“Unveiling Secrets: Jon Gunn Reveals the Hidden Truths Behind Storytelling in SYS Podcast Episode 532!”
So often when you’ve got a good story that’s got a lot of good material, you can find yourself saying, I know that when I watch the film, I’m going to want to get to the 13-year-old version of Austin as soon as I can. But is there any way to take any of these ideas or scenes and move them from his youth to when he’s 13? Some of them, yes, some of them know, right? How quickly can I consolidate and condense the courting and the dating and the finding out that they’re pregnant and all that. And so I just write a bunch of it. And with this particular case, more so than usual for me, I started writing before I had it all figured out because there were some scenes I really wanted to explore to find a voice. Like I wanted to write the scenes where Scott and Theresa met for the first time. And I wanted to try some of the voiceover and some of the sequences. So, I just started writing scenes that I found charming and fun. And then that got me going. And then after a couple of weeks of doing that, I was like, all right, I’m going to now spend eight weeks and I’m going to write the script in eight weeks. And that’s what I did, I wrote in eight weeks. And the first draft was very close to the draft we made. I mean, it happened very quickly. I sent it to my partners. They were like, oh my gosh, we love this. And I did a quick polish on it for probably a week or two to adjust some notes and crunch it down and dial it in. And then we sent it to Zach Levi. He read it on a Friday, called us on Saturday and said, I’m in, and we were off to the races. So this is very rare how quickly this happened. And honestly, it was only because of COVID that this happened. I would have been making another film, but I wrote it out of necessity. I wrote it quickly because we needed something. It got greenlit because we already had a project with Zach and because we wanted to make something in COVID. And this was a story about gratitude. And honestly, I was just the gratitude of how fast the experience went and how well it went. It reflected, I think, in the film. We didn’t have much of an opportunity to overthink it. We just sort of went with the momentum of it.
