Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Script Notes, a podcast about

screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, so you've been

nominated for an Oscar. What do you do next? How do you translate this attention and heat into

that next project and hopefully into a career? To help us answer this question, we are joined today

by a writer-director

pair facing this exact dilemma. Natalie Mastata and Alessandra Singh are a writer-director

pair whose short film, Two People, exchanging saliva, has racked up a bunch of awards,

including an Oscar nomination. Welcome and congratulations. Thank you so much, John.

Thank you.

We should say you were actually our scripted notes listeners,

and so this is not a strange place for you to show up.

Not at all.

I mean, this is actually the first podcast for screenwriting that we ever listened to.

It was 10 years ago, and Alex and I, we come from the visual arts,

and all we ever did was talk about film, and so Alex I, we come from the visual arts, and all we ever did was talk about film.

And so Alex suggested, you know, rather than talking about film or writing about film, why don't

we try and make films, which I thought was audacious as two people that had never been to

film school and knew absolutely no one in the film industry.

So this is a sort of full circle moment for us because I think quite often in the podcast,

we're talking about emerging filmmakers, emerging screenwriters, regardless of how old they are.

We're coming from careers in visual arts and then like everybody dreaming of making films.

And coming up in an age when you don't have to go to film school, there's so much that

...