Unveiling the Untold Secrets Behind Cesar Vitale’s Storytelling Mastery
22 hours ago
My conversation with the 2017 Black List screenwriter.
Cesar Vitale wrote the original screenplay “The Great Nothing” which won a 2017 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting and made the 2017 Black List. I had a one-hour conversation with the Brazil-based writer about his background, his award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what being on the Black List and winning the Nicholl has meant to him.
Scott Myers: You are from Brazil and live there now, right?
Cesar Vitale: Yeah. I was born and raised in Brazil. I lived in LA for a while, but now I’m back home.
Scott: What were you doing in Los Angeles?
Cesar: I moved to LA to study advertisement, actually. I majored in advertisement in Brazil then moved to LA to do an advertisement program. I ended up doing a screenwriting one right after that and things just took off from there.
Scott: In your Nicholl acceptance speech, you thanked your first screenwriter professor, Phillip Eisner. Was that that at UCLA?
Cesar: Yeah, that was at UCLA Extension.
Scott: Okay, let’s jump back a little bit. How did you get into screenwriting as an interest?
Cesar: I’ve always studied screenwriting on my own as a hobby. I think I might be the only person that read Syd Field for fun, growing up. [laughs] I never considered it a possible career path, though. The filmmaking market in Brazil is so small it doesn’t make much sense to try and make a living writing scripts here. Which is not to say that people don’t do it, but it’s very, very difficult.
I kept screenwriting and my love for filmmaking in general as a hobby for a long time, and studied it on my free time and wrote scripts in my free time. When I got in touch with the UCLA Extension people ‑‑ the Screenwriting Program ‑‑ that was an opportunity to see what would happen if I took this path a little more seriously.
Obviously the market in Los Angeles, and Hollywood in general, is much larger, so there are more opportunities. I took the chance, and then did the program, and started working on scripts in English. Things just happened from there.
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