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 the podcast click here. To listen to other podcasts visit podcasts.finaldraft.com. 

Pete D’Alessandro: You're listening to the Final Draft Insider View, a podcast where we talk to you about screenwriting and screenwriters. I'm your host, Pete D’Alessandro, and today one of the screenwriters we're talking to is Dean DeBlois. He is best known for How to Train Your Dragon 1 and 2 and Lilo and Stitch. He has also directed several of these and been nominated for just a few Oscars for all these. So we wish him the best of luck as the new Oscar season comes through, but Dean, thank you so much for being here.

Dean DeBlois: Thank you for having me. It's fun.

Pete D’Alessandro: So what I wanted to start with was, how did you get your first job in animation?

Dean DeBlois: Well, I went to college in Canada, Sheridan College, they offered a classical animation course and I decided to try it out over there. They did a summer school program so tried it for a summer, really loved it, managed to get a job at a local TV animation studio during the year and they made allowances for me to go back and complete my three-year program. So it was…

Pete D’Alessandro: Wow.

Dean DeBlois: Yeah, jumped into that when I was 18 and graduated at 20 and was hired out of school to go work for a feature animation studio at the time, which was in Ireland, led by Don Bluth. He's one of the famous Disney defectors who had started a studio of his own.

Pete D’Alessandro: Sure. So when you were studying back then animation was probably not anything like animation is today, I got to imagine…

Dean DeBlois: Yeah, they had a computer animation department but it was, yeah, it was just blossoming technology at the time. I took the classical animation program. And so I could always draw, I wanted to be a comic book artist, and classical animation kind of spoke to all of my aspirations because I could draw, I could write stories, I could design characters and worlds and lay them out exactly as I saw them, and with animation you could do that but in movement, with life and speak to a really broad audience, a worldwide audience.

Pete D’Alessandro: When did you really become interested in telling stories?

Dean DeBlois: It dates all the way back to my early years, and I loved comic books as I said so I was always dreaming up my own stories. And then, one of the first films I saw in the movie theatres was The Empire Strikes Back and that changed a lot for me because I had seen Star Wars but The Empire Strikes Back just managed to take everything that I loved about that world and dial it up in every way – the stakes, the personalities, just the inventiveness of the worlds and the creatures. It was fantastic, and so I started writing my own fan fiction at that point and did a lot of drawing, but it certainly sparked something in me.

Pete D’Alessandro: And then you went on to animate for a long time for a couple of different places. How would you make that transition to Disney at that point because you wound up as head of story at some point?

Dean DeBlois: Yeah, I was Canadian, so I needed to establish myself with a few years of work experience at the feature animation level in order to be considered by Disney, because it would mean that they would have to petition me for a special talent Visa. So during my time at the Don Bluth Studios I figured out really quickly that animation wasn’t really the path I wanted to go down. I wanted to be closer to the story, and so I targeted the story department as my end goal because I know that those people were doing as much writing as they were drawing. They would be often given sequences from a film that might be very lightly described or the pages might not be fully developed and so it was up to that story artist to really work with character development and pacing and editing and cinematography. And so it's kind of logical that most animation directors come from a storyboarding background just because it's kind of a proving ground for those skills.

Pete D’Alessandro: Sure, sure, and I'm sure a development ground for those skills as well.

Dean DeBlois: Absolutely. So when I started at Disney I was hired into the story department on Mulan and that was a five-year journey of learning how they did it, so as many lessons about how not to develop a movie as there were how to develop a movie.

Pete D’Alessandro: So what kind of lessons were you learning specifically? I mean, what wrong turns and right turns do you remember making along the way back then?

Dean DeBlois: Well, definitely in the right turns category I think there were—the Disney way of working is kind of communal. They have a team of story artists, a head of story, often the writers were in the room, and then you have the director and the producer, and it's sort of an open forum. Everybody can throw out an idea, there are no feelings to be hurt, people approach it without an ego, and so you can be just really open about how you feel about the characters, how the story’s developing. And that was very different from my experience at the Don Bluth studio where story was pretty much controlled by Don Bluth himself for better or worse, and in often cases like for the films that I worked on for the worse, I think, because those stories just needed a lot of development that they didn't get. So I loved that part. It definitely taught me to be good in the room, to offer opinions without being a downer, to be supportive and also just critical in an honest way but also in a way that is additive and doesn’t shut the room down.

Pete D’Alessandro: How do you manage that? Because that’s a really tricky skill for a lot of writers to master, being critical without stepping on someone else’s ideas.

Dean DeBlois: For me, it all boils down to the wording that you use. I always approach an opinion with “I feel” or “I wish that” or “I really like this and I wish it could be that much more.” So it's usually taking something, placing a compliment in there somewhere, [laughs] recognizing the intent, and then surrounding it with support, saying, “I think it would be stronger if x,” and that tends to work for me. And also just being cognizant of the people in the room and not monopolizing the story session by contributing too much, just knowing if you've spoken enough and you can hand over the talking stick to someone else.

Pete D’Alessandro: Right, right. And on that level, where are the other people coming from in that room? And there are other probably animators and people with an animation background, but who else is in that room?

Dean DeBlois: Well, they tend to be…story people at Disney traditionally came from a…they either had experience as a journeyman story artist or many of them that I worked with came up through the story trainee program, and in that program they actually teach people to develop themselves as writers as much as they are cinematographers with a pencil and paper. So they have to understand all of the arts that go into it because in animation the storyboards are very detailed, a lot of the acting is put into the storyboards. And so it's not just a setup for a shot, it actually stands in place once edited together as the living, breathing film until the animation is done.

So I think a lot of people did come from the trainee program as I remember, and then some people were just…they’ve been doing it a long time or they'd come from other studios with that kind of a background. But I determined pretty quickly that the ones that succeed and are still working in that format today are the ones that were very versatile and put as much as they could into their storyboards, both in the writing but also just in establishing the camera and establishing the kind of look and the acting, the emotion of the scene. There's a sense that if you could put all of that into your sketches, then you were inspiring departments down the line as opposed to handing them something that they'd have to completely reinvent because you were too lazy to add background or to suggest a camera move or perform it with any sense of cinematography or acting. You have to get up in front of a room and pitch it, and that was always intimidating but it was a great skill to have because pitching as you know is a difficult thing to do in any circumstance but being able to sort of I guess simplify the ideas so that as you're pitching them it would unfold almost real-time as though the people in the room are watching a film. I found that to be a really invaluable skill going forward.

Pete D’Alessandro: And it sounds like the storyboards themselves, the drawings themselves would then have to kind of pitch themselves down the hallway to everybody else after that.

Dean DeBlois: Yeah, yeah, they would. I mean, generally we would do it several times. We would pitch to our colleagues in the story department and then to the director and producer, sometimes the head of the studio. And then there would be a third one. We called it a turnover. It's when you would pitch the storyboards to the larger team, all of the department heads that were going to help execute it. And so that was a chance for everybody to weigh in and say, “Oh, this is too complicated,” or “How are we going to pull that off?” but just get a real sense of overall what the scene’s about.

Pete D’Alessandro: So at this time you were at Disney, you were probably working tons of hours, tons of time. Was there time for you to write on the side on your own?

Dean DeBlois: Yeah. Very early on I saw the quality of the writing that was going into a lot of the films and the quality of the writers that they were hiring and I just felt as though I could do as good or better, and so very quickly I bought a copy of Final Draft and I started reading a lot of books about screenwriting, attending seminars like Robert McKee’s Story, and just putting together my own little toolkit of questions and story development concepts that I would put to work on my own ideas. So by the time I left Disney I had about 20 ideas that I was working on and I realized that probably about two-thirds of those lent themselves more readily to live-action films, and that’s why after Lilo and Stitch I left to set up a few live-action projects to write and direct.

Pete D’Alessandro: What goes with that? I mean, you start to set these up, you have an idea – do you have a script at that point for anything or it's all just a set of ideas?

Dean DeBlois: Well, I sold three projects and each one was sold on a pitch with artwork, and two of them were to Disney, one was to Universal. It was a good 10- or 15-minute pitch of what the story was, who the characters were, and then artwork to support it so they had the right idea in mind as they were visualizing what I was describing. In each case, there was a lot of enthusiasm in the purchase, and then came the actual writing and the whole development of the script. And I realized in those years that I spent on the live action side of it, time is of the essence, and I think if you have a concept, if you're pitching a concept and you're not submitting a draft with it, you've got to be really quick about writing that draft because the enthusiasm and the certainty surrounding the project dies off very quickly.

Pete D’Alessandro: How quick is very quickly?

Dean DeBlois: Well, I would say you got to be ready to go in the space of a year. I went through several drafts and taking in all of the development executives’ notes, but what happened at Disney and the same thing happened at Universal is the presidents of production who bought the projects who were so behind the ideas and believed in them wholeheartedly, they were replaced by new presidents of production who wanted nothing to do with their predecessors’ slate, so it just immediately threw every project into stasis. And it's really frustrating because at that point I had one film that had a start date. I mean, we had an approved budget. We were going through all of the logistics of shooting the film in the space of an afternoon. It all went into a tailspin and there was nothing I could really do to resurrect it because once it's considered tainted, the previous regime, it really is hard to I think reenergize the project and garner new interest.

Pete D’Alessandro: So after some of this live action stuff you eventually make it to a point where you're getting ready to make How to Train Your Dragon. Can you talk about the beginning of that?

Dean DeBlois: Sure. Well, How to Train Your Dragon came on the heels of I would say five years of setting up these projects, writing the drafts, reaching the disappointing ends, and I was working for Universal at the time on a project that I had sold to them. Again, the president who bought it was replaced by somebody who seemed to exhibit very little interest in it, so by the time we got through all of the development executive notes and we had a draft ready to submit to Donna Langley, she had no prior investment or interest in it, and so it sat there. And I was waiting for a couple of months, is this going to happen or not, and my collaborator on Lilo and Stitch and who I'd also worked with and met on Mulan, Chris Sanders, he called me up and he said, “Well, listen, Jeffrey Katzenberg called me over the weekend. They have this project called How to Train Your Dragon and it's based on a book. They’ve been trying to adapt very faithfully to the book and two years later it's not working, and so I've been asked to jump off of The Croods,” which was a film he was developing at the time, “and jump on to How to Train Your Dragon, but I told them that I would only do it if you're available.” And I was sitting here in Seattle waiting on news from Universal that didn't seem to be coming, so I said, “Well, how soon are we talking?” and he said, “Can you be here Monday morning?”

So it was jumping on the deep end for sure. There was just over a year left and they wanted a page-one reconceive, so we had to take a lot of the elements that had already been built, sets and characters, and repurpose them into a new story that kept the spirit of the book but was a complete narrative departure from it. And that was, yeah, that was a hurried and kind of frenetic experience but one that was really validating, I thought. And it felt great to be actively working on a film that was going to see the light of day again.

Pete D’Alessandro: So what were some of the biggest changes, if you remember, in making that big page-one, as you said, revisitation?

Dean DeBlois: Having read the book, there were two relationships in the book in regard to humans and dragons. A good two-thirds of the book is kind of a symbiotic one – dragons and Vikings live together in relative harmony, and the story was about 10-year-old Vikings going out to select eggs from a cave which they then kind of nurture and hatch and out comes a dragon. And the kids are tasked with training the dragons, teaching them to do tricks and such, and the tradition is to yell at them until they submit, but Hiccup being the runt of his tribe, he ends up picking the egg that yields the runt dragon, and instead of yelling at it he's kind to it and it ends up in the end doing far better tricks than any of the other dragons can do.

And then in the last third of the book there's a really grumpy dragon that's awakened and he comes to the island looking for trouble, and it's up to Hiccup and his tiny Chihuahua-sized talking dragon, Toothless, to save the day. And so we thought, “Well, the Vikings either need to be friendly and symbiotic with their dragons or enemies,” and we decided to choose the story of the first Viking to befriend a dragon and thereby ending an age-old war. We thought that had bigger tropes of a fantasy adventure and that was kind of the request from the start from Jeffrey Katzenberg. I sat down in the room with him on the first day and he said, “Look, guys, I want three things. I want a father-son story, I want a big David and Goliath ending, and I want a Harry Potter tone. Give me those three things and I don't care what you keep from the book, it's still going to be called How to Train Your Dragon, still has characters named Hiccup and Toothless and Stoic, but at this point we need some reinvention so go,” and those became the fence posts and…

Pete D’Alessandro: Okay, so that brings me to a question I would like to talk about because for me, as a viewer, tone always seems to be the most important thing. I mean, that’s the part that really makes me want to watch something over and over and over again, and I think you guys really nailed the tone on this. So when you're writing, when you're developing, how do you keep that stuff in mind? How do you shoot for that particular fence post?

Dean DeBlois: I don't know that you can, to be honest. It's just our sensibility. I think we, Chris Sanders and I both, we crack each other up all the time. We certainly love comedy and films, but we're also very moved by poignant moments in films and those are the ones that kind of shaped us from an early age, moments like Dumbo’s mother rocking Dumbo to sleep from the bars of her cage or the rescuers…Penny sitting dejected on her bed after the adoptive family left with the pretty girl. Those sorts of things just had such a resonance to them and we’re very conscious of wanting to be honest and emotional with moments in the movie as well.

So it's a balance, and anytime that we feel like we're getting too heavy we recognize that we need to lighten the tone a little bit with a little humor, but at the same time I don't think we've ever been inclined to veer away from something that would be daring or emotional because of that when it's just a matter of being I think cognizant of the audience and knowing that there will be plenty of kids in the theatres as well as adults and making sure that we speak to both of them.

Pete D’Alessandro: So what goes on as you're getting through the first movie, the first How to Train Your Dragon? Because at some point this winds up being a pretty big success. I mean, what were the steering forces there? Were there still a lot of notes and a lot of work and a process or did you guys kind of get to do what you want?

Dean DeBlois: Well, we knew that we had to work quickly and I had in the two years prior to that…had become part of Blake Snyder’s writer’s group—there were five of us—and that was due to having taken one of his workshops. I read his book. I thought the book was very resonant to me. It actually, when I looked back at the films that I'd worked on and anything that actually fell into place correctly, seemed to line up exactly with the beats and kind of the theories in Blake’s Save the Cat book.

Anyway, I took one of his beats. He used to do these weekend workshops where you would work out the beats of any story, and I'd taken in a concept and kind of worked through it and got to know him very well. And I think because of my experience being in a Disney story room and learning to be additive and encouraging and to work well with a group, he really responded to that in the group setting that we were in and he asked me to be part of his writer’s group, which was an honor and very exciting, and I got to continue learning from him.

So fast-forward to that first week on How to Train Your Dragon, I'd passed along the book to Chris and he really responded to it as well. We used some of that sort of plot-building structural beat ideas from his books just to lay out this new structure for the film, and then from there we divided up the scenes and anything that we had a particular liking for we would grab and develop it into a scene, and then trade pages back and forth. We had a chance to criticize, correct or in any way sort of support each other’s writing.

Pete D’Alessandro: So it sounds like you guys weren't really even necessarily working in a linear fashion then.

Dean DeBlois: Well, we were in the sense that we went right back to a beat outline and from there we flushed it out into a quick treatment, and then from there we just divided up scenes and conquered as best we could. There was definitely time spent on the outline.

Pete D’Alessandro: How did it wind up that you became…I mean, you wound up working on How to Train Your Dragon 2. When did that wind up coming together?

Dean DeBlois: Well, while we were doing the mix for How to Train Your Dragon 1, we were up at Skywalker Ranch. I'd been approached by Jeffrey Katzenberg to start thinking up ideas in our hopeful anticipation of the film being a success, coming up with ideas for a sequel, and yeah, on a little picnic table overlooking a baseball diamond at Skywalker Ranch I read out the first outline for the sequel, but I did it from the standpoint that this should be the middle act of a three-act story and when I did pitch these ideas I talked about it as being two more films, because I have this aversion to sequels in general in that a lot of them don’t seem to further the story and they don’t seem necessary.

Pete D’Alessandro: Right.

Dean DeBlois: Too oftentimes they recycle the same material or the character’s problem just seems trivial because the first film did a good job of taking care of whatever that hero problem was. So I realized that if we tell a larger story about the coming of age of Hiccup and the eventual loss of dragons, then there's a real arc to that and the second film was going to represent the meat of the story.

Pete D’Alessandro: Yeah, I mean, Hiccup’s arc doesn’t start over as it does…you know, he's not back at the same place in the first movie, he starts from a place where we got him to in the first movie.

Dean DeBlois: Yeah, yeah.

Pete D’Alessandro: It's not the same person at the beginning of each movie.

Dean DeBlois: Most any screenwriting course or book will talk about how important it is to establish your main character’s problem, you know, who’s the guy, what’s his problem. And with Hiccup, at the end of the first film, he really didn't have a problem. He was the town hero. He had managed to win the affection of his father and the respect of the town, the attention of the girl that he pined for, and he landed a super-cool dragon and ended an age-old war, so there was really nothing for him to complain about. But by fast-forwarding five years in his life and meeting him as a 20-year-old, suddenly I found myself in a position where we could tell a story that had a universal theme to it again and a new rite of passage, which is that moment of stepping into adulthood with trepidation because you don’t quite know who you are but you feel the pressure of everyone around you tell you who you are. So from his father to his community, there's a sense of what he needs to become and he doesn’t feel that in himself yet. So the story is an exploration of that sort of desire to get to the bottom of who he is.

Pete D’Alessandro: Yeah, that really rings true.

Dean DeBlois: Thank you. Yeah, I really felt strongly that unless we could come up with another universal problem and one that didn't feel grafted on or trivial that we would end up in that trap of just having a very unnecessary unimportant sequel.

Pete D’Alessandro: Mm-hmm. The more nitty-gritty of some of this, I'd love to hear how will you guys get to rewrite and readjust as you're making pieces of what’s going to be the final movie? I mean, writing and animation have kind of a back and forth cycle. How do you guys get to steer and course-correct along the way?

Dean DeBlois: Well, I think the benefit of animation over live action is that we make the film…we edit the film first. So we take the storyboards that are put together based on the script that I've written and we sit with the editor and we cut those boards together and assemble like a radio play of the film. There are voices in place, there's music, we have special effects, but the images are still images sort of standing in for the animation, and it becomes a blueprint for the film. We can watch it as a group, we can even test it with an outside audience, and we get a sense of whether or not the film’s playing, is it emotional, is it funny, is it well-paced.

And from there we make corrections. A lot of rewrites happen at the story reel stage, and generally we'll select a scene in the beginning that we think collectively is working really well and that will become the first scene to go into production, because in animation all of the money gets spent really when you engage the larger team and start producing these scenes.

Pete D’Alessandro: Sure. So you really start with what you feel the most likely pieces of the movie to be in the movie, start with that and build out?

Dean DeBlois: Exactly, exactly. If we go all the way back to Mulan, I had storyboarded a sequence in which Mulan makes the decision to kind of defy tradition, cut her hair, dress in her father’s armor, and steal off into the night in order to protect him so that he won't have to go to the war and certainly die. So it was always going to be a moment in the story. It's essential for the legend. And in the script it was just a paragraph, but I was left to my devices to come up with a largely visual scene in which Mulan makes her decision. That became the first sequence to go into production because we knew no matter what we do to her personality or however the plot comes together that moment has to happen.

Pete D’Alessandro: Okay. There's no way around that.

Dean DeBlois: Yeah. [Laughs]

Pete D’Alessandro: Sure, sure. Can you remember anything from How to Train Your Dragon as far as along that story reel, at least the second movie, what did you wind up course-correcting? What notes did you get from the group as a whole that you showed…what changes did you guys make on the fly there?

Dean DeBlois: Well, one that I remember distinctly was, this doesn’t always happen but we had a very pat third act. It all came together, just felt very traditional, sort of the happy ending with no scars or scratches and everything just wrapped up a little too finely. And so it was Jeffrey Katzenberg actually in one of our meetings who just said, “You’ve been bold and inventive in moments throughout the story, but when we get to this third act it just feels like a generic ending.” So he had pitched the idea, what if Toothless dies? What if he doesn’t make it out? And we were thinking, “Well, wow, that's so close to the credits, like you're just going to send the audience out in tears,” and it felt to us like a loss that people wouldn’t recover from because we had managed to make this character quite endearing.

So I had pitched out the idea of Hiccup losing his leg, suffering some kind of injury that allowed him to come out of this final battle with some form of loss, and in this case it was one that would mirror Toothless’ so made them a little more symbiotic but also spoke to I think the consequence of the world that we had set up. And people were nervous about it but we decided to test it with an audience, and it was only in story sketch but the focus group afterward had been very vocal about it. They rose to defend it and parents were saying like, “I really hope that's in the final version. I like what it says.” And then there was a little boy who put up his hand, and I remember this distinctly, he said, “It's sad because Hiccup lost something, but then he gains so much more.” I said, “Wow, okay.” They get it.

Pete D’Alessandro: Better than I could have put it, yeah. That’s great.

Dean DeBlois: And yeah, it was neat because I ran into Jeffrey Katzenberg in the lobby by the concession stand after we had tested it and he said to me, “That moment of Hiccup losing his leg is half of the movie. It's half of the effect that you're left with.” And so I felt like that was a late change and a victory.

The one thing, the one alteration to that was we showed it to Steven Spielberg who checks in on the films every now and then, offers his opinion, and he said, “I love the moment. I just wish Toothless was in the room with Hiccup when he woke up and so he could take that first step with him and be there to support him,” and we thought that was beautiful and absolutely included it.

Pete D’Alessandro: Again, that really rings true in the end and that really works.

Dean DeBlois: Yeah, yeah. It set a tone for the franchise, I think, that allows us to go to a more daring place than most any other animated film that I'd worked on.

Pete D’Alessandro: Sure.

Dean DeBlois: So I definitely welcome that. I was particularly proud of it and they hopefully continue that tradition with the second and third one.

Pete D’Alessandro: Without spoiling too much, is there anything you can say about the third one at this point or is it too early?

Dean DeBlois: Well, it's certainly early. I'm working on it now. The big aspiration that I have is to line up with Cressida Cowell’s book series. The opening line of her first book is Hiccup as an adult late in his years saying, “There were dragons when I was a boy,” and he goes on to describe the different kinds of and how amazing they were, but just the suggestion that he now lives in a world without dragons, there was something really bittersweet and emotional and compelling about that. And she talked about how in her final book she was going to explain what happened to them and why they are no more, and even though our narratives are quite different I think that idea’s really inspiring partly because it just evokes like a “no, don’t do that” kind of response from fans, and I think therein lies the challenge, like, can you explain it in such a way that it feels like the necessary and the poetic and right end to the story. So that's the challenge ahead of me. I think the rest of the storyline really is about Hiccup rising to become the wise leader that he's destined to be.

Pete D’Alessandro: Mm-hmm. So for how you guys work, the process you guys have, I know that in How to Train Your Dragon 2 you had a totally new set of tools as far as software and animating, can you talk about that and the Apollo software that DreamWorks has and how that's different?

Dean DeBlois: Yeah, we had heard at the studio that they were developing like an overhaul on all of our tools and this has been going on for about five years, and then as we embarked on How to Train Your Dragon 2 they informed us that we would be the first team to use them. So that came with a certain amount of apprehension because we thought, oh no, like we have this ambitious film ahead of us and we're counting our pennies from the start, but now is new technology, new tools, are they going to hamper us or sort of hinder us in pulling this off? Like, what if there are bugs and what if it doesn’t work? So there was a great apprehension heading into it.

However, once the animators started using the new animation tool—it's called Primo, the lighting tool’s called Torch—they discovered that it was completely freeing them up in the sense that they were able to just kind of work with their hands again. A lot of these animators were classically trained animators used to drawing and creating their animation with pencil and paper, and now here they were working with Cintiq tablets, which are monitors that you can draw on, working with a stylus and manipulating the characters in real time, changing expressions, creating poses and doing their animation that way, which is so much more creatively intuitive versus how they used to work, which was a whole lot of spreadsheets and pull-down menus and it was really tedious to watch.

Pete D’Alessandro: Yeah, I can imagine.

Dean DeBlois: It took a lot of time. And then they had to wait and render the results, and so it just dampened creativity in general. It turns out that the tools are fantastic because not only were they easy to use and liberating for the artists, they were extremely powerful. So we could have multiple characters onscreen with all of their details and they could manipulate them and see the effects in real time as opposed to having to turn everything off in the previous version of the software.

Pete D’Alessandro: I got to imagine that's going to help you a lot as a director. You can give someone feedback there on the spot and then immediately see if that feedback is correct or not.

Dean DeBlois: Yeah, yeah. To compare to live action, I sit down with the actor or the animator and we talk about the intent of the scene, and instead of rolling cameras and doing take one they go away and they spend a few days working it out and they would come back to me and say, “Okay, here's my take one.” And it didn't do away with that process, I mean the animators still go back to their desks and work on a scene, but you tend to see it turned around a lot faster. They might be back in the same day or the next day with a blocked out version of their shot and you can talk about refinements at that point and whether the intent is clear and correct. So it was much more iterative in that sense and I think it's the way forward for sure.

Pete D’Alessandro: So before we wrap up, I just want to see if there's something that you can offer the writers out there who are inspired by your movies and if there's something you would tell them to do on their own to improve their writing, to advance their careers.

Dean DeBlois: Well, I think a lot of it is just not necessarily waiting for opportunity but continuing to create and be ready with samples. I went to plenty of meetings where people would like the idea I was pitching in the room but immediately they'd want to read something else, and so I think writers should always have a couple of specs on hand that they're really proud of and that show kind of a diversity of tone and subject matter. I think that's really important.

And then also, there are so many doors that will be closed in your face and I think you just have to be persistent about it. Like on Lilo and Stitch, I know animation is kind of an anomaly for a lot of writers, but Chris Sanders and I started out on this project that was already considered a little strange for Disney, just on concept, but it was given kind of a B budget and a B time schedule and we had less time and less money to make it. So for the first year it was just Chris Sanders and I locked away in a room working on this story, and we wrote our screenplay but we were animators, we came from an animation background and we drew, and at Disney there was a clear delineation between writers and those who drew. And so we were constantly being told like, “Okay, you can have fun in the room and do what you want, but we will hire a real screenwriter at some point, just be warned.”

And as the process went on, the writing was good enough and of a singular enough voice that they soon realized that if they brought another writer into the mix they were going to spoil that. The charm and the tone and everything that was Lilo and Stitch was coming out of that singular voice. So by the time credits rolled on the finished film, Chris Sanders and I were now official screenwriters, but we only really achieved that by just being persistent, and I think a lot of the time that's just the situation that you have to endure. A lot of people are going to tell you that no you're not ready or you're not right for this job, and I think you have to handle a certain amount of rejection but continue to be persistent because people tend not to reach out to you, you have to go knocking on those doors and just anticipate that 90% of the doors will be closed in your face.

Pete D’Alessandro: And just that play that 10% and…

Dean DeBlois: Yeah. Tenacity, it's so important. I think having those samples to back you up, but I think the tenacity of being out there and constantly inquiring is also very important. And I also think just keep up your education. I continue to read screenwriting books and take seminars just looking for any little kernel that will make it a little easier going forward.

Pete D’Alessandro: That’s great.

Dean DeBlois: And I've picked up a great…like my personal toolbox, as it were, for writing is an amalgam of so many different screenwriting gurus and books, and if I hear a trick of the trade that resonates with me I pick it up. And one doesn’t cancel the other, they're just different ways of looking at a problem.

I always recommend the Save the Cat! books to anyone who's starting out who's looking for a little guidance because they're very practical. And they're a fun read, but they offer questions that can get you out of a lot of story problems. Whereas something like Robert McKee’s Story, great as it is, it's a lot of theory with not a lot of practical applications, you know? I love the questions that are put forth, just the simple ones. What is like essential and so important and so often overlooked are some of the basic questions like, who is your hero and what is his or her problem? What does he most want? What does he most need and how does pursuing what he wants eventually get him what he needs, hopefully in a very unexpected way? Like just answering those questions can just solve 90% of the story’s problems. There are so many important little very useful nuggets out there to be found.

Pete D’Alessandro: Well, thank you, Dean, so much. This has been fantastic.

Dean DeBlois: Oh, thank you.

Pete D’Alessandro: You've been great.

Dean DeBlois: Yeah, happy to talk about it any time.

Pete D’Alessandro: Alright, thanks. And thank you to all those who are listening out there, and if you like what you're hearing please leave us a review on iTunes or wherever you're grabbing your podcasts. Thanks so much.

Dean DeBlois: Great, thank you.

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