Screenwriting and directing are two distinct career paths, but some talented Hollywood professionals can find ways to balance both. Joe Nussbaum is one such juggler, so we asked him about how he pursues both writing and directing movies and TV. Joe: Oddly, it is. Normally, it isn’t, for most people, but somehow I’ve managed to have this bizarre parallel career. After my first feature came out, I was disappointed with how it performed. It wasn’t necessarily opening doors for me to do more features, even though I did end up doing more features after that. I decided I should do some writing. My first couple of years out of film school I wrote three or four screenplays. After I did “George Lucas in Love,” I had such great opportunities as a director that I sort of stopped writing, and after my first film, “Sleepover,” I decided to start writing again. I wrote a couple of screenplays and sold the second one, which was great and it started this separate sort of career where I went on to sell another screenplay and another pitch and then do writing assignments for different studios. But, none of which I was attached to direct. In the meantime, on the directing side, I did a few more movies. The one place my writing and directing has gelled is on the TV side, because I’ve directed a lot of episodes of this show called “Awkward,” and then I ended up joining the writing staff of “Awkward” and wrote an episode - and the episode I wrote I also directed, so that’s the one place they’ve managed to come together. But on the feature side, they are still two separate career paths, which is weird, and hopefully some day I’ll bring them together. I enjoy directing way more than writing. I would say that the worst moment of directing is one hundred times better than the best moments of writing. But that’s just me. I don’t think that’s true for everyone. I just like being on set, I like being around people, I like the excitement, I like the pressure, I like the fun, I don’t know, I just like being on set. There are moments in writing where you have a great idea, and it’s really exciting, but it just doesn’t compare to shooting for me, or being in the editing room, which is actually my favorite part of directing.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 15:41:19 +0000
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