think it's cool-sounding. But for the most part it's just we're either writing about ourselves, we're writing about people we know, we kind of think about behavioral patterns and would this character do that, I don't know, that doesn’t pass the smell test. But it isn't anything more specific than that. Since we're two of us, if he went and wrote a scene and sent it to me and I would be like, “I don’t understand what you're doing here. Who is that guy? That's not the guy we've been talking about,” then we would have a long discussion about it and we would kind of figure out what the thing is, what the problem was, where's the disconnect. And if I write something and he says, “Well, he wouldn't say that because of this,” I'd go, “Oh, you're right. Maybe we should think about a little bit more who these people are.” But we haven't had that problem too often because the characters are really the things that we are interested in in the first place. We're not plotty guys.

And so like we were talking about the other day, we kind of are itching to write something with a bad guy. The villains in our projects are always like time or she doesn’t love you enough. There's never a villain, and wouldn't that be fun to have a bad guy? But yeah, we're just sort of trying to figure out like normal people and usually they're the problem and they’ve got to figure out their thing in order for a happy ending. That’s always sort of what we like.

Pete D’Alessandro: So it sounds like there's a good deal of trial and error and, I mean, like you said, your pinkie’s on the Delete key all the time and you're okay with that part.

Scott Neustadter: [Laughs] You've got to know yourself.

Pete D’Alessandro: I guess so. I'm curious what you guys do when you actually have to go in and rewrite. I mean, you said there wasn't a whole lot of notes at all for 500 Days of Summer, but I'm imagining since then there's been plenty.

Scott Neustadter: Yeah, yeah. No, that's for sure. The advantage I think when you go and write something on your own is very different I think than when you're working through the system and you have masters you're trying to serve. That’s why you have indie movies and that’s why you have studio projects a lot. But yeah, there are always notes to some degree, and when you're pitching or when you're a writer for hire there's a lot of cooks in the kitchen before you even start, which is a different scenario than if you're specking something or writing an original. You kind of have to be zen about it. I mean, I think that my development background at least has illuminated that you will always be rewriting. Don’t expect it to be perfect. Kind of read between the lines when you get notes and figure out what the note is behind the note. We've been doing it now for like nine years professionally. I think the note is always the same. We're supposed to be feeling X here, we're feeling Y, so something’s broken.

And sometimes the note that they give you isn't…they're not really saying the thing that they need to be saying, but that’s what I think they're saying. They're saying that you want someone to feel a certain way in the scene, they took it completely differently so you've got to go back to your process and figure out why they didn't feel the thing you wanted them to feel, and that’s really what it always comes down to. We have never been in a situation, I don't think, where someone gave us a note that was completely…that they didn't get it, you know, they want a different movie than we were writing, which I'm sure happens a lot. I think at this point if you're looking to us to come in and work on something, you know kind of our strengths and weaknesses, I don't know how to write action scenes, I don’t really know a lot of…I hope that you wouldn't expect a Neustadter and Weber script to be very high-concept action, sci-fi, crazy, you know.

Pete D’Alessandro: Sure, sure.

Scott Neustadter: I wouldn't know what to do with that. If you're a writer trying to make it in Hollywood, as good as you are, you are going to get notes. Some of them are going to make you crazy. You're just going to have to deal.

Pete D’Alessandro: [Laughs] Sure. Alright. So how did you guys get involved in The Fault in Our Stars?

Scott Neustadter: So we had done a project for Fox 2000 that they liked, kind of a different thing. It's basically the story of the girl Romeo was dating right before he met Juliet, and so it's a comedy version of Romeo and Juliet set in those times. And Fox 2000 really liked it and they liked us, they liked our writing. This book came out. They optioned it. They were looking for writers and they said, “Those guys might be interesting.” We had written Spectacular, which was about the same kind of age group and it's a very different kind of a teenagey movie, and they thought we would be a good fit for this project.

It just so happens at the time my father just passed away. He had gotten pancreatic cancer and passed away literally the week the book came out. When they sent it to my reps, the reps were like, “I don't know. Maybe it's not the right time.” They were going to not do it. I remember they called and they said, “Look, Fox has sent us a book. It's kind of getting a lot of notice.” At the time it was not the phenomenon that it would later become, but it had just been published, people were really liking it, and for the most part everything about it is definitely at least stuff that Weber and I would love. You got your teenage lovers and you got your bittersweet kind of tone and things don’t always work out and all that stuff, but there's that one extra sort of component of the cancer and all that. “We didn't want to bring it to your attention,” was kind of what they were saying.

Pete D’Alessandro: Sure.

Scott Neustadter: And I was like, “No, you know what? I think I would love to read that.” I'm sitting around not being very productive. I'm not in the best headspace. For the last year it's all I did, was think about cancer. I wasn’t working. It's hard when you don’t have a job to feel like you're being productive when you're sad, and so I said, “Give it to me. It'll feel like I'm working.” And I read the book and I was like, “Dude, this is really great. How do we get this job? I want to do this. I know how to do it. I think that Weber and I could kill this. How do we get this job?” There were a million other screenwriters that they had talked to, most of them much more high-profile and badass than us. But we were in the top five maybe that they met with, or I should say the final five, and we went in the room and I just sort of talked about kind of what I was going through, what I loved about the book and what we thought would be some improvements structurally, you know, very small things.

But it was a tough thing because we didn't want to change that much. We loved the book. How do you get a job as a screenwriter when all you want to say is like, “Well, no, we're going to protect the book. We just want to do the book.” We felt like maybe we were supposed to come in with these grandiose ideas and all these changes we were going to make and how brilliant we were, but really we just wanted to do justice to this great novel. And I still don't know why they picked us but we got the job and we turned in the draft very quickly, and they were very happy with the draft and we were off to the races. It was really one of the least—getting the job was the hardest part. The actual writing process of adapting this book was a breeze.

Pete D’Alessandro: Now, did guys work with the author? Did you talk to the author at all?

Scott Neustadter: Never talk to the author during the process because…we’ve done Spectacular Now and we did another adaptation as well, but we never talked to the authors on those cases until afterwards. And afterwards we wanted to make sure that they liked what we did, and if they had any hang-ups or if they had any questions or why’d you do this instead of that we were totally like psyched to hear from them, but we thought that if they were getting involved during the process it would really kind of skew us one way or another, and so better they just kind of put it out there and say, “What do you think?”

And so with Fault we did that and John was really happy with it, and at one point I think he said he liked our ending better than his ending, which is amazing. We just were really happy. He had like…he said, “Could we do this? Could we do that?” And we said no, yes, I mean, he's very smart as well and very savvy and just such a talented writer. So it was a great situation for us. We were very fortunate to be chosen to do it.

And then the book became this crazy thing that none of us kind of ever really expect, and now there's like a tweet that goes out of like a quote of the day from the book. Looking at the tweet every day and I'm like, “Oh shit, that’s not in there. Oh no, we didn't put that one either.”

Like, starting to get a little nervous about all of the things—any time you do an adaption, you can't use everything, so I hope that the fans of the novel now who are so rabid and crazy and are tattooing lines to their bodies will appreciate the effort we put into doing as faithful an adaptation as we could.

Pete D’Alessandro: It sounds like a big challenge to try to take material that is so important to people and is so reaching in so many people.

Scott Neustadter: Yeah, thankfully, we didn't have to worry about that when we were actually doing…

Pete D’Alessandro: [Laughs] Right. So what was one of the more unique challenges you did have to deal with in adapting that?

Scott Neustadter: Well, Fault in Our Stars is very much from the perspective of the protagonist and she has a certain voice and John Green has a certain voice. To preserve that voice, to kind of get it across without doing a ton of voiceover, was really important to us. We didn't want to have every scene have her say, “And this is what I was feeling at the time,” because I don't know, I just feel like it would take you out of the movie.

Pete D’Alessandro: Sure.

Scott Neustadter: I'm a proponent of voiceover. When it works, it works amazing. We do have some. I think we wanted to prevent it from being overload, definitely a challenge. And then in the book, I don’t want to ruin anything…

Pete D’Alessandro: No problem.

Scott Neustadter: …but something very major happens towards the end and in the book there's like another 80 pages of book after that major event, and we felt like in a movie you had to be kind of racing to the curtain at that point, and so we had to find a way to take some of this emotional kind of catharsis stuff that in a novel you have a lot more leeway, you have a lot longer lead time to get to. We had to figure out how to do it in maybe a scene or two and that was definitely a tricky thing, but hopefully it worked.

Pete D’Alessandro: Well, skipping ahead a little bit, I know at some point you guys wound up switching off and you got a TV show going for a little while. What was the process like there and how was that different for you from writing features?

Scott Neustadter: This is I think what everyone talks about when they talk about creative differences. What we discovered subsequently is that when you do a TV show it's not something you do on the side of your feature career. If you do have a really good TV show, I think you kind of want to invest your life and your time to this endeavor. The writer becomes kind of the director in television. You can captain the ship, it is your kind of baby, and you shepherd it your way. No one told our pilot director that, and so very quickly we did not see eye to eye on what we thought this should be and we lost every creative battle and eventually just said, “You know what? This isn't worth it and you have this. This is no longer ours.”

But I think that part of it was we had a lot going on. We were doing a lot of other things, and this was something we thought would be a fun thing to do in the meantime and it can't be. You have to really devote your life I think to making the best TV show, and we learned a lot of lessons I think in the process. I love the medium. I think it's like the best place for storytelling right now. We liked everyone involved personally. Professionally, I don't think we got along with some of the people or at least didn't see eye to eye and maybe we just leave it at that.

Pete D’Alessandro: So when you go back to features after that, is there something that you take away from that experience to shape how you write, how you work professionally?

Scott Neustadter: Well, it's so interesting because we have only had the opposite experience in features. Every single feature director, every single feature we have ever been associated with, we were considered part of the process to the point where we were on set every single day. The directors did not have any ego to walk up and go, “Is this line working?” or “Why isn't this feeling like it's supposed to feel?” It was such a collaboration and it was such a beautiful kind of way to do business. The TV world, when we were supposed to actually be in charge, was totally the, “Excuse me, I'm the director. You do what I say.” And we were like, “Well, is anyone going to tell this guy that it’s television?” And no one did, and so it was a really weird thing.

So when you do anything in entertainment, it's a collaboration and best idea wins. There shouldn't really be a lot of ego. There shouldn't be a lot of, “Well, I have to win the fight.” It just should be best idea wins the fight. And it shouldn't even be a fight, it should be a conversation of like, “How are we going to make this as great as we can make it?” That was a surprise.

So all of our feature stuff, we've never had that experience. I was on set every single day at 500 Days of Summer. Weber’s on set every single at Spectacular Now. We both went back and forth for Fault in Our Stars. All of the stuff that we're like super-proud of has collaborations. We can't take credit for it ourselves and neither can anyone else because we all kind of worked together to do this. And I don't know why it wasn’t like that on television. I couldn't tell you, but it certainly wasn’t that one time.

Pete D’Alessandro: Speaking of being on set and the way you guys have been able to work and you've been collaborating and writing and rewriting obviously all through that process, you guys have worked on a lot of stuff that is very low-budget, you know, that five to 15-million-dollar range. What are some of the challenges you guys have had to deal with on the fly in rearranging things for budgets and productions and logistics?

Scott Neustadter: We don’t set out to do that. We can make whatever we've written as a 50-million-dollar movie or as a 200,000-dollar movie, just right language and characters. And we've learned a lot about the movie business and why things are expensive and all that stuff that you probably learn from school that neither one of us ever learned. But yeah, when…500 was made for about seven. We had originally set it in San Francisco because it just seemed like the whole movie’s taking place in this head of this character who is very like pop culture whatever, and so like what’s the most fantastical place to set a movie? We thought San Francisco was a great thing, and then we realized it's the most expensive place to shoot a movie. We're making this for seven million and we would get so much more bang for our buck in, you know, here are 50 choices.

And Mark was like, “LA’s on here. Let's go figure out how to do the LA version.” And so we went downtown and we did the tour of downtown and all the buildings and the old architecture and rewrote the script to reflect LA, and I think that turned out really well and kind of as a love letter to Downtown LA, which is a place that nobody thinks of, and there were a lot of reasons why we really liked that.

We originally were going to do Spectacular Now for about the same budget, and when we finally had to raise the money ourselves we raised about a third of that budget, and so there were a lot of like, “Okay, well, this great scene which takes place at this hotel with a hot tub and this character, we can't have any of those things.”

Pete D’Alessandro: [Laughs]

Scott Neustadter: “We can't cast another person so we got to get rid of that character. Hot tub’s too expensive. Hotel’s too expensive. What else you got?” So we had to learn a lot about repurposing some lines that we loved or some emotional beats in other ways, and that was really kind of a fun exercise. I mean, it shows you that it's doable.

Pete D’Alessandro: Out of curiosity, what was the meat of that scene that wound up coming out of that?

Scott Neustadter: Spectacular Now, Sutter, he is on this kind of journey of like all of his friends are about to graduate high school and move on with their lives and that’s the last thing he wants to do and it's actually kind of terrifying to him because he's not moving on, everyone else is moving on, and what happens? Is he going to turn into the McConaughey from Dazed and Confused? I think that he's getting a little bit of nervous.

There's a scene where he goes to a very lame birthday party at a hotel and he sneaks out he finds some kids who are walking in to the party. One of them is his ex-girlfriend before the movie started, not the ex-girlfriend who’s in the movie And he convinces her to go sneak off with him to the back and they go and find a room with a hot tub and they have this really kind of intimate scene between the two of them where she's like asking him very real questions about his future, and he doesn’t have great answers and he does his usual argument about how we shouldn't be thinking about that stuff. And she thinks it's amazing. She thinks it's really cool. “This is what I always like about you, Sutter.” But at the same time it's getting a little bit…it's not landing right because she's moving on. As much as she says she finds this adorable, it's a little patronizing at this point.

Pete D’Alessandro: Hmm.

Scott Neustadter: So it was an interesting thing, and then we had to figure out how to take some of those lines and move them to other scenes and give them to other characters that it made sense and we had to do some of that stuff. But it was great problem-solving. Once you get to the point where the script is written, you're on set, and then you have to problem-solve, you're in a good place. It means they're making your movie.

Pete D’Alessandro: That's fantastic. Hey, right, that's a pretty good problem to be in.

Scott Neustadter: Yeah, exactly.

Pete D’Alessandro: So as far as adapting a book like Fault in Our Stars versus 500 Days of Summer is a lot of real-life experience. How does that influence the approach and what winds up being different for writing those two very different places of project?

Scott Neustadter: Well, 500 is such a weird example because I was culling from my own experience and I could always…I would write something and Weber would say, “Why’d you do that?” “Because that’s what happened.” And he'd be like, “Okay. No one can argue with that.” Fault in Our Stars, either one of us made a choice that was different from the book. We both had highlighted and written in the margins of our own books. And so when we were dividing up scenes and we would email them back and forth, I might have not included a line that he had highlighted and he would say, “Why didn't you put that line in?” and we talk about it. That’s how the conversation is almost always whenever we're doing these adaptations. And it's great. I think the process works really well for us. We like it.

When it's an original and it's an original that’s not based on my life, the questions are a little different. It's like, okay, well, is that good enough? I mean, I feel like we might be our own worst critics. Everything has to be really great. We challenge each other to that degree. I think that’s why the book thing, it's better for our sanity.

Pete D’Alessandro: Sure.

Scott Neustadter: Adaptation is better for our friendship and our sanity and our working relationship. It's a piece of material you can look at and you can talk about without kind of going into the black hole of, “But isn't this even better or isn't this…?” Like we could go over here, just get crazy.

But we wrote a project that we loved called Underage. It's another upside-down kind of relationship story. It was a really fun kind of a thing for us to do and it's taken like seven years. We have a director now and we have some cast getting involved. It's really exciting but it's like those original ideas, they're really challenging to get any studio to step up to the plate.

Pete D’Alessandro: So who do you guys go to besides each other, obviously, with draft after draft. You've got to be getting notes from I imagine other writers, friends, whatnot?

Scott Neustadter: Yeah, we have our little crack squad of readers that we will send all of our first drafts to. It's a fun thing. It's a mixture of people that we know are going to like everything we do to people who we know are not going to like anything we do to other writers or people who understand the sort of…have been through the system and are kind of guessing what a studio person might say. And my wife used to be a studio executive, is now a TV executive, and she gives amazing notes and is definitely kind of…has a gut feeling about what’s working, what’s not working, what people are going to like, and what they're not going to like, and she's been an awesome kind of lucky fortunate resource for us to have.

Pete D’Alessandro: That’s great.

Scott Neustadter: So we do have our circle of people that we will go to and it's funny because it's a lot of the same exact people as it was nine years ago.

Pete D’Alessandro: So on the flipside, when someone asks you for notes on a script, what kind of stuff do you look at? What do you look for?

Scott Neustadter: I always ask them upfront like, do they want studio notes or do they want like me notes, like what do I think is good or should I give them what I think is going to come down from on high? And the most helpful is usually like to try to predict the note that’s coming down from the studio or the producers or what might someone say who was trying to make the most money on your thing. But if they want writer notes, if they want me to tell them do I think it's special, that's way more fun for me. I'd rather think about it as just a fan because all my favorite movies are all the ones that are like, how did that slip through the system?

Pete D’Alessandro: [Laughs]

Scott Neustadter: Like how did that get past all of the people? But I can do both. I have some experience both as a writer but also as an executive. Yeah, I have a lot people who send me stuff, and I love reading. I do really enjoy it. But I don’t enjoy giving notes to people who don’t actually want them. Sometimes you get a friend asking to read a script and all they want you to say is how great it is, and I have the worst poker face, I really do.

Pete D’Alessandro: Alright. So last question, what one piece of advice would you give to a writer who is trying to get started now? From what you know now, what would you caution people to?

Scott Neustadter: The one piece of advice that I would give…well, I probably have a few. It's not a pleasant thing to say but I do think that living in LA was extremely helpful, and I know that there are a lot of people who are like me who resisted coming to LA. I was 25. I had always said I'm never doing that. I actually kind of like it, but I think it was helpful. I mean, I lived in New York for a while. We tried to write something. This is just where the action is. It's easier to be taken seriously. There are a lot of advantages to being here. I don't think my writing is as good, like I always write better scenes when I leave, but I think it is extremely helpful for aspiring writers to have a presence in LA because, number one, you'll be one degree away from an assistant at an agency after five days of living in LA and you'll make friends, and there are just so many ways to get your thing read when it's ready that I think if you don’t live in LA…you know, now we have the Black List, which is really cool and they're doing a lot of amazing stuff…

Pete D’Alessandro: Yeah.

Scott Neustadter: …that was not there when I started and does level the playing field for sure that get your things read and, if it's good, the cream will rise. But I think living in LA is helpful.

And then the other thing I would say is read a lot. That’s definitely…the more you read, the more you'll see…you know, even if you read terrible things…I was always more inspired by the bad stuff than the good stuff. When I read something amazing, it like sets me back for a week and I can't write. I'm like, “Oh, how could I ever do anything that good?” And then if I read a bunch of not-so-good scripts that are also being taken seriously and talked about, I'll say, “You know what? Okay, the bar is set a little lower. I could make this happen,” and I always found that very inspiring.

Pete D’Alessandro: Oh, that’s actually great.

Scott Neustadter: So I think you should read as many scripts as you possibly can. It'll make your writing better. It'll make your mind…it'll set you at ease a little bit. So I definitely think that’s super-helpful. And it also would…a lot of people ask about rule-breaking, because 500 Days of Summer is like a super-weird…if you ever saw the actual printed script…

Pete D’Alessandro: Sure.

Scott Neustadter: …it's bizarre, and we had so many people when we first started tell us, “Man, one day you guys are going to learn how to write scripts and you're going to be really, really good at it.” And we were like, “Okay, that’s nice to hear.” I had one guy hold the script up from across the room and say, “You see what I mean? This doesn’t look like a script.” And I was like, “Well, what if you stand a little closer? Maybe if you actually read it.”

But yeah, you can break rules, but I think it's really important to have read a lot of scripts and to have understood the rules and why they exist before you can start to mess around with it. New writers are almost always saying, “I want to do something totally unconventional, weird and strange,” which is really, really awesome as long as I understand that you'd better nail it. It better be a homerun. But don’t do it. If you think you can do it, do it. I think that’d be awesome. I'd love to see your movie. If you're going to break every rule, I would love that, so go for it. Just I always sort of recommend having a really good handle on the rules before you start to chip away at them.

Pete D’Alessandro: Well, that sounds like a great place to wrap it up. So Scott, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for doing this.

Scott Neustadter: Thanks for wanting to talk to me.

Pete D’Alessandro: No, that’s great. Thank you so much. Alright, this has been fantastic.

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.