Joston Ramon Theney, Screenwriter, Author, Director, Producer: Now I
only write stories that wake me up in the middle of the night and make
me go grab my laptop if it doesn't make me do that I don't write it.
Film Courage: Can you take us all the way through your writing process?
Joston: It's changed a lot before I think my writing process was more
I had an idea and then I wanted to take a really good look at the two main characters and then
branch off from there with and I would always write like random scenes like these are the must
you know have scenes in the script because that's what ultimately made me think about
the the the story I carried that with me for a while but now it's not so much that and it's
because I've made enough films where I know what goes into making one and just starting
at the writing standpoint so now I only write stories that wake me up in the middle of the night
and make me go grab my laptop if it doesn't make me do that I don't write it if there's something
that happens and i'm like you know what that's it I gotta sit down I gotta nail this and the
reason is because you know as we've spoken about before that passion if if what you have in here
isn't it it doesn't wake you up in the middle of the night with for this project
then I don't know how possible it is like you're gonna have to fight so hard to make it to the end
so for me it starts with does this thing wake me up in the middle of the night is this the only
thing I can think about right now and if it is the only thing I can think about what am I thinking
about right now why do I want to write this what is it saying about me and I start with that
and then what I do is ultimately something is going on around me that's making me
feel this way and oftentimes it's music so then that song is on repeat repeat repeat
repeat i'm writing a story right now called moon and the stars and
it's a story about love but not romantic love I mean there's romantic love in it but it's it's
more about the real concept of love like when you really love someone what you're willing to do for
them what does it really mean for you to really love someone and believe it or not the I can't get
this story out of my head and i'm already we've already set it up to start production in 2022.
the song that I have on repeat is what is a guy's name weekend and his song save your tears I don't
know if you've heard that song but I just have it on repeat and I just write and I write and I
write i'm just so obsessed with the story i'm so obsessed with the character's journey and
at every time I stop because I always say you know find the perfect scene and stop and then
when I stop I go back and I think about all the technical stuff you know and I start to make notes
for myself okay when you go back to rewrite make sure you think about this and think about this and
think about this and then when I sit down the next day to write it that song goes on and by the way I
don't know if this is a thing for every song but on youtube you can search the song and loop and
then it'll come up with somebody who's made like a two-hour loop of the same song over and over
and over and I just hit play and I just and I just and I know what the objective is for every scene
so I sit down i'm looking through my notes i'm like okay this is my objective for today
I need to do this for these previous scenes and then the new scenes have to be about this
it has to be a point to every scene I can't just sit down like I did before and just write a scene
and hopefully some way find some sort of connect you know some kind of connective tissue for the
rest of the story I have to know the point of the scene and who's making the point and why is this
person the best person to make this point or why is this event the event that needs to happen now
you know and I that's how I kind of structure each scene
but I go back and make sure it fits the story as a whole and I just do that all the way through
when you say that you you what if it wakes you up in the middle of the night are you already up for
something else and then you're like you know what this one part I've just got to write this down or
how does that work if let's say it's two in the morning on a Tuesday and you just happen to wake
up what's your process are you going to a laptop it all depends it all depends if I am trying to
not wake up the cat or my wife you know then it's going to be going into the into
the living room where you know my office is and you know sitting down at the computer and just
you know but then there'll be times where maybe I get hit with inspiration at six a.m
six a.m and the sun's probably starting to come up it's okay if I grab the laptop and
you know from the bed you know so I’ll do it that way but but usually I feel something and
I have to get up and I have to write and I have to complete this script you know and it happens
it only happens when now because I think I've i've allowed myself to surrender to whatever
that that thing is inside you that intuition it tells you now as a time
I think that it's something someone said a while back where you know writing is a profession and
you have to sit down at the keyboard at a certain time and then you get up from that
computer at a certain time because it's your job to write it's your career and you're professional
that's okay I get that I get that but if you are a person who you have multiple films in various
stages of production maybe nine to five isn't something I can do because i'm still editing this
one i'm still handling the promotional stuff for this one i'm doing interviews over here for that
one I can't just sit at a computer from nine to five right so I write when the inspiration
hits me and oftentimes it is in the middle of the night it's it's in that moment where you
you kind of wake up or you're about to go to sleep that little that little area I don't know what it
is about that time but it's like ah there it is and then you just and you punch you know you sit
there and you punch the keypad until you get it out of your system you purge out of your system
and you go back and you you read it and you make sure you got everything okay I get everything
okay cool let me write my notes and that's just my notes for what to do when I come back to it
and how does it tie back into the rest of the story just making sure that it stays fresh because
when you get that feeling and you put it on paper you sometimes forget certain details so you make
sure I make sure I want to write it down and then I go back but yeah I believe that you you have to
surrender to that that urge that desire to get up right now because you you you you feel that this
needs to be on the page at this moment I don't believe that's something you can force my best
writing has been when I felt that urge are you sensitive to the moon I don't know oh okay because
you used it's called moon and stars or whatever oh it's moon m-u-n-e and stars s-t-a-r-r-s okay and
it's it's really affecting you yeah no no no it's funny it's it's it's a story that when I
describe it people go well where's the love story but it's it's a story about this 1842
this child she's 66 years old six-year-old prodigy from Beijing and she's taken through
a portal by this guy named Egun and the order of Fanu and they take her to a place where love wilts
and hope goes to die and they take her here and then the story picks up in this day and age and
there's a guy who's going through a breakup and he's trying desperately
to get back with his fiance and he's been having his vision since he was a kid of
you know various catastrophes and this one girl is always in his dreams and
one day when he's just at his bottom the portal opens up and she comes through and
she tells him that he's the only like the ego in the order for new are coming to basically
destroy life as we know it and you are the only hope and the guy who's had no desire to
do anything in his life other than be with this woman over here now has a new mission in life
and ultimately the woman that he is in love with who just doesn't want to be with him right now
she's also enlisted to help him in this fight to save the universe and throughout all of it
what he has to learn is what what is love truly because love he thought was showing someone
how much you want to be with them so they'll want to be with you but truly it's it's having enough
love for this person to only want the best for them even if the best for them isn't you
you know that's all you want is you want to see the best for this person and that's the lesson
that he's trying to learn throughout this movie and that's ultimately the lesson that helps him
to be successful at saving the world in the universe
wow but in all of that that just came from I don't know what it was something happened and
it just made me evaluate love and what we think of it as as people even healthy people like what we
think about love and I was just like man so many people have it so backwards so backwards they or
they love a person because of how the person makes them feel and it's like that's not love that's
you know it's something but but it ain't love and that's that's what really wakes me
up is you know whenever I find some other example of it and i'm like oh why isn't that in the script
and then it's like oh and then this person does this and this event happens and i'm
just constantly jumping up in the middle of the night or early morning and plugging in more pages
and it's all coming from a place of of passion but also truth and and honesty which I believe
truth and honesty are two very different things but you know it's coming from a place of truth
in a place of honesty and and building this story and those are the stories that i'm trying to tell
now versus how I used to tell stories I used to tell stories it was very stream of consciousness
and it was whatever it was supposed to be and then it was done and now I put more thought into making
sure the stories are just honest they're coming from an honest place even if you don't agree
with the message even if you don't agree with the characters it's coming from a place of honesty
yeah I was wondering what what is the difference between writing honesty and writing truth
in your screenplay I think truth is a fact honesty is the feeling I think honesty is your intent
okay if you I met many people who are super honest but their facts are so screwed up that is not the
truth that is not what happened but you can tell a person truth and not be honest also you can
tell facts and omit certain things that don't fit your narrative and that's being dishonest
yet you're still being truthful okay so which would you rather have in a story truth or honesty
I think honesty inner story is is better than the truth but I aspire to have both.
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