TC Podcast Episode One: Meet Matt White on Screenwriting and Pitching

Chris: So welcome to this podcast with me, Chris Jones and Matt White. I’m the founder of the London Screenwriters Festival. I’m a filmmaker. Screenwriter. And we’re here to talk about Talent Campus today, which is the professional development total immersion programme from the London Screenwriters Festival. To give you a little context, it was set up in 2015 with the support and inclusion of screen skills. As it was then, it was called skillset, and screen skills have continued to support us over the years. Having said that, we haven’t run Talent campus since 2019 because of the pandemic and because I got busy directing splinter unit on mission impossible and various other things that got in the way. But we are back. Back with a vengeance. And I wanted to invite past talent campers to talk about their post talent campus experiences because I ran a survey last year speaking to the 200 and so screenwriters, filmmakers, producers, who’d been through the Talent campus programme about what they wanted post talent campus, post pandemic as well. And the number one thing everybody wanted to hear was success stories from their peers. So we’re here with Matt to hear about his success stories. Post talent campus. Welcome, Matt. Whereabouts in the world are you?

Matt: Thank you, Chris. It’s lovely to be here. I am in the beautiful village or town of Llanidloyes in the depths of mid Wales, which I found out recently is the first place in written history to have a maypole. And given that I’m working on a tv show at the moment about a May Day ceremony that goes supernaturally wrong, that’s a pretty cool place. That’s a pretty cool coincidence to find amazing.

Chris: Now, I don’t want to start on talent campus. I want to get straight into your successes. But, you know, in 20 seconds, just give me a snapshot of when you did talent campus and what was maybe one of the big things you got out of it.

Matt: Yeah, I did talent campus in 2019. I was part of the TC five. And amongst other things, we’ll talk about. I got the. The most awesome network of friends that I’ve ever made in this industry, and we still communicate every day to this day.

Chris: Okay, so let’s go back to post 2019, and you’ve come out of talent campus, and there are two very specific stories we want to talk about. One is a feature film that got made, and another is a whole kind of pitching journey. But let’s dive in on your feature film. So tell us about the feature film and how it came about.

Matt: Okay, so the feature film is called Paul Dude’s deadly lunch break. And it was based on an idea I had way back in about 2011 that I’d been developing for years with a good mate of mine, Nick Gillespie. He’s a filmmaker and director. And it started out as a sort of real time, very dark thriller that became funnier and funnier the more I tried to work on it, because of the fact that I just thought the actual reality of a spree killing, if you try and achieve it and somebody’s actually watching you trying to do it, as it were, in the film, it just. There’s a lot of scope there for black humour. And it was Nick, he said, just turn it into a comedy. So we did. We played around with it for years. We developed it, and then Nick worked with a producer called Finn Bruce on a couple of projects. And so the film was actually shot in late 2019. And one of the great things about someone like Nick being just a great example of networking, just being such a lovely guy and having worked with so many people and made such a good reputation for himself by just being nice and very professional, was that loads of amazing actors got on board to make the film with us. So, starring Tom Meaton, and we had people like Alice Lowe, Johnny Vegas, Pippin Middleton, Chris Marshall, Craig Parkinson, all of these great people turning up and volunteering to be offed in all kinds of gruesome ways. So it was filmed in late 2019. It was post production, took a long time during 2020, because obviously we had things like the pandemic getting in the way, and they had to do some reshoots and some extra footage. But then in 21, it was released to festivals and played by Southe by Southwest. That’s where it had its global premiere, which was amazing. And we won the Screenwriters award there. So sort of the best screenplay. And then it played at various festivals, including Toronto after Dark and Fantasia. And now it’s on sky, so you can watch it on sky in the UK, and it made it onto shudder in the states, which is amazing. So it sort of flitted around the various streaming platforms in the states for a while, but then Shudder got their hands on it, and suddenly there’s a new resurgence of interest in it because it is a dark enough black comedy to make it as a sort of horror adjacent thing. And so there were watch parties taking place on social media, and if I go on Reddit now and Google Paul dude, which I do, because it’s a big ego thing, people are still talking about it. So, yeah, it seems to find a pretty happy home out there in the.

Chris: General ether and in terms of what you took from talent campus and what you learned if you were to stand, because one of the things that, you know, the London Screenwriters Festival and talent campus, what I personally feel very passionate about is it’s all well and good to hear from Sir Ridley Scott and the likes, and it’s amazing, but often the best learning comes from somebody who’s just one or two rungs up the ladder above you. So if you were to talk to someone who’s, you know, maybe yourself in 2019, experienced, you know, got passion and talent and capability, looking for that first big break, what do you think? What would you do differently now in order, based on the experience you’ve had.

Matt: On Paul, dude, I would say take on board the messages around relentlessness a bit more. So be, you know, talent campus, a lot of it is about, and I remember describing it like this, and I still do, it’s the most awesome cult I’ve ever joined in my life, and I’ve not joined many, so I can’t compare it to many. But a lot of it, as you know, is about self actualization and it’s about. About projecting the vision, a vision of yourself, which is amazing and awesome, and then just living up to that vision and letting the world see it. And there were times, I mean, you know, we were in the middle of lockdown, but when, after the film came out, I approached a few companies, particularly in the States, who’d made sort of adjacent kinds of movies and tried to make contact with them and said, you know, let’s build up a working relationship. And nothing really came of it because I wasn’t relentless enough, because I didn’t approach enough people, because I didn’t push it hard enough. And I, it was sort of, I went through a phase of falling back away from the lessons of talent campus a little bit where really there should have been 50 to 100 emails going out to people, contacts with people who’d been at south by South west, who’d been at Fantasia, who’d been at the various festivals, who may have seen it or had films in competition there, and building up those connections and just making friends with those people and saying, let’s have a chat and let’s start sharing ideas and look at this thing and isn’t it great? And I love what you did, and let’s help each other out in the world. So looking back on the talent campus, me, I’d have said those lessons about that, use them and be more beautifully ruthless, I’d say.

Chris: I love that phrase, beautifully ruthless. Of course, that’s where the peer group comes in and, you know, having. Again, I didn’t think I was going to talk so much about talent campus now. But one of those things that really shines through is that as writers, you know, we sit at our desk and yes, we’ve got friends and we’ve got peers and relationships, but very often we don’t have like ten people who are kind of nudging you and saying, where you at? Come on, let’s go in. And you don’t feel like you’re in a clan of people pushing forward together.

Matt: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it is, you know, you think sometimes about the mentality or the behavioural patterns that drive people to be writers and the attraction of, you know, the idea of a sort of a little cottage in the middle of nowhere or a desk in a really cool creative space and you can just sit there and make magic and then that’s all you have to do and you get paid for it. And so I’m working on a film project with my friend Kelly Holmes, he’s a director, which we’ll talk about in a bit. And we’ve reached a little bit of a point where we made some major changes to the structure and the story wasn’t really developing. So Kelly just said, come stay with me for the weekend. So I’ve just got back yesterday. We went to live down in Nottinghamshire, so we spent a weekend together and we’ve just smashed the whole thing in about a day and a half of working because we’ve made that effort to be with each other and we, you know, we were, we were keeping each other accountable for doing good stuff and so, yeah, that idea of having people around you and it’s not just about networking with people to sell scripts and to make business. You know, if I want to set a target for myself, I go on WhatsApp and I talked to the TC five group, talent campus five group, and said, look, I want to do this by this date. And you can guarantee that five people a couple of days before be saying, come on, get your finger out. Have you done it? Have you done it? And we’re constantly sharing. You know, one of the group, one of the members of the group came that close to winning a pretty cool screenwriting competition. And the way in which they found out they didn’t win, it was quite aggravating. So of course, you know, we’re piling on with building them up again and saying, you know, this was amazing that you got that far and we feel your pain, you know, because we’ve been through it with you, but we can keep going together. So it’s definitely that idea of, you know, you’ve got to step out of this mindset of my desk is the be all and end all, and I can just send great scripts out and people will come to them. You know, you’ve got to constantly be making friends and being friends, you know, being useful to people and helping and sharing and cajoling, and, you know, you put it out without expecting to get it back, you know, and that in itself is a value.

Chris: Yeah. Be the friend you want to have.

Matt: Yeah.

Chris: It’s so critical. And so let’s just talk about Paul dude again, and as an unproduced writer who then became a produced writer and on a feature film during COVID what are the big takeaways in terms of your journey that you think others could really learn from, either to prepare them emotionally, spiritually, or whether just on a craft level?

Matt: I think so in terms of emotionally and spiritually, it’s, again, it’s that idea of relentlessness and that journey. So Nick was a guy I met at Salford University, and we became really good friends. We made a couple of short films together, and we had a shared sort of love of particular kinds of film and filmmaking. And it took, I would say, ten years between me first writing an outline for that script, that film, and it appearing at a film festival, and which is not bad going, you know, for a british independent film. But it was about almost the fact that we. We both. We’d meet up because we moved down to London. I was in Manchester at the time, and we’d meet up every now and then, and he just kept saying, I still want to make Paul dude. I still want to make Paul dude. And we went through various dead ends with it, but it was like we always had it there in the locker, if that makes sense. So we moved on and we worked on other things, you know, and Nick’s made some great stuff, both as a dop and a camera operator and then as a director. I was working on my own projects as well and doing things like, you know, having my own life as well. But we always had that idea of, somebody can talk to you, and this is a useful thing you can take out of. This is that film project. I had that pitch ready to go at any time, and as soon as somebody said, what have you got? What are you working on? What’s available? That was one of four or five things I could say, oh, right, let me tell you about Paul Dean. That was a really useful thing to know, to have that. Even though we hadn’t worked on it for a year or two years, it was still in the locker. I was still able to talk about it and pitch it and promote it. And that’s what Nick did when he worked with Finnae. He, you know, they made a film together and Nick said, right now we’ve done this. This is what I want to do next. I want to do Paul, dude. So that was useful. The other thing I’d say, from a. Working on a film perspective, I kind of got rewrote. So it was my draught. My baby went to a big writing a workshop thing, actually, at Finn’s house, and he got a few friends of his in another guy called Brooke Driver. He was also a friend of his, one of that group. And we sort of smashed the script a bit and went through it page by page over a couple of days. I went and did another draught and then Brooke had a go on it and Brooke added some pretty cool things to the story. But Nick also wanted to stay involved, and so we ended up having three people listed as co writers. And from an ego perspective, that was quite hard to take. You know, that immediately was me thinking, oh, that’s my baby gone. And when you watch the film, I can see the bits that I wrote. I can see the bits that Nick and Brook wrote when they worked on it afterwards. And I can still say it’s my idea. And a lot of that basic idea and that story and that stuff and the theme and what it’s all about is still there, but the bits they added made it better. And that was a really, really cool thing to accept. You know, when you finally watch the film, you think, yeah, that’s better than it was when I worked on it. The ending is much more coherent. A lot of people talk about the ending because it sort of breaks with tradition in a story like that, and it does things that you don’t necessarily expect, but it’s got a lot of depth and emotion to it. And none of that was in mine. Mine was horrible, you know, so there’s this idea of being rewritten or, you know, knowing that you’re part of a huge process. And also the way that Nick works with people, because he’s. He comes from a technical perspective. You know, he’s a camera operator, so he’s incredibly on top of the technical process. But it also means he can make films quickly and efficiently and on the fly and still make them look wonderful. But he likes to do the same with his actors. He loves working closely with actors, he always tries to choose, for example, people who are gifted comedic actors because he can say to them, there are going to be three takes on this, so we’re going to work on it beforehand, you know, what we need to achieve by the end of the script. And we’ll have a version of a take which is, you know, the, what needs to be done in terms of delivering the particular lines in the particular moments. But when you’ve got people like Alice Lowe and Jonny Vegas in a room, you know, you’re going to say to them, takes two and three off you go. And if you watch the outtakes at the end of the movie, some of the genius that these people are coming out with is just fantastic. So there’s, that’s always going to change as well. That’s always going to develop your work and it’s going to improve it. And sometimes you won’t think it improves it, but from when a film gets made with that kind of stuff in and it becomes memorable, then it’s improved it, you know? So I think from a sort of professional perspective as well, it really, I learned a lot about having the edges knocked off and, and you keep your vision, but you also have to say goodbye to your vision at a point. And as Kelly, my friend said, you know, when that film’s in the can, the day you start editing, there’s no longer a script. The script doesn’t matter. You know, the film is made in the edit, so the edit changes everything again. And so you get further and further away from the finished project, and you just got to suck it up. As a writer, I’d say, you have to accept that. And then technically, I’d say, from a craft perspective, we always knew what the film was about. We knew what the theme was. We knew what the vision was for the story. But when Nick says and Finn say, because Nick had worked on free fire with Ben Wheatley, he’s done a lot of Ben Wheatley stuff. And in that, Nick had worked on a bit where a guy gets his head brushed by a van, goes over his head, and they actually film the van going over this guy’s head. And he said, it was so cool, I want to do it with a steamroller. So, you know, regardless of this beautiful set piece you’ve written, if your director and producer said, get rid of that and replace it with a steamroller, you’re going, yeah, okay. I mean, and you got to make it happen.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, it all speaks to this concept that, you know, writers sit at a desk and imagine and create a vacuum. Not entirely, yeah, but largely. And then it becomes a team sport, and it doesn’t just become one or two. I mean, there is a transition from loan writer to loan writer with producer, maybe director, and then you got table reads, and then suddenly it’s 50 people, and then it’s completely out of your control and then enters post, and people stop even talking to you because you’re so distant from the actual trauma of making the film that they kind of forget that you even existed in the process.

Matt: Yeah, yeah. And I worked on a short film which is playing at festivals at the moment called the Sin Eater. I wrote it, and it was directed by Kelly, my friend. And I was actually on set for that because it’s a low budget short. So I’m doing sort of. What was I doing? Driving craft services. I was the cook for the crew, all these kinds of various things, and it was awesome. But you really see how much influence the costume designer has on the story, you know, and the set dresser and the person who does the lighting, you know, and we had a load of setups to do in a church on the last day. And so the sound recordist is an absolutely key member of the story at that moment because he may be able to record, but he. I say he, because he was him on that day. They may be able to record some ambient footage, you know, of crows in the background that will have an influence on the way it happens. And all this stuff can enhance the story as well. And they’ve all got a right to do that, you know, and to be amazing. And so it just can take. Yeah. And all of that can chip away at your vision and make it something completely different. But as you said, it’s a team project.

Chris: It is a language thing, isn’t it? Because I would say, not so much chip away at your vision, but enhance your vision. Yes. It’s elevating and improving through other creative people, adding their skill, their vision, their thing, to make what was once one thing, something bigger, better, bolder, brighter.

Matt: Yes.

Chris: And just more awesomeness.

Matt: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s just. And then when you’ve got, you know, I was getting script questions during the sin Eater from Sharon Morgan, you know, who is one of, you know, she’s sort of like the Judi Dench and the Helen mirror in times ten of welsh film and tv in theatre, when she’s asking me questions about the script and about dialogue, that’s definitely a dialogue between the two of us. That’s not me. As writers, saying, no, these are the lines that have to be delivered. All I can say is, this is the history. This is why I wrote that bit. This is who inspired me to say that. But please, Sharon, just go make it, you know, whatever you want to make it, because, you know.

Chris: Yeah. And, you know, you raise a really fascinating thing and we talk about it on talent campus, which is how to effectively not get fired or uninvited from the process. Because, you know, it’s incredibly valuable to have the writer on set, but there is definitely a way to not annoy people because it’s very easy to say, no, that’s not the way I imagined it. And it’s kind of pointless to do that because that may well be because the sun is in the wrong place, or it’s raining, or the lead actors had a hissy fit last night, not talking to each other. There’s like a million really random things that can impact how a thing comes together. But to be able, I think really it comes. And you’ve touched on this. To be able to witness and to offer insight is an incredible gift to be given. And you become very humbled seeing what other craftspeople, other artists bring to the process. And it’s exhilarating.

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It’s quite incredible to see. And to see it, I mean, to do it in a way that it looks so mundane at the same time, when you realise how much time on set is putting scaffolding together and, you know, you’ve got this. We shot the sinita in this tiny little beautiful old farmhouse up in, I think it’s called Greenfields heritage Park up in north Wales. And, you know, you’ve got 15 people round into these tiny rooms. And then poor old Trevor, the gaffer, he’s outside in the wind and the rain with about two, a few tonnes of metal equipment and massive acetone sheets, just to make sure that it looks like it’s almost nighttime inside. And you just think, you know, the big thing for Trevor that day was able to get him a sausage sandwich in the morning, you know, and that was his sort of. Because he was doing this, you know, he’d come from major high project things, high budget things, to come and work on this short with this. But it was like that mundaneity is what fuels it. You know, finding the right place to put the coffee cups out so they wouldn’t get blown over in the wind, but anybody could just run out and grab a coffee and just showing that level of consideration. So the main character has to drink beer because there’s a sin eating festival, and beer is a festival, a ceremony, and beer is drunk. That Carly Sophia Davis. So Kylie needs something that looks like beer but isn’t beer. So I went out and bought some coke zero because it’s the same kind of colour. It’s like stout coloured. But she said it’s got caffeine in it. And this is a very high, you know, finely pitched, emotional moment. Can’t drink caffeine right now. And all of those little moments of mundaneity, you think these people are fighting with it all the time and struggling with these things and overcoming them and still making something absolutely incredible at the end of the day. And it just. Yeah. Actually, as a practical tip for writers, get on set, be a runner. You know, go and see as much stuff as you can.

Chris: That’s such a fantastic insight, isn’t it? Be a runner and don’t tell anybody you’re the writer. Yes.

Matt: Yeah.

Chris: And. And you will learn so much. I mean, I. I’m a real proponent of, you know, whatever’s happening. Stay involved so that you can learn. I mean, you may not like what you learn to, and it may not go the way you want it, but it’s all part of the arsenal of knowledge that helps you improve as a creative, but also as an entrepreneur. A creative entrepreneur. And that’s who we have to be. We can’t just be siloed screenwriters anymore. We have to be more than that.

Matt: Yeah.

Chris: Let’s talk about pitching as well, because I know you had huge success with Sundance, with pitching. What was your journey there?

Matt: So one of the things that led me to talent campus, and, you know, anybody who’s been. Who’s developing a writing career knows that you have to be able to pitch as in, as I like to put it, you have to be able to tell your story in any situation. So, you know, there’s that great thing you do at the Screenwriters festival where you. The elevator pitch, where you literally get an elevator with somebody. You don’t know how it’s gonna be till you get in there. It could be Paul Verhoeven or somebody. So I went to Screenwriters festival in 2013, and I did the elevator pitches and I did a pitching session, and it all went really, really well because I was very confident in my public speaking abilities. And then a year later, I had a huge nerve breakdown whilst doing a presentation in a job. And it was a job with a company whose. I’m not going to say what it was, but it’s an industry I didn’t necessarily want to work in. It wasn’t evil, but I just didn’t. It wasn’t my world and I’d never been in that sort of corporate and time is money kind of environment before. And I’m pitching in front of a pitch, I’m presenting something I’ve been working on in front of about 50 people who are all very suited and booted and lovely, lovely people, but very different to me. And I just had a huge panic attack and walked out. And it’s the most humiliating thing I’ve ever done in my life. And ever since then, I had terror over public speaking and I’d done various things. I’d got a different job and I had to do. It was a sort of remote job, so I was doing a lot of stuff over Zoom and it’s sort of ancestors, but there was always that terror there. And I could always do it remotely because I could look at my camera and not have to deal with anybody else. But I was hiding away from it. And my screenwriting suffered because I passed up opportunities, opportunities to do things, because I thought, I’m going to have to tell strangers about my story. And one of the things that got me to talent campus was I thought, I need to get out of this. I need to get out of this rut that I’m in, of this absolute terror of getting too highly strung and too overwhelmed. And one of the things I realised at talent campus, because I’d done all kinds of things like meditation and relaxation exercises and all that kind of stuff, and talent campus made me realise what I need to say is, no, screw that, that is me. I will never slow my heart rate down. I’ve got a resting heart rate of about 42, and when I pitch, it’s about 150, right? And that’s never going to change. And that is my superpower. That whole wonder woman thing made me realise that that energy is what works for me when I pitch. And if I try and suppress it, if it scares me, bad things happen. And sometimes if bad things happen, then that’s life, you know, and I’ll carry on. So after talent campers, I put myself out there more, because one of the things you do is you put yourself into uncomfortable situations, and I’ll give you full context. That’s not. You go and bully people on the street, but you put yourself into situations that scare you a bit as part of the TC experience, surrounded by people who love you for doing it. And so I started doing that one. So I started taking opportunities to sort of promote and pitch again. And I was a finalist at Euroscript, and as part of that, they have a get together and you can. There are three pitching slots available and you can play and you can pitch an idea to people. So that’s sort of 45 seconds or something, or a minute and a half in front of about 25 people in a pub. And that was the first step. That was terrifying. There was the Screenwriters Festival 2020, the online version that we did during COVID and I won the pitching competition there. And that was about 120 people in a room, but that was 45 seconds and just me and the camera. I could sort of turn everybody else off. So that was awesome. And then it just got bigger and bigger. But Sundance was a new level. So I went to Sundance London last year, and there was a pitching competition, and I thought, of course I’m going to sign up for it. It terrifies me and I’m going to do it. And I did. And then I think eight people got selected out of the 70 or the 50 who put in, and I, you know, who said, oh, they’ll do it. And of course, I kind of knew I was going to be the one, one of the eight. I don’t know why. I just did. Got the email at the end of the first evening. So I go home, a couple of drinks, and then I was staying at a friend’s place and I actually have one of those things. I did 3000 steps when I was practising in the morning, and all the stuff I’d picked up from talent campus about creating the routines and creating the, you know, the visual image of yourself that you want to have and playing the music that you want to have going through your head and creating that sort of physical reality of how you want to be at that moment. I did that in that apartment, listening to music, doing my pitch again and again and again. And the physical reality of this one was, it was another level up because there’s between 51 hundred people in an auditorium and you’re on stage with a microphone and there’s no physical barrier. You can’t sit down or anything like that. So, yeah, I did it and I pitched my. So the short film I was talking about, the gothic horror that we made with Sharon Morgan and Carly Sophia Davis is called the Sin Eater. And it’s a sort of bilingual welsh victorian gothic horror. And it’s all about sort of, it’s a folk horror about suppression and how suppressing things can cause horrible things to happen. And there’s a feature film version of it. And I pitched that. Yeah. And I won, and it was a fantastic moment. It’s really cool. I won. They had an audience prize and a judges prize, so there were people like agent from CAA and, you know, people who running various production companies and used to run the BFI and all that kind of stuff. So they judged me the winner and the audience judged me the winner. So I got two sets of the same prizes. So I got a bag. I got two bags of dvd’s and two boxes of chocolates, which is cool.

Chris: Amazing. Amazing. So, I mean, looking back now, I mean, I was going to conclude on talking about talent campus, but we’ve done loads of talking about talent campus. You know, is there anything that we haven’t discussed from your talent campus experience that you think is something to share real value?

Matt: Yeah. So just to reiterate, the friends I’ve made and the self actualization is amazing, but talent campus is also rammed with practical stuff about filmmaking. So there are negotiation exercises, there’s pitching practise. Pitching practise under pressure, which I’m not going to talk about because it gives away a big secret. There’s a whole thing where you’re doing that exercise where you’ve got a, you know, you put into groups and you’re making a film and you’re throwing different scenarios at you and how do you cope with this? And your stars just going to the airport, what do you say to the press? But there’s also the fact that you get these speakers in. So we had Jed Mercurio and we had. I’m trying to think some names. I’m not going to do names because it’ll take me too long and I’m awful. Names. We have people from tv development companies talking to us about the tv landscape. We had agents. We had.

Chris: Did you have Eleanor Green, if I remember?

Matt: I think we did, yes. Yeah. And Gene Kitson from kids, and she’s.

Chris: Coming back for the next one as well. Yeah.

Matt: Awesome. She was cool. And so we had all of these and, of course, we had John Yorke and. Yeah, I’ve got to say. Yeah, yeah. When Chris tells you how to welcome John Yorke to the ring, do it right, because he’s great fun.

Chris: He hates it.

Matt: Yeah. But it was like, the practicalities of it. And, you know, we did this great exercise where we were running through what the different tv broadcasters in the UK, what kind of things they look for when they’re looking for a tv project. And we were then given the opportunity to take a tv show that we, you know, and to describe the tv show now and then say how we would change it for, for example, a Channel four show that was originally a BBC show and things like that and little things like that. Just stick with you. Because I’ve just done the BBC writers voices development programme and we had people from the commissioning team and the insight teams at the BBC talking about what the BBC is looking for at the moment, you know, and how they judge the quality and value of a tv show. And that was all coming back to me, the stuff from talent camp, as they were using the same language and using the same approach. And so that element of it, it actually equips you with professional knowledge and professional practise and a professional mindset. And I think that’s absolutely key. You know, it gets you into the development process. It gets you used to getting feedback from people, which can be quite confrontational, you know, and it gets you used to working with people. So I had Lucy hay as my sort of script development mentor, and Lucy is, as you know, is phenomenal, really great insight, incredible knowledge of the industry, and also honesty. As long as the day is long, Lucy will tell you what you need to hear, and that’s not necessarily what you think you need to hear. And so all of those things, that’s learning how to be a professional screenwriter. So I think the terms of the practical lessons that you pick up as well, people often lose sight of that kind of thing, and you can’t, overdose, estimate the value of that. Is that right?

Chris: Yeah, yeah, that’s true.

Matt: You can’t.

Chris: Yeah, I think you’ve covered the three, you know, the three cornerstones of professional development. I don’t like the phrase personal development because I think it’s a little bit, you know, californian, but self actualization, you know, getting outside of your own skin, like being comfortable in discomfort, going to places, doing the things that other people won’t do in order to find success, and then that, you know, just nuts and bolts of craft. But craft from a producer’s perspective, as opposed to, you know, an abstract 1970s, 1980s screenwriting lecture perspective, which I think. Excuse me, I think that that really illustrates one of the other things that we’ve tried to do with talent campuses, like learn from the present and the immediate past and not so much the distant past, and try and kind of spell cast the future.

Matt: Yes.

Chris: Like, what is the future going to be like in 2025? And we obviously can’t really tell, but there are signs, there are indicators and there’s interesting trends, you know, starting to show up. So I just think it’s really important that we’re very future facing and less so much about celebrating the past.

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. And future proofing. Because, you know, you can almost become too sort of, for example, too medium dependent. You know, if you’ve got that confidence, if you understand the mechanics of the way that the world works in the industry works, you know, audio drama is exploding if you are a good screenwriter, can write audio drama if they’ve never written it before, because, a, you’ve got the humility to know, you’ve got a lot to learn, but b, you’ve got the confidence to go and learn to, you know, to talk to people who’ve done it, to listen to things, to read those scripts. And, you know, it’s about knowing that you’ll have your own basic value. The self actualization thing, what do I bring to the world as a writer that can be delivered in all kinds of different contexts in different ways? You know, a Matt white script is a Matt white script. A Chris Jones script is a Chris Jones script. Regardless of, you know, what kind of. What technology is used to make it and develop it and share it with the world and what, regardless of what medium is used, it will still be my. My voice and my values.

Chris: Yeah, yeah. Brilliant. Okay, Matt, I think we’ve, we’ve covered everything we, we plan to cover. Before we wrap it up, is there anything you think we’ve, we should talk about?

Matt: Um, just I. When I read the title of this book, I hated it. But then I read the book and it was quite pivotal for me. And a key moment in my life is feel the fear and do it anyway. And a lot of talent campus is feel the fear and do it anyway because you’ll be surrounded by awesome people who are there to help.

Chris: Right.

Matt: I think that’s the thing about the words, but the way I’d put it.

Chris: Yeah, amazing. That’s fantastic, Matt. How can people find you then, if they want to, you know, discover more about you and your amazing career?

Matt: I would suggest. I’m most active on Twitter. I think my handle is treentrol, which is a long story because I’ve got. I look like a troll and my wife’s taller than me, so it’s tree underscore and there’s a word underscore troll. But if you google for tree and troll or Google Paul dude or Google the sin eater and that kind of thing, you’ll find me on amazing medias.

Chris: Fantastic. Well, Matt, thank you so much for your insight and your generosity, and we’ll see you soon.

Matt: Amazing. Thanks, Chris.

Chris: All right, then. Bye.

Matt: Cheers.