Thanks to the Criterion Collection here's the young Matthew McConaughey auditioning for his role in Richard Linklater's 'Dazed and Confused'.



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Script Magazine has an archived article from 2004 with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga on the process of writing the film '21 Grams'. It covers the initial nugget of the idea, themes, characters and the film's big questions.

"We all know that one scene has a meaning by itself and a completely different one when it is linked to a scene before and a scene after. I wanted to go beyond the conventional, so I went for symbolic choices. I started writing scenes in a contrasting order, so that the str...
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I'm always interested in a writer's process. In fact, I should start a collection of posts with that as a theme. As such the Creative Spark section of the Academy's YouTube page is a goldmine. They have videos of several screenwriters discussing and showing their various ways of approaching writing.

It's interesting to see how their working methods vary greatly. My favourite of all the videos is this one from Oscar winning write of 'Milk' Dustin Lance Black. His approach to outlining is in...
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Another film covered by How Did This Get Made? is The Room. Commonly accepted as the worst bad film of all time (although I think Birdemic has now inherited that title) The Room is the vision of writer/actor/producer Tommy Wiseau. The new book The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell is the inside story of how the film came to be. 

Sestero was one of the leads of the film, and by his own admission 'The Tommy Whisperer', the one man who was at Tommy Wiseau's side throughout the durat...
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One of the best things I've stumbled upon this year is the podcast How Did This Get Made? Presented by Paul Scheer, Jason Mantzoukas and June Diane Raphael, every fortnight they watch a film that's so bad it's amazing and then discuss the various plot holes, bad acting and general oddball film-making techniques. The best way, I find, to listen to it is to watch the film first.

It's through this show that I've discovered some eye-popping films that I wouldn't have bothered to watch otherwise. S...
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