Shanee Edwards

Shanee Edwards graduated from UCLA Film School with an MFA in Screenwriting and is currently the film critic for SheKnows.com. She recently won the Next MacGyver television writing competition to create a TV show about a female engineer. Her pilot, Ada and the Machine, is currently in development with America Ferrera's Take Fountain Productions. You can follow her on Twitter: @ShaneeEdwards

Posts by Shanee Edwards 176 results

Making a Passive Protagonist Work in A Ghost Story

A Ghost Story, written and directed by David Lowery, (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Pete’s Dragon) is one of the most bizarre yet beautiful films I’ve seen in a long time. It’s both clever and frustrating, both emotionally consuming and numbing, both sentimental and existential. That’s a lot of contradictions for one movie. Spoilers ...

July 4, 2017

Despicable Me 3 Writers on Pitching: “They Can Smell Your Desperation”

Every Tom, Dick and Mary in Hollywood has a screenplay. But very few writers can get one made, let alone be a critical and box office success. Even fewer writers can write two successful sequels and build a franchise. Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio are part of that elite group. Writing team Paul and Daurio didn’t meet in film school or at a ...

June 29, 2017

How One Writer Used Fairytale Structure for her Script about Cannibals

For writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour, her latest screenplay, The Bad Batch, started with a single image. “The first thing I wrote – and I didn’t know how she was going to get the skateboard – but I just had this image of a girl, missing an arm and a leg, rowing herself on a life boat in a sea of dirt in the middle of nowhere. And then ...

June 22, 2017

My Cousin Rachel: How a Writer Sustains a Mystery

Everyone loves a good mystery. And My Cousin Rachel is just that – mysterious from the beginning to the end in the most delicious way. But keeping an audience in suspense for two hours is no easy task. Just ask writer/director Roger Michell. For him, it was all about character.

June 19, 2017

How grieving a father’s death became a horror script

Shults says that when he was writing the film, he had no idea where all the dark thoughts were coming from. “But now, after talking about it so much and psychoanalyzing it, I think I understand where it all came from. It’s weird.”

June 16, 2017

The art (and pain) of writing a Netflix movie backwards

Shimmer Lake isn’t your ordinary crime drama about a bank heist gone wrong. It’s a multilayered examination of revenge, loyalty and plain old bad luck. Oh, and did I mention the story is told in reverse?

June 8, 2017

Turning Nostalgic TV into Film Franchises is Risky Biz

Hollywood has a tendency to cannibalize itself. Most of the superhero reboots are empty-calorie action flicks with too much CGI, (do we really need another Spider-Man this July?). While superhero films are here to stay - at least for the next decade - the other recycling trend with which Hollywood seems obsessed is rebooting nostalgic TV shows ...

June 2, 2017

War Machine’s writer/director David Michôd on “schizophrenic” film

For several years, Australian writer/director David Michôd has been eager to make a film about the current war in Afghanistan. After reading the late journalist Michael Hastings’s book, The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan, Michôd knew he had a launching pad for the exact type of war movie ...

May 25, 2017

Could Blade Runner 2049 be the most anticipated movie sequel of all time?

In 1982, director Ridley Scott stunned audiences with his epic sci-fi, dystopian noir film Blade Runner. Hampton Fancher and David Peoples wrote the screenplay based on the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? prompting the heated debate that continues to this day: Is Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a replicant? Coming ...

May 19, 2017

Finding Inspiration in the Story Behind the Story

It’s no secret that the most beloved and powerful stories come out of tragedy, adversity and struggle.

April 24, 2017

The Lost City of Z writer/director talks obsession, shooting in the jungle and ignoring Coppola’s advice

The new film, The Lost City of Z, was written and directed by James Gray and tells the true story of Percival Fawcett, a British explorer who disappeared in the Amazon jungle in 1925. If Fawcett’s name doesn’t ring a bell, you may be surprised to learn he’s one of the inspirations for the character Indiana Jones. Like Indiana, Fawcett ...

April 18, 2017

Should you “cheat the page” to alter your script’s page count? The Zookeeper’s Wife screenwriter says absolutely not.

The Zookeeper's Wife screenwriter Angela Workman sat down with ScreenwritingU to talk about the challenges of bringing this powerful story about animals and war to film.

March 20, 2017