Ep484 - BenDavid Grabinski, Co-Creator Netflix’s ‘Scott Pilgrim Takes Off’

“I wanted to direct movies. That’s all I ever wanted to do. I never had a plan to write movies,” says BenDavid Grabinski. ‘In college one summer, I wrote a script and people seemed to like it. So I wrote a few more and moved to LA.”

Initially, Grabinski was writing with the goal of making something he could direct, but then he ended up loving the process of screenwriting. “I just really enjoy that creative approach to storytelling.”

“I have a very unorthodox career narrative because I moved to LA at 22 and the first thing I wrote got optioned and made in six months. The next thing was on the Blacklist and Barry Sonnenfield was going to direct, but the studio went bankrupt. I kept almost having an overnight success.”

This would have been around 2005. “I know I’m a much better writer now than I was then. When I look back at that, I think that guy didn’t know anything about anything. So much about success is out of your control. You have to keep writing and opportunity will fall into your lap or it won’t.”

Grabinski is known for writing Skiptrace, Happily, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, and the new Netflix series, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. “I didn’t go to Film School. It has a lot of value for a lot of people, but my way to learn movies was watching movies, reading scripts, listening to audio commentaries. That’s how I figured out the process.”

“If you read enough scripts and are excited about that kind of language and that format and that structure, I think it can only help. I think I read so many I internalized how it felt to read a script, how something is broken down versus executed, and I think I absorbed that. It helps to see the code in the Matrix.”

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