“I needed to make a change in my life,” said Andy Siara about the origin of his screenwriting career. “I was in a band with my brother for a while and we decided to call it a day in 2012. He was making responsible adult decisions, so I thought I had to do that too, so I applied to the only school that didn’t require the GRE.”

Two weeks later, Siara was enrolled at AFI. “To hedge my bets, I applied to the producing program and the screenwriting program,” he joked. “I stayed up all night writing my first screenplay and I got into both programs—so I decided to do screenwriting.”

Andy refers to this as the non-romantic version of his path into screenwriting, but if you go back a little further, the real fascination came when Andy was a 7-year-old and his dad took him to see Jurassic Park. “Oh, okay, this is what I gotta do now,” he said. “I saw that like nine times that summer and developed a true love for movies and then TV in the early 2000s.”

Today, Siara is best known for his work on Lodge 49, the movie Palm Springs, and the recent TV series The Resort. “In order to not hate myself the rest of my life, I knew I had to at least try it,” he said of screenwriting. “I had to back myself into a corner and try it.”

Andy Siara

Andy’s work is all very unique in nature, giving him a signature for the unusual quite early in his career. His most recent project, The Resort, has been described as “one foot on the banana peel and the other in the grave.” It all goes back to a short story he wrote around age 12, called Stuck in the Past.

Writing About Time

“I’m definitely into something within that world,” he said of these three projects. “That was one of the big ones that stuck with me. I also dabbled in various [themes] trying to find my writing voice. I’m still trying to find my voice, but I know the things I’m constantly circling—like time, romance, comedy, adventure.”

“If I had a set of rules, I would probably be much more efficient,” said the writer. “I think the thing I’ve learned about myself is that I have to throw everything at the wall and just see what sticks. We were finishing Episode 5 and it’s 28 pages, but I have a separate document that’s about 400 pages just of Episode 5,” he said about the latest project.

Emma (Cristin Milioti) & Noah (William Jackson Harper). Photo courtesy of Peacock

“That’s where it’s not the most efficient way. I probably didn’t need to write 400 pages to get these 28 pages, but that’s what I’ve noticed about my writing. I really need to write through things to find the core of what I’m trying to do. Then I look at act structure and all of those. They’re helpful tools if you find yourself stuff, but when I’m letting the characters come to life, I [prefer] to get lost in the writing.”

Siara said when he follows his instinct, the characters seem to take the plot in a way that it “falls into place.” He continued, “When I’ve tried the structure approach and I spend time brainstorming, then I add a structure to make turning points happen, those inevitably change when I’m writing it.”

“I have respect for the structure. Students will save David Lynch doesn’t follow structure, but if you break down Mulholland Drive, there is a structure there. I doubt David Lynch has [structured] note cards, but if you break it down, the structure is there. The structure comes from storytelling.”

The Lodge 49 TV Writers’ Room

Siara started as an assistant to Peter Ocko (The Office, Dinosaurs), the showrunner on Lodge 49. “Watching him, I felt like I got a good front row seat to what works and what doesn’t work in the writer’s room. Throughout the whole production side of things too.”

Ocko bumped up Siara to staff writer for the second season of the series. “Everyone has a style that works for them. I feel like I learned about things I tried that didn’t work for me. The biggest thing I learned in the writers’ room is that we need to throw as much against the wall [as possible]. All ideas come out and then I watch Creator Jim [Gavin] and Peter find the nugget of certain ideas and have that filter through their brains into the show it became.”

Sean ‘Dud’ Dudley (Wyatt Russell)

Siara said that was the most important lesson he learned while working on Lodge 49: “Knowing how to identify the brilliant little nuggets that can come out of all these minds coming together.” He took these nuggets and later formed his own script, Palm Springs, originally an idea meant to be made for $500,000 or less.

Writing Palm Springs

The week after graduation, Siara met up with his friend Max Barbakow, who would later direct Palm Springs. “Out of that came this seed of an idea. Then, over the next three years, I was writing it and passing it to Max for notes, then we would talk about life and everything. I was in Lodge 49 at that point, but wrote on my off time. After three and a half years, we got to a point where we knew what it was.”

In the background, Siara also landed a great agent who helped get this script into the hands of comedy star Andy Samberg. By this point, it was no longer a small, indie film.

“We were aiming for a small indie film, but following my tastes and my instincts, while I do love small indies, I still have this spectacle craving inside of me too. Where the script ended up and the one that got to Andy, it was no longer a $500,000 or $1 million script. I tried to limit myself, but I like explosions here and there. When it got to Andy, that’s what they were attracted to too. I realized I needed a bigger sandbox to play in.”

There were lulls in this writing process, but the screenwriter credits having Max as a collaborator and partner the reason he never gave up on it. “I’m sure there were lulls, but we never scrapped it. I would say one thing that truly kept me going was it was something Max and I wanted to do together. Not just as a producer, but someone who also has their DNA in it.”

He added, “When you’re left to just your own negative thoughts, you can fall into a failure cycle, but having someone to lean on is huge.”

Writing The Resort

The Resort actually came from a failed script. It was previously a movie about a kid who goes with his family to a resort, where he befriends an older couple. “That was an earlier version of Sam and his family and the couple was an earlier version of Emma and Noah. It was a sweet little movie that was not very good.”

(Sam) (Skyler Gisondo) & Hannah (Debby Ryan) Abey Charron/Peacock

Siara put this script to the side, but as he grew as a writer, he could return to the script and “look at it through a new lens.” He said, “Over several years, I would take it apart, approach it through where I was in my life at that point and fast forward to 2019, I realized I was unwilling to let it go, but that can be a problem because there’s a nostalgic spiral you can get trapped into.”

To make the story finally work, he decided to split the story in half. He took the married couple and put them in present day. Then he took Sam’s family and Violet’s family and put them in the past. “The story had always been about Emma and Noah trying to capture something from their past. So, splitting them up and creating this missing person’s case, they’re literally trying to find out the past and simultaneously trying to figure out their lives and how they got here. Then it all started to fall into place.”

Through this complex story, Siara ends up with pages and pages of notes. But, he’s often still facing a deadline. “It’s very hard. At a certain point, you just have to say this is as good as its going to get,” he joked. “In that sense, deadlines are very helpful. You can’t overthink something. But what’s hard, doing the showrunning job and re-writing, that is a tough balance.”

“It’s basically survival. That’s the only way to get through it all. You have to trust your instincts are right, so what ends up in those final thirty pages we’re shooting, the whole journey to get there is necessary. You have to convince yourself it was necessary even if it wasn’t necessary. Otherwise, you will lose your mind.”

Battling Writers’ Block

The screenwriter said whenever he gets stuck it’s because something is broken. “What I’ve learned is that it’s often not in the scene that I’m noticing it in. It’s often much deeper and that’s a scary thing to look at. The best ideas from the show have come from identifying that and doing the hard work, because something is fundamentally wrong.”

“The easy thing is putting a bandage on it or a simple fix, but if you look under the hood, you can see what the problem is. That happened a few times. It forces you to zoom in on the emotional core and thematic part of the story, but also keep a bird’s eye view to see how it all fits in as a whole.”

He said it’s difficult to diagnose “this tiny screw that’s loose” with the “bird’s eye view.” But without doing so, “the entire engine can fall apart.” He continued, “From there, I might go watch a movie to see how they got through it. Then just trust the audience. They don’t need as much shoe leather sometimes. When you’re lost in the woods, you’re looking for any guidepost at all. It might be analyzing the self or self hatred,” he joked, “but it’s necessary.”

Although The Resort came from a nearly abandoned script, but Siara’s overall success comes from a lot of trial and error. “I definitely have a drawer of bad scripts. Other friends I went to film school with, I see the constantly reworking of a script written there, little revisions here and there… I’m of the mindset that those were stepping stones to find your voice, but you should move on to the next thing.”

He concluded, “Don’t dwell on making a masterpiece. The difference in this script is that I never tried to rewrite that script. I just blew it up completely every single time. It is because of something different every time. A finished script is a great rare thing. So writing something to the finish is a huge victory in and of itself. Allow that to be the victory then do it again.”

This interview has been condensed. Listen to the full audio version here.