So what do we got? What's our first question, Jesse? Hi, the first question is from Julian. Julian says, I intend in university for a brief period to get a degree in film, but dropped out. I want to be a screenwriter, but I currently work in the service industry. So my days can be long and tiresome.

At 20 years old, I feel incredibly behind in my writing. Was dropping out of university a bad decision? Well, Julian, first of all, I think dropping out or not dropping out. This is a red herring when it comes to the specific question of screenwriting and jumpstarting your screenwriting career.

I think there's a lot to be discussed about dropping out of college, whether you should or shouldn't. But I don't think it really matters either way, good or bad. When it comes to this very specific question of are you behind in your screenwriting career and what would you need to do?

So I'm not a screenwriter myself. I don't have a specific background in it. I am a big fan of movies. I am a big fan of the movie industry. I know screenwriters. I'm going to try to pull together from stuff I have learned to try to offer you some advice here.

I have two things to recommend, Julian. One, surround yourself. By other artists. I think this is critical in the movie industry, particularly if you're going to be a screenwriter, you have to be around other people with high artistic aspirations in this field. If you're trying to do this in isolation, this how do I write a movie that gets made?

You're going to produce things that are formulaic. You're not going to find traction. You have to aim incredibly high and be around people who are really pushing themselves. You see this again and again. When you look back through the personal stories, in particular of directors or director writers that that really break out.

They're surrounded by other aspirational film industry types. They're pushing each other. They're learning from each other. They have big aims. I'm just reading right now a Francis Ford Coppola or Coppola, Coppola, Coppola biography and about that generation of filmmakers. They came from various places, but they were all with each other.

So he had George Lucas. They were very he was very close with George Lucas. And then that crew met up with the USC crew. So you had, you know, Scorsese. You had Brian De Palma. Then they connected with Spielberg, who didn't didn't get in the USC, but also had a deal with Universal at, you know, 19.

So it didn't really matter. So it's Spielberg at the Palma. You have Scorsese, Coppola. You had Lucas. They're all hanging out and pushing each other and working with each other. And out of that came, you know, really interesting, really interesting work. JJ Abrams has a sort of interesting similar story.

So surround yourself by other artists, people who are obsessed with this. I just went down a a PTA rabbit hole, Paul Thomas Anderson rabbit hole. Same thing. You see him at Sundance Labs as a really young, really young filmmaker just surrounded by all of this talent to surround yourself by talent.

If you're not, it's not going to work. And then when you write aim really high, does the other thing I picked up, even with screenwriters that you associate later on with this seems like a commercial blockbuster movie. So if we're thinking, I'm thinking JJ Abrams, maybe go back and think about John Milius.

They were artistically really ambitious, and they were working on and they would work on scripts that were really stretches novelistic, literary, interesting nuance of character and pacing. Your your produced works are going to fall below where you're aiming. So if you come into the industry thinking like, how do I write an action movie like one I just saw, like a Marvel movie or something, you're going to fall below that standard and do nothing.

But when you come into the industry with interesting artistic stuff, you show real skill. That is what is going to develop your skill. That's what's going to catch attention, even if the things you end up getting produced later are farther down the ladder. Now, 50 percent of what I'm saying here, Julian, might be nonsense.

Again, I'm not in the movie industry. I did, though, have an interesting conversation once with the head of story at Paramount. So it was someone who doesn't write scripts, but helps develop all the scripts that Paramount is actually going to work on. And I learned a lot from that conversation.

But basically, you have to be if you're going to succeed in screenwriting, people have to see you as having this spark, this artistic genius. Right. And then they're happy to have some with an artistic genius, you know, right. Take a hack at the next Guardian of the Galaxy franchise.

But you got to you have to come in with this spark. So aim really high. Be very aspirational, very ambitious. Surround yourself with other artists. That's what matters. Whether you dropped out of college or not, doesn't matter for that specific thing. So that'd be my advice. How would you suggest that Julian balances it with his service industry job?

Like, say, say he works some nights, he might work some doubles, stuff like that. I mean, go back and read a bunch of Tarantino oral histories. That's a good one. A lot of early interviews with Tarantino. Find out about how he was crafting his scripts when working at the famous was the video.

What was it called? You said the video store. But I don't remember the exact name of the video store. I think that's a good example. Kevin Smith is another good example of people who were honing this skill while just working in a service industry. Tarantino is where I'm going to point you, actually, Julian, if you really want to see that what I'm talking about in action, because he was obsessed with film, obsessed with it, watching everything, tracking down where the weird prints were.

This art house across town is playing, you know, some early Kurosawa there. You know, I want to see, you know, Hitchcock's rope, which is not really widely played, but there's maybe an interesting print happening over here. He was obsessed with film and that obsession with film drove it. He had a service industry job.

He's working at a video store doing other odd jobs. And that's when he also started writing. By the way, look at Tarantino's rise. He did a lot of script work early on with some pretty major blockbuster type films. I'm blanking on what some of the names are now, but films you would remember from the early the mid 90s films that were just straight up like Nicolas Cage action films.

He would call they would call him in to work on those things, which again shows. The writers who work are artistically ambitious. Even if not everything they work on itself is artistically ambitious. So use use Tarantino, I think, is a good case study. You're 20, you have energy. So if you get obsessed and let that obsession drive you.

You can you have the time you have the time. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)