Wired Shut writer/producer, Peter Malone Elliott, and director, Alexander Sharp, discuss the behind-the-scenes details of taking their feature film, from idea to completion.

Michael Corleone. Ferris Bueller. Beatrix Kiddo. John Wick. What do these four famous film characters have in common, other than that they all hail from classic movies?

Before you build a dam or put up power lines, make sure the core filament in your idea bulb actually works. And how do you do that? Proof of concept.

Hollywood is deep in the throes of capitalist puppy-love with pre-existing intellectual property. But how do you get the underlying rights?

What Netflix's "Maid" says about America, right now, lends it the overall edge that it possesses in nearly every moment of its being.

But when you write a script, if it doesn’t get produced, it remains as just that. A template. A creative miscarriage.

We were in a position that many of our screenwriter friends were envious of … but we were miserable.

That’s the problem with unsolicited advice. Most of the time, the advice-giver knows nothing about you or your situation.

Is anything harder in the world of fictional storytelling than coming up with an ending to a mystery that no one sees coming?

Here, the sun never shone. It was blotted out by an eternal fog, a white-grey sheet pulled over a town which had long ago flatlined, but whose body remained here, somehow forgotten and forever awaiting an autopsy.

Our fields can be harsh, and the struggle is real, but that doesn’t have to be all we are.

Damaged people are always going to twist any message to confirm whatever they already believe. But we have to recognize that those are twisted narratives.

This process is frustrating, agonizing, soul-crushing, but also rewarding, exciting, and I cannot imagine doing anything else.

A good writer pushes the reader to draw on their common experiences and fill in as much story as is logically possible while they’re in the gutter.

Mass takes place in the aftermath of a violent tragedy that affects the lives of two couples in different ways. What both couples have experienced is unimaginable.