Sujata Day, Actor, Writer/Director: How many french fries does McDonald's make every year?
Film Courage: How did you learn to write screenplays?
Sujata: I took a semester of playwriting in college and also a semester of screenwriting. In
our screenwriting class we had a book called The Screenwriters Bible [Author David Trottier] which
taught us the structure and the technical aspects of screenwriting. We were supposed to have
a finished script coming out of that class, which I did not. I believe my script was about 50 pages
long and actually went back recently to go look at that script to see if there was something
I could salvage out of that story and it was just terrible. It was so bad and I thought that
was really funny because I'm like Oh that just means I’ve grown so much since that first script
that I never finished and and now my scripts are like I said each script that I write is
is better than the last one. That's what's exciting is to see the progression of writing from
a class my first class to to my writing now.
Film Courage: Why was it terrible?
Sujata: The story just didn't make any sense I guess and the characters didn't have specific
point of views and they were just in these scenarios and scenes with no rhyme or reason it
was just really bad all across everything so they were just sort of like situations and conflict
yeah yeah and like I said it I never finished it it was about 45 to 50 pages and and I don't even
think when I looked back on it I think I read the first two or three pages and I was like oh I don't
I don't need to finish reading this shitty script that I wrote back in the day so stage plays also
you said you learned to write why why not focus on that as well what is it about the screen
so something about stage plays because even when I was asked by Accenture where do you want to
live obviously I had a couple different cities in mind it was Los Angeles New York and Chicago
and I really decided that I was going to forgo the New York city theater scene because I
didn't feel like I ever saw people of color in broadway plays and so it just didn't feel like
the right place for me and that I wouldn't get any work and so but I was always seeing people
of color in commercials and stuff so that's what made me move to Los Angeles and that
was the same kind of thinking in terms of going into playwriting or screenwriting I did not see
plays that were written by or for people of color to be honest or enough of them but I had
like I said I had watched sattiji three films and I had seen and I knew bali would have was
a big thing in our culture and so I was inspired by the films and the tv that I
watched and it felt more attainable to me why is it so important to write a perfect first draft
it's not important to write a perfect first draft I like I said I always write a vomit for a strap
and it's actually terrible and writing is all about rewriting so for me I'm just trying to
get to the page count and once I get to 90 I get really excited and that is cause for celebration
and then I go back and I look at my draft and it's terrible and so I look through it and I do my own
version of the second and third drafts of that and then that's when I get to
send it off to my four or five friends that I trust to give me critical smart notes
that will actually help move the script along and then I gather those notes and I read through them
and and I see if any of the notes are actually similar and I tackle those notes first and then
at this point I'm at the fourth fifth draft of the script and it's getting there but it's not perfect
and then I i tend to finish a script when it's on its sixth or seventh draft that many okay
do you outline I do outline so going back to thomas lennon's book
how to write movies for fun and profit he has this really great chapter of outlining where
his outlines are like 20 pages long so if you do a very specific long outline where exactly what
the scenes are going to be and who the characters are in each scene you can transfer that into final
draft and then have just the scenes in there but then you are writing the characters in
the dialogue so when you transfer it over to final draft it's already like 15 20 pages in and so it's
way easier to write and finish a script if you have an amazing outline and exactly where it's
going to go and then you can even hop back and forth so what's exciting to me is like I said I i
don't write unless I'm getting joy from the script and so maybe I want to write the ending
first so then I write the ending because I already know what scenes are necessary to get to the end
so then I just write that ending and then I work backwards so your writing process sounds like it
it varies it's not like you start a script the exact same way every time it varies with each
project and sometimes i'll just get an idea and i'll start writing and i'll be like oh
I'm writing where's this gonna go maybe it goes nowhere but maybe it does go somewhere and so
every project that I write it's it's a different process in terms of getting it down on the page
even with cowboy and indian when I wrote cowboy and indian I saw it more visually than with a
lot of dialogue so I just wrote the visions of the scenes down and then it it was birthed out of that
so going back to the twitter thread from a few months ago that I saw about the right way and
the wrong way to do something and sort of the film community and their opinions on it it sounds like
you just have different styles for each script that you work on and it all ends up working
out it just there's no real process that you follow every time for each one there's no real
process that I follow and and I think that that's what keeps it fresh in my mind and that's what
keeps me coming back to screenwriting with my every story every idea that I have
there's a new way to approach it and whether it's Thomas Lennon's way of approaching something
which I really connected to or whether it's just writing down certain ideas or visions
or what the cinematography is going to be then that's that's a whole different way of looking at
approaching a script with engineering classes did they teach you the same different ways to approach
problem solving so it won't be a b and c every time for the same problem yes so something that I
went through after as I was getting my degree was I was interviewing for a lot of different jobs and
even though I had the Accenture jobs I would go to these interviews to be like oh maybe they're
gonna offer me more money who knows and so I was in an interview for Mckinsey consulting which
is one of the big fancy consulting groups that a lot of ivy league graduates work for and they ask
the same type of questions in these interviews which are big
big macro questions that don't necessarily have a correct answer but they want to see your brain
process of how you would get to that answer so one of the questions that I remember getting in this
Mckinsey consulting interview was how many french fries does McDonald's make
every year so how would you go about answering that question and there's different ways to go
about it there's you could start with okay what does a McDonald's sign say serving this many
million people every year you could start from there and work backwards towards okay how many
how many french fries are in one pack how many how many people come through there per
day and how many cities are there in the United States how many McDonald's are there in America
so you you go through this process and you have to say the process out loud to the interviewer so
they can understand your brain thinking skills and then you get to a number at the end but it could
be a totally unrealistic number it doesn't matter what that number is it's about how you got there.