Sometimes all it takes to jumpstart your screenwriting career is someone believing in you. That definitely seems to be the case with writing duo Laura Moss and Brendan J. O'Brien, whose three-time Spirit award-nominated feature film birth/rebirth, a modern reimagining of Frankenstein, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023.

After being accepted into the Sundance Labs, they began to see their own work in a new light, saying, "We were suddenly surrounded by all of these accomplished and talented people and they were treating our made-up ideas with such thoughtfulness and consideration." 

We got the chance to speak with Moss and O'Brien about their work, their craft, and the value of finding a community that champions your creativity.

Final Draft: Tell us a little about yourself.

Laura Moss and Brendan J. O'Brien: We were working in the film industry, below-the-line, for over ten years before becoming writers, but we’ve known each other long before that. We met in college, dated, fell in love, got married, got divorced, and only after that started writing professionally together. It’s actually great because we never shy away from thorny creative conversations. We’ve had pretty much every type of difficult conversation you can have.

FD: How did your career get started?

BO: Laura and I both worked as below-the-line crew and during the WGA strike in 2007, we found ourselves aggressively unemployed and decided to write a short film together that we could shoot with friends on weekends. The end result was a far too long, very silly mockumentary that looked back on the fictional “Zombie Rights Movement” of the late 1960s.   

LM: It was broad and ridiculous, but we immediately clicked as writers and realized that we have very different strengths and can make each other’s work a lot better.

FD: When did you start writing?

LM: The first non-academic writing I ever did was as part of group/devised theater pieces. I’ve always been a collaborative writer; I like sparking off other people and building together on ideas. 

BO: Going back to my teens I would write fragments of movies and plays that I never had the discipline to finish or the courage to show another person. I loved looking at people on the bus or in a bar and then just spinning off about what was going on in the conversations I couldn’t hear. As silly as it sounds I do think when I really started writing professionally my people-watching compulsion gave me a leg up in writing dialogue.

FD: Do you have a writing process?

LM: We start with a lot of freewriting, a lot of discussion about what is deep about the idea or premise we are digging into, what really speaks to us. We come up with an outline together, then we work apart -- separate computers, separate workspaces -- for most of the rest of the process.

BO: Usually I’ll take the outline we come up with and write the first “vomit” draft of the project. It will be overwrought and unwieldy -  characters speaking subtext, bricks of action lines just to get from point to point - but it gives us a starting place. After that Laura will take a scalpel to it and cut it waaaay down and then we’ll throw the draft back and forth, arguing until we get it to a place that’s lean and something we’re excited about.  

Judy Reyes in Birth/Rebirth (2023)

FD: How has your writing changed over time?

BO: I’m less precious in the early phases of the process than I used to be. When I was younger, I was pretty consumed by imposter syndrome and thought “real” writers just sat at the keyboard, the muse moved through them and then a work of staggering genius came out. It took a while for me to realize that most of the time, the work of the work is very much “work”. You put in your hours. You get better over time. Some days are better than others, but every day that you’re working you’re exercising the muscles you need to do this as a career. 

LM: On a technical level, our system for keeping the bigger perspective on a feature script has really evolved; a task that felt completely overwhelming to us at first.  We have a bullet point outline, a document that no one else sees, which we constantly update to reflect the script as it evolves. When we receive feedback, we plug the notes we agree with into that outline, so when we go back and rewrite we can methodically tackle our pass.

FD: What do you think was the most pivotal moment in your writing career?

LM/BO: When the script for our feature ‘birth/rebirth’ was accepted into the Sundance labs. Not just the stamp of approval that came with that (which was certainly huge and opened a lot of doors) but more so being in the labs themselves.

We were suddenly surrounded by all of these accomplished and talented people and they were treating our made-up ideas with such thoughtfulness and consideration. We realized that we needed to treat our work the same way.  Everything became real in a way that was terrifying and exciting all at once. 

FD: What is your favorite thing that you’ve written?

LM/BO: Our short film ‘Fry Day’ was the first time that we achieved the result we had in our minds when we put pen to paper. A lot of that was because of the painstaking research that went into the screenplay.

It’s set in Starke, Florida, in 1989, and we spent a lot of time down there doing visual and historical research, and most importantly talking and listening to people from the region, both for their style and the substance of what mattered to them. The biggest compliment we’ve gotten is that folks from that region can’t believe the film was made by Northerners.

Marin Ireland and Judy Reyes in Birth/Rebirth (2023)

FD: What is your favorite thing that someone else has written?

LM: I recently had the pleasure of finally seeing The Beaver Trilogy on the big screen at the Nitehawk Theater here in Brooklyn. It’s a cult classic; one of my favorite films, and a masterclass in the ways that tone and perspective shifts can fundamentally alter a story.

BO: The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh. It is one of the most violent, hilarious, upsetting, and beautiful things ever written. It is so simple in the structure - there’s just four people talking - but there’s not a false beat. It never slows, never drags. It's like a perfect piece of music.

FD: Do you have any advice for someone looking to break into screenwriting?

LM: Be prolific. Write many things, and often. Don’t rely on just one big idea.

BO: Don’t be afraid of writing the bad version of your script. You have to start somewhere and it very seldom will come out fully formed on the first pass. It’s a process to get a project where you want it and it takes time.

FD: Do you have a preferred writing snack?

LM: Homemade kale Chips, extra salty with a squeeze of lemon.

BO: Iced coffee. Lots of iced coffee. 

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Laura Moss and Brendan J. O'Brien are NYC-based filmmakers who have been making movies together since 2009. Their work has been cited in both the Zombie Movie Encyclopedia and the London Review of Books and can be seen on the Criterion Channel, Hulu, and Shudder. Their feature film, "birth/rebirth", a modern reimagining of the Frankenstein story, premiered at Sundance in 2023 and was nominated for three Independent Spirit awards.