How to go from no idea to movie idea

Writing a movie isn't easy, but here are 10 steps to get started!

I’m supposed to start writing a new movie. Or, more accurately, the treatment for a new movie. Then, assuming everyone likes the treatment, I’ll write the movie. Last week I had the kick off call with the team, and it was short and sweet. Remember when you pitched us the movie? Now that the deal is done, go for it.

It’s always exciting (and a little bit daunting) to start a brand new thing, and I find that no matter how many things I’ve written, the blank page can always be a little bit intimidating. How do I write a movie? How does anyone write anything?

Well, as I caveat basically everything I write here, there are no rules, but here’s my methodology and maybe that will work for you!

HOW DO I COME UP WITH A (GOOD) IDEA?

This is a very thorny question because… how does any idea ever come to anyone? Usually something I’ve seen or read or heard will scratch some little recess of my brain and leave a mark. Over time that mark will just sort of linger there, and if I pay it enough attention, and give it enough space, it’ll blossom into a legitimate “idea.”

See that squiggly part? That’s where the ideas are.

Concrete example: This isn’t the movie I’m about to start writing, but I find writing about writing to be confusing, and so wanted to use an idea I’ve been noodling on as an example. So here we go: I was looking through filmmakers’ bodies of work and noticed that a lot of first time features involve heists or cons or criminals. Blood Simple (Coen Brothers), Brick (Rian Jonson), Following (Chris Nolan), Breaking (Abi Damaris Corbin), Bottle Rocket (Wes Anderson) and on and on… I started to wonder why that is.

Well… they’re often contained, don’t have too many characters, but most importantly: they’re tight narratives. The stakes are very clear and very easy to communicate — this is life or death for our characters.

This thought left a mark and I’ve sat around for a while with it there slowly becoming an idea: Maybe I should write a heist. Then the questions begin… What would my heist be? How would I write a heist? What do I know or care about that nobody else knows or cares about, and could that in some way become a heist movie?

What you’ll notice is that usually the way into an idea for me personally is taking a genre/style and then applying some self-interrogation. If I were to do something like that, what would it be? What could it be? What is allowed in that genre and what isn’t allowed? Could I do some of the things that “aren’t allowed” and would that make it more exciting? Less?

Once I have this sort of beginning of a beginning, a spark of an idea, I get to work.

ONE. Brain dump a bunch of notes. When I want to start working on a completely new thing, I’ll open a blank document (I use Evernote actually for note taking, but you get the idea) and just start writing notes to myself. The goal is to do this as fast as humanly possible, and in a way that’s very much just me talking out loud to myself but on paper. The goal is to eliminate as much friction as possible between my brain and the words on the paper. Usually this will be half ideas, run on sentences, strange people and places I’ve encountered who might fit into some version of this idea.

Back to our concrete example, re: heists: It would be fun in a heist to rip off people who you feel have ripped you off. I think back to seedy and strange people I’ve known and wonder if there’s something fun about car dealerships. Everyone has some experience with car dealerships. I personally have a strong connection to that weird world, as my dad was a car dealer, and so I have a depth of stories and strange people that I can plug into the kind of super-structure of heist stories as I understand them.

The idea in this step is to create a big sandbox and put a lot of toys into it so that I can then start to pick up my favorite ones and examine them.

TWO. At the same time that I am beginning to sort of mull over ideas / character types / possible settings, I also usually start to think about the genre rules. I’ll usually at the bottom of my notes document start a list of “COMPS,” movies and books (I love when I can find books rather than just movies) that execute the genre well that I can watch and compare / contrast to.

Concrete example time: What even happens in a heist? What are good heists? What are bad heists? Here’s the list of comps I started to put together in my document that had previously been called “Heist Idea” and soon became “Dealership Heist Idea.”

Good Time, Uncut Gems, A Simple Plan, Fargo, Natural Born Killers, Raising Arizona, Snatch, Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, Hell or High Water, American Animals, Drive, The Town, Inside Man, The Score, Brothers Bloom, Out of Sight, Logan Lucky, Reservoir Dogs, Matchstick Men, Army of Thieves, The Sting, Bottle Rocket, Shade, Baby Driver, Three Kings, Le Cercle Rouge, Criss Cross, The Hot Rock, The Killing, The Ladykillers, Ocean's Eleven, Dead Presidents, Rififi

THREE. I will watch SOME of these movies. I had a teacher in college remind our class at one point “Don’t get bogged down in research. The whole point of writing is to make things up.” I find that usually after watching like three or four things I get it. What I like, what I don’t like. What I might be able to steal structurally. Do not get bogged down in research! Just start writing! You can always watch more stuff when you’re stuck (and you will get stuck). But you don’t want “I need to know more” to get in the way of you creating something original and innovative thanks to the fact that you don’t know too much about how something is “supposed to be.”

FOUR. Now that I have a lot of other versions of this kind of story in my head, I’ll start to get more concrete about taking the (hopefully now quite extensive) list of stray ideas, scenes, moments, characters, vibes, goals that I’ve compiled in my notes document and try to cherry-pick elements that I’d like to coalesce into a coherent story. This will usually mean picking a lead character or characters, a motivation for them (do they need the money for their elderly mom? their deadbeat brother? Or are they just that selfish/vindictive?) and an inciting incident. In the context of a heist, did they get ripped off? Did they work at the dealership and were recently laid off?

FIVE. Once I have a lead character, and a motivation, I’ll sort of force myself into figuring out their antagonist.

Example: If our hero is a laid off mechanic, and they’re doing this to get back at the owner of the car dealership, then it would seem like they’re directly in opposition to the owner.

SIX. But… movies need complications. Once I have a basic straight line of an idea, it’s time to come up with a way to create some wrinkles.

Example: Yes, it could be mechanic vs. owner, but that might be a bit too straightforward, we usually want at least a few twists and turns. Especially around the midpoint of a movie. So… thinking about the middle of the movie, what’s a way that things can escalate, or get out of control? Often with heists there is a second, worse bad guy. Maybe the cash that’s stolen is money that the car dealer owes to an even scarier guy. And by the middle of the movie, that guy gets involved. So now we have a “Big Bad” (aka our real antagonist) as well as some increasing stakes (good, drama) and a complication that changes the course of the story (probably around the midpoint, but TBD).

SEVEN. This is enough information to me to start taking all of this and begin putting it into some sort of order. I’ll start a new “outline” document and start putting scenes in. Sometimes they’re very thought out, sometimes it’s “probably need a cool car chase or something, maybe that could go through unfinished housing development???” This is where we begin doing our architectural drawing of the movie.

Throughout all of this, the goal is REDUCE FRICTION. If you are trying to be creative you need to turn off the “inner critic” that second guesses things. A neat trick to do that is, rather than ignore the critic, just type what the inner critic is saying too! If the critic pops in to say “well that maybe doesn’t make sense, why do they go there? Maybe they don’t chase them, since the bad guys already know where they live?” Just write that part down too! It keeps the critic from gaining control, and keeps the writing flowing, which is the main goal of this entire “brainstorming” phase. We just want all the ideas on the page. Good, bad, weird. Comments on why it might be more interesting to subvert the first dumb idea you had. It’s all useful here.

EIGHT. Continue this outline. It usually becomes an unwieldy mess because I’m transcribing all of my thoughts. Some of them are contradictory, and some of them are out of sequence, but eventually… if I keep doing this, I will have the fodder for a complete film in here somewhere.

NINE. Revise the outline into something mostly coherent. I don’t personally need to plug in every hole, but I do want to know where each emotional section of the movie twists into the next one, and what the next one is.

TEN. Copy the outline into the screenwriting software of your choice. Start taking those bullet points and start making them actual scenes. Some will be cut. Some will be changed. Some will end up not working, but… by putting it all into Final Draft, you now have an outline of the whole movie in here and your work is simply to flesh it all out.

And… it’s really that easy! Just kidding!

My method is all about REDUCING FRICTION BETWEEN THE IDEA AND THE PAGE.

The whole goal, especially when starting something new is to be able to channel as many ideas into one container so that over time they begin to accumulate and through some magical property congeal into a movie-like primordial ooze. The more ingredients I put in, whether they’re sequences, lines, vibes, things I’ve never seen in this kind of story, the more mental nooks and crannies I’m creating in which good ideas can become lodged and begin to grow.

This is all a little bit woo woo but then again, writing is a creative field, and creativity is all about magic! It doesn’t function on a timeline, or in a linear fashion, and I’ve often found that it needs stuff to bounce off, so my process as I’ve kind of codified it over the years is all about harnessing all of that stuff so that whatever weird alchemy then occurs where something feels right can happen and I can move on to the writing part.

Which I’m about to do the minute I send this out.

But enough about me! How do YOU start writing a new idea? Where do you like to get ideas? Where do your ideas come from? Where do ideas come from? What even is an idea, when you really think about it?