“Unveiling Secrets: Jon Gunn Reveals the Hidden Truths Behind Storytelling in SYS Podcast Episode 532!”
Ashley
Welcome Jon to the Selling Your Screenplay Podcast. I really appreciate you coming on the show with me today.
Jon Gunn
Thanks for having me.
Ashley
Great to be here. So, to start out, maybe you can tell us a little bit about your background. Where did you grow up and how do you get interested in the entertainment business?
Jon Gunn
I was born in Southern California and always loved watching movies and always kind of dreamed of making movies. And then, you know, there wasn’t a lot of opportunity in the eighties to figure that out. So, I had some friends, we got camcorders and we started shooting our own movies in high school. Went to film school, Ithaca College in the mid-nineties. And I wanted to direct films, but I realized that I was going to need to learn to write to give myself things to direct. And so I actually accidentally fell into screenwriting just out of necessity and found that that was, you know, that was the most compelling way to find stories that I felt personally connected to was to write those stories myself. So, I started, you know, right out of film school, I just decided I was never going to take a real job and I was going to just struggle my way through it. And I started, I read every screenwriting book I could and I wrote a whole bunch of things. I had a writing partner that he and I were friends in high school and film school and just were writing and writing and writing for years, just struggling through, you know, trying to get something developed that we could make. I directed my first film that I wrote when I was like 25 years old, just raised some financing and about a million dollars and made an independent film called Mercy Streets. And that sort of continued to sort of roll into my next series of projects. Funny enough, probably one of my earliest hit film was an unscripted film called My Date With Drew. It was a comedy documentary, but it was sort of, we sort of shaped it. And it was interesting for me just to see that like the storytelling of a documentary still has to have the structure, you know, that keeps audiences interested in. And so, and that launched into a whole career for me as a screenwriter really writing studio movies. I wrote five or six movies for DreamWorks Animation and then I went on and wrote a bunch of movies for studios while I was simultaneously developing and directing films of my own.
