6 Questions with Matt Nix
Join the Q&A with the True Lies + Burn Notice showrunner this Sunday!
Write Stuff
A bit of housekeeping before getting into today’s excellent Q&A from Matt Nix. Info about our LA meet-up tomorrow night and Sunday’s live Zoom Q&A with Matt are behind the $-barrier at the bottom of this newsletter. Meantime:
My April “Draft Intensive” workshop at Script Anatomy sold out, so I asked them to add another for me, since I really love teaching this class. It’s the fun one where I take you from outline to script, and it functions more like a writers’ room—very collaborative, very supportive.
The class starts April 11 and runs every other Tuesday night for three sessions. There are only a couple of slots left for this one, so sign up now!
In addition to Writers Panel and Thrilling Adventure Hour, I been produce the podcast Dead Pilots Society. If you’re unfamiliar with DPS, it’s got a great concept, conceived by my fellow producer Andrew Reich, who was a writer on Friends and other shows.
In Dead Pilots Society, comedy pilots that were bought and developed by networks and then passed over are given the table reads they so richly deserve. It’s a lot of fun, there are no notes, and no one gets fired.
Our casts for these are ridiculous. We’ve had everyone from Carey Mulligan and Richard E. Grant to Larry Wilmore, Laurie Metcalf, and hundreds more.
The show is on the Maximum Fun network, who are currently holding their annual pledge drive, which is how we pay for the show. Basically, you go and pledge $5-10/month, click the button that says you want to support Dead Pilots Society, and then you get a bunch of bonus material (including videos of the reads) and our eternal gratitude. Pledge here.
For MaxFunDrive, we’re releasing a rare three-episode run of a series that was commissioned but not picked up written by Brooks Wheelan (SNL) and Isaac Rentz (Opening Night). We did this one live, and it stars Bobby Moynihan, Will Sasso, Paul Scheer, Alyssa Limpiris, and lots more great folks. Check out the first episode here.
Okay, on with the show.
Nix It Up
Matt Nix is a work horse, and it’s that work ethic to which he attributes his early success in television. Starting out after college working in development, he quickly turned to feature writing. He wrote movies for about eight years, “working steadily but nothing was getting made.” It was in the feature world that he got the experience that made him suited to television.
In order to work consistently for the eight years I was working in features, I pitched on everything, like every-fuckin’-thing you can imagine. Three different movies about students making porn films. Didn’t get any of those jobs, but I was just all over the place.
So I had a lot of experience just generating stories. I’d been this hustling feature writer for so long that I was actually more accustomed than a lot of feature writers are to coming in and pitching: “Oh, you don’t like that? How about this?” You know, I was flexible and I was also fast, because again, in order to stay working as a feature writer, I never stopped looking for work. It didn’t matter how many features I’d lined up, I was always hustling because that’s how you stay employed.
That hustle and a willingness to collaborate, to take and integrate notes from the studio and network, were skills that translated well to television. Burn Notice was the first show that he pitched, and it ran for seven years on USA, helping to turn the network into a powerhouse at the time.
Since then, Matt has created or co-created a number of shows, including The Good Guys, Complications, The Comedians, The Gifted, and the Turner and Hooch adaptation for Disney+. Currently, he’s the creator and showrunner of CBS’s True Lies, based on the 1994 James Cameron movie.
6 Questions with Matt Nix
1. What you working on right now?
At the moment I’m working on a few things. I’m finishing up post-production on season one of True Lies, though it’s mostly finished. I’m working on a Clash of the Titans series for Warner Brothers. I’m working on a detective procedural for Fox Network with Amy Holden Jones, who created The Resident, and I’ve also got another project about State Troopers with them through a deal I just signed. I also wrote an indie feature that I’m rewriting and working on getting going that I plan to direct. I also have a few other back-burner projects.
2. What challenges are you facing specific to your current writing project?
Well, I’ve got a few, and they all have their individual challenges.
I’d say for my indie feature the challenge is just that I’ve been working for so long under the restrictions of series television that it can be a little daunting to work on a project where the parameters are less clear. I know it sounds strange to say, but I’m not used to the freedom. So much of series television is navigating the priorities of various people – producers, a studio, a network, a budget. But this is just me looking at a computer and thinking “what do I want to write?” about a very personal story.
For Clash of the Titans, it's all about thinking about a way in to write about Greek gods that feels relatable on a human level and balancing the need to invent a story and still remain faithful to the tradition of Greek myth.
For my Fox procedural, I’ve really been looking at how to infuse a broadcast procedural with something personal and specific to me. A broadcast procedural needs to do certain things, but at the same time I think it needs to have something vital and personal at its core or it just feels empty and formulaic. I’m excited about my way in, but it’s definitely going to require mining my own psychology at a pretty deep level.
And then, in the back of my mind, I’m always thinking about possible episodes of True Lies if we get a second season.
3. What advice about the business of TV/film writing can you give to someone starting out now?
It’s a hard time to be starting out. The thing I recommend to people is that they not think about trying to make it in “the industry.” The old model of writing scripts and putting them “out there” and getting meetings and getting jobs that way is dying fast, if it’s not dead already.
It used to be that people wrote a script, and it went into a pile, and people read the pile and picked their script. These days, hiring tends to be much more targeted. Sometimes people are looking to hire someone in a very specific category, and they’re not even reading anyone outside of that category. Sometimes they’re looking for someone with a very specific skill set. It’s very rare for people to have a job available for and just go out looking for “a good writer.” I encourage people to think in terms of cultivating specific relationships, specific skills, and specific opportunities.
When it comes to relationships, think long-term. Everybody wants to “network” with me when I have a new show and jobs to give out. That’s YEARS too late. People should be looking down the road to who’s going to have a show in three years, five years, or even longer. Build your contacts as a long-term project. Make real relationships with people who you respect and who you’d like to work with. Think about how you can help THEM. That way the opportunities arise organically and naturally when the time comes.
With cultivating skills, again, be specific, long-term, and strategic. The competition is fierce. If you want to write horror, for example, are you really studying the genre? Do you know it better than anyone? If you want to write ensemble medical dramas, have you seen all of them? Do you read books about medicine? When you get that meeting, are you going to be the one who stands out with the most ideas and the most insight?
Finally, with regard to opportunities, I encourage people to think about specific opportunities rather than “jobs” in general. What’s a place where you can create value and really be helpful? One writer I know got a job on a show about computer hacking which he targeted because he was a former hacker. That’s a great opportunity. While hundreds of writers were throwing their scripts at this show, he was making sure that the showrunner understood the unique value he could bring.
4. What advice about the craft of writing can you give to someone starting out?
There’s so much advice out there. The thing that I emphasize that I think doesn’t get enough attention is just “be faster and write more.”
Yes, your scripts have to be good and that can take time. But I find people aren’t getting enough reps in. They have one spec pilot they worked on for a year. Maybe you get lucky and it happens to be a great sample for a job you want, but that’s a long shot.
Every good script you have increases your odds. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to people who say things like “I love sci-fi but I’ve never written any,” or “your show is totally my kind of thing but I haven’t written anything like it.” Get to work!
Ideally, you should always, always, always be working on something new, and you should be getting it done as quickly and as well as you can. Plus, it’s good preparation. After all, if you get the job you want writing for a show, you’re going to be writing a script in a couple of weeks.
5. What do you respond to most in a piece of writing?
I tend to keep it simple. I want to know that someone has done all the math.
I want a character I’m rooting for, with a specific goal that I care about, with clear obstacles and a character arc that I can easily identify. If I’m reading a procedural, I want to know what the procedure is and how it relates to the characters. If I’m reading an ensemble drama, I want to know what the specific relationships between the characters are and why those relationships will remain interesting, conflicted, and connected through the life of the series. I also love it when I learn something new from a script that’s interesting or counterintuitive.
6. What are you watching/reading/listening to lately that’s getting you excited or inspired?
I loved the French film Athena – it absolutely blew me away. It’s an almost real-time film that takes place in a Paris slum and it left me really excited about the possibilities of different kinds of storytelling. When people worry about ChatGPT taking over, I just think “go ahead and try to get an AI to write Athena.”
I just read George Saunders’ “Liberation Day,” as well as his book on writing A Walk in the Pond in the Rain. He’s always an inspiration to me, with a totally unique style that is simultaneously completely out there and completely grounded emotionally.
For podcasts, I always love Radiolab, Freakonomics, Work Life, and Planet Money. I tend to look to podcasts for interesting ideas and perspectives to bring to my writing, and those are great ones for that.
Below is the Zoom info for Sunday’s Q&A with Matt Nix for all of you lovely paid subscribers, as well as a reminder about Thursday night’s LA meet up.
Excited to meet so many of you at the get-together tomorrow night!
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