Mitch Hurwitz:
I think for me, every road kind of leads to my subconscious. So I started out my career trying to write about my family, and then once I kind of explored that, I started making up characters, and they still always had attributes of my personality or people in my life…Writing what you know sometimes doesn’t just mean writing about being a young screenwriter in Austin. Sometimes, it means just your experiences with your parents, your experiences with your friends, with your ambitions…It becomes very internal.
Ron Howard:
It’s a number of things that would attract me to a script. Ultimately, you want it to read well. You want the characters to surprise you. You want the setting to be interesting, the themes to be somewhat thought-provoking. No matter what the genre, I think it has to be suspenseful. You want it to be a page-turner, or develop sequences that draw you into the next one. All those things you sort of intuitively respond to as you’re reading, but ultimately I think I have to feel like I understand something, I connect with something. It goes back a little bit to what Mitch was saying, that either I have a point of view, or a particular understanding of something that the characters are going through that I relate to. Because most stories have to be about test of character, or challenges to their existence, or the existence of a group of people who are trying to achieve something. And I’m drawn to those stories. I’m drawn to stories about families, and I’m often drawn to stories about group endeavors because…I relate to it. It’s not exclusively what I’ve done, but when I connect with a thing, and I start to …believe I can bring some creativity to it, and I start to, you know, become proprietary about it. I don’t want to let go of it, because I’m eager to apply my ideas to something that’s already well on its way.