In this episode, I’m joined by writer, director, and bestselling comics author Michael Moreci, whose reentry into filmmaking came in the form of Revealer, a single-location horror film set in a 1980s Chicago peep show booth. He wrote the film in about ten days and it later premiered on Shudder. Since then he’s co-written and co-directed the heist comedy Holiday Hold-Up, written on Syfy’s Revival, and continued a long career in comics on series like Barbaric and Dick Tracy.
Throughout the episode we get into the discipline that lets you write a feature in ten days, why he thinks directing is mostly pre-production and post, how the crew community at Flyover Studios in Illinois has become the lifeblood of everything he makes, and the hard lesson that the second film is harder to get made than the first.
Topics covered include:
- Writing Revealer in ten days and more or less shooting the first draft
- Why a thorough outline is what actually lets you write fast
- Wearing the writer hat and the director hat, and why you can’t wear both at once
- Splitting one narrative feature between four directors, one per character
- Clarity of vision as the thing that makes every on-set decision easy
- How an abandoned Air Force base became Flyover Studios
- Building a crew community that stays, grows, and moves laterally
- What writing for a cable series taught him about what he doesn’t want
- Why comics training makes you fast, economical, and better at editing
- Somehow holding the Dick Tracy comic rights, and the value of just asking
All of this and much more on today’s show!
This is Episode 280: Writing A Shudder Horror Feature In 10 Days & Making A Micro Budget Paranoia Thriller With Michael Moreci
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