An Interview with Roadmap's 76th Signing!

Thank you! We are so excited to be working with Daniela Gonzalez at Circle of Confusion and the whole thing still feels surreal. 

As for our journey, we were finalists in last year's JumpStart competition. We were thrilled, obviously! One of the prizes was a fifteen minute call with Jorge at Roadmap Writers. We ended up chatting for almost an hour and really clicked. We told him about a pilot called Charlotte and Branwell that we had just finished which he asked to take a look at. He ended up passing it along to, Daniela, and basically the rest is history! In terms of our writing background, Andrew graduated from Tisch film school. He took some screenwriting courses and has been writing specs ever since. Meredith edited screenplays for others and wrote several novels before realizing her true love was screenwriting.

Tell us a little bit about how you came to work together/how your writing team works.
We've been best friends since we were 14. We met on the cross country team on the first day of high school! We were always off on some weird storytelling tangent together. We liked to disappear into our own little world. We always read each others work when we wrote on our own. Writing together now is a natural extension of that, though we didn't actually try it until around two and a half years ago. We live in different cities so writing together took some getting used to on a practical level but we found a writing program that lets us edit together in real time. Basically, we are constantly on the phone or texting, sometimes both. We recently discovered land lines are a legit thing!

Who are your writing influences? Whose work do you admire?
So many! We both love the Coen brothers, Noah Baumbach, Whit Stillman, Alexander Payne. We love a nice mix of high and low cultural influences from Mean Girls and Bridesmaids to The Hours and The Lobster. We are Gilmore Girls superfans. We recently re-watched Reality Bites and it's way better than we even remembered! We are also into great period pieces and really enjoy doing tons of research so we can fully delve into someone's life experience.

Other than getting signed, what's jazzing you right now (TV shows, films, books, podcasts)?
Meredith: I'm really loving Barry-the way the writers combine humor with drama is brilliant, such a tough balance and they really pull it off perfectly. I just watched Cabaret for the first time and was completely in awe of Bob Fosse's brain. He was fearless in his creativity. I'm re-reading a book by Bill Bryson called At Home which takes you through the history of every room in the house. It doesn't sound thrilling but I swear, it is! I'm obsessed with The Moth, all those stories, moments in people's lives that have all this weight, I love it!

Andrew: I watched the first season of Killing Eve and I'm looking forward to watching season 2. I loved Olivier Assayas' film Non-Fiction and recently watched Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and I'm fascinated but I have to watch it again to really understand it. I have a stack of fiction I want to read but I'm mostly reading screenplays for a contest, some excellent, but I have to catch up on my books. I'm not huge on podcasts. My guilty pleasures are Real Housewives and Chopped.

How did you discover Roadmap Writers?
Andrew found them online and took a great Roadmap class with Beverly Neufeld called Industry Reading. When the JumpStart competition came up, we made sure to enter. They have been incredibly supportive to us, way beyond any expectations! We are very grateful.