Q&A with Lisa & Laura Bunbury: Having Fun Working Hard
Now that March is over, I’ve reclaimed my writing practice from the whims of my 31-day piano performance project. The daily grind feels good—discipline has always been my jam—but it was a needed jolt to take a break and interview Lisa and Laura Bunbury, with whom I share a rockstar women screenwriters’ group. I’m always grateful for Lisa’s and Laura’s creative insights, galvanizing words of wisdom and general hilarity, and our Zoom Q&A was all this and more.
Lisa and Laura are a sister screenwriting/producing team who write multicultural young adult and teen/family dramas. They were recently selected as fellows and Team Leads of the Blackmagic Collective’s Breakthrough Initiative, a fellowship that champions BIPOC TV directors and writers, and they’re mentees in the #StartWith8Hollywood program. The Bunbury sisters produced the social commentary short film Tuesday, which screened in over 47 festivals around the world and won both national and international awards. They’ve also written and produced shows at Santa Monica CityTV and worked in the writers’ room on the Hallmark Channel’s Good Witch.
As a solo artist who’s used to creating in isolation, I was eager to learn the inner workings of Lisa’s and Laura’s mysterious collaborative process. Spoiler alert: it’s mostly about having fun.
Q&A with Lisa & Laura Bunbury, screenwriters & producers
Lisa & Laura Bunbury
Q: What is your collaborative creative process like?
Lisa: Laura’s a longhand processor and I like to type things up. In the beginning, she’d put all her thoughts down and I’d put it into a form. Then we’d go over it together and tweak and massage and work it. Now we both pretty much do all the things.
Laura: I don’t do as much longhand anymore except for characters. I have to write it and feel it before I type it up. So, one of us will come up with an idea, we’ll discuss it and laugh about it a lot, and then it turns into something—probably ten minutes into that conversation, Lisa will say, “We should be writing this down!”
Lisa: We don’t start a draft of anything until we’ve fully outlined it.
Laura: The outline makes writing so much easier.
Lisa: The last piece of our process, which is advice I’d give to anyone who writes, is that every time you send your script to a new person for notes—
Laura: Read it.
Lisa: Read it again before you send it out. Read it out loud before you send it out. Inevitably, you’ll find one small thing, like a comma or phrasing that doesn’t feel right. Re-reading is the most valuable thing you can do, because then you start to really wear it in like a piece of clothing.
Q: What inspires your ideas?
Laura and Lisa (laughing): Everything.
Lisa: We collect dialogue when we’re out.
Laura: Both of us have files in our phones where we’ll write and email each other dialogue and ideas.
Lisa: We once heard someone say, “if I was just like X I could get all these things done in my life,” and we turned it into a script.
Laura: We laugh all day long, so we also come up with ideas based on things we say to each other.
Q: Laura, how do you develop characters when you’re writing longhand?
Laura: If I write in pen and mess up, I have to white-out or rewrite the page, so I use pencils. I start with picturing my characters and writing down their names. Sometimes I know what their ethnicity’s going to be and I build them out that way. For our first teen drama, the son was going to be half Greek and half Colombian. To get the dad’s name, I looked up popular Greek names in the 1970s and researched their meanings to see what grabbed me. I do that for each person’s name because I want everything to be authentic. I don’t give anyone the same initials because I like all the names to blend. I want to see how their names are on the page. I don’t want any similar names. It’s a whole process, but Lisa lets me do my thing.
Lisa: Yeah, I’m not into all that deep CIA intel on the characters. Once she decides their origins, I’ll jump in. We’ll think about where they begin their journey and what they’re going to go through. There might be dialogue we collected that we use, or sometimes that’s what a character is built around. On SNL, Molly Shannon would say “this character is this” and move in a certain way with a certain attitude, and she’d give that to the writers and they’d build a character on that essence. Sometimes we’ll just have an essence and build character around it.
Q: What’s your favorite part of the creative process?
Laura: I love all of it but my favorite parts are building the world and creating the characters.
Lisa: I love the sparring in scenes with conflict, when an argument feels like a dance. And I love table reads when you’re hearing your words read aloud and people actually get what you’ve written. That is electrifying.
Q: Do you have any rituals around your creative work?
Lisa: It depends on our setup—where we’re living or working—but we do enjoy a comfy chair.
Laura: Good snacks.
Lisa: Big workspace, natural light. I like a hot green tea and a big glass of water. Fruit and, of course, chocolate. I’m painting the ideal picture, but we’ll write anywhere. There’s no hard and fast like, “if I don’t wear these old sweaty socks my team isn’t going to win the game” sort of thing. We’re definitely into comfort and a lot of light while we’re writing, if we can get it. But if not, the writing will continue.
Laura: We can write at night, but if we had to choose, we’d pick morning.
Q: Lisa, during a recent Blackmagic Collective panel, you offered up the advice to be your own biggest cheerleader. Why is this so important?
Lisa: What we’ve found in our journey is that this industry is basically a flood of “No’s.” And if you have not fortified yourself, you’re going to give up quickly, you’re going to get discouraged, you’re going to be depressed, you’re going to doubt and question what you’ve done. If you’re going to really be a writer in the sense that you’re going to believe in your stuff to get it produced, you’ve got to develop a thick skin and you’ve got to be the one who knows without a shadow of a doubt that your stuff is fantastic.
Laura: That’s true for any industry, and anything you’re passionate about.
Lisa: Especially with the creative arts because they’re subjective, and there will be people who don’t get you and don’t connect to your material. You’ve got to stand by your own self and your own truth even when other people are saying “no.” If you’ve gone through the work and you know this is the story you’ve got to tell, stand by it.
Follow the Bunbury sisters on Instagram or Twitter to stay up to date with their projects and words of wisdom.
If you’re like me and still need some prodding to make outlining your friend, here are inspiring reasons to outline from screenwriter Glenn Gers.
Ready to infuse more fun into your work? Lisa and Laura can’t get enough of Leave the Door Open by Bruno Mars & Anderson .Paak! And I’d be remiss if I didn’t lead you to some Molly Shannon.
Read more Wild Minds posts here.