At Sundance’s screenwriting lab, young writers learn from — and give inspiration to — Hollywood pros

Sundance • Taylor Sanghyun Lee only decided to get into filmmaking in the last few years, but last week he was in a spot many young filmmakers would envy: A fellowship at the Sundance Institute’s screenwriters’ lab.

“I didn’t come from a background of film,” Lee said. “I grew up without a TV. I studied software engineering in my undergrad, and worked as a software engineer. Then I went to grad school for film. … I got restless.”

Lee was one of 11 screenwriters who spent three full days last week in an intensive program run by the Sundance Institute. During those days, the young writers engaged in conversations with a group of Hollywood pros — people who have won Oscars, Tonys and the occasional Pulitzer — to talk about the craft of writing, and how to get what’s in their head and heart onto the page.

“I’ve learned there’s a lot of work to do on the script,” Lee said. “I’m finding that just getting little [bits of advice] and bringing [them] into my script — hopefully, it just encourages me to keep writing.”

The labs started in 1981, when actor-director Robert Redford founded the Sundance Institute, to give independent storytellers a place to develop their work and their voices away from the pressures of Hollywood.

The January labs are timed to precede the Sundance Film Festival, so the writers developing their scripts can see some festival films and experience what’s on the other end of the indie-movie pipeline. In June, Sundance holds its directors’ labs, where eight fledgling directors get to rehearse, shoot and edit a couple of scenes from their scripts.

With few exceptions, the labs have been held annually at the Sundance Mountain Resort, formerly owned by Redford. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the lab programs were retooled to be held virtually. In 2024, while the resort was undergoing renovations, the June lab moved temporarily to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado — the location Stephen King said inspired him in writing “The Shining.”

Michelle Satter, the founding senior director of Sundance’s artists programs, said last week that the January labs will continue to be held at the Sundance resort, even as the Sundance Film Festival gets ready to move to Boulder, Colorado, in 2027. The June labs will be held for the third year at the Stanley, but will return to Sundance in 2027, she said.

‘Why did I choose that?’

Lulu Wang, who wrote and directed the 2019 comedy-drama “The Farewell,” said that as an adviser to Sundance’s lab, she feels an affinity with the new writers. After all, she said, “I’ve only made a couple more [movies] than some of them.”

“As a filmmaker, it is incredibly helpful just to be challenged and questioned on the choices that you’ve made,” Wang said. “When you’re working on something for a long time, it’s hard to see the forest through the trees.”

The advisers, Wang said, can “look at things with fresh eyes, and really question the filmmaker on why they made these choices. Sometimes you do things instinctively, so you’re in conversation with yourself and that’s it. You’re, like, ‘Why did I choose that?’”

The advisers’ insight “forces you to question yourself, and ponder those questions,” Wang said. “You’re, like, ‘Why am I being so defensive? Why do I not want to cut this? Even though it’s not working, where do we need to get in order to make it work?’”

Another adviser, screenwriter and playwright Doug Wright, jokingly compared the advisers’ job to marriage counseling.

“A couple comes to us, and that couple happens to be a writer and his or her screenplay,” said Wright, who won a Tony and a Pulitzer for the 2004 play “I Am My Own Wife.” “We all have relationships to our work, and sometimes that relationship is healthy and good and full of excitement — and sometimes we’re not on speaking terms. So the first thing is to assess where the writer is in relation to their own work, and the next thing is to try and bring that relationship to as healthy and proactive a place as you can.”

When looking at a first script, Wright said what can’t be taught is “a unique authorial voice, someone who writes in a way that is distinctive and leaps off the page. … I always say that really good writing has all of the passion of a great love letter and all the urgency of a suicide note. That’s what you look for.”

Once Sundance finds a writer like that, the next step for the advisers, Wright said, is to “introduce craft. You can’t get that kind of raw talent, it simply has to be presented to you. Once you’re given it, you can teach that individual how to apply craft in a way that serves that talent in a lasting way.”

Part of a community

In a cozy conference room, this year’s 11 lab fellows sat in a circle listening to Satter and Ilyse McKimmie, deputy director of Sundance’s Feature Film Program, talk about what being accepted into the lab means.

The lab, they told the screenwriters, is just the first step in what Sundance calls “a continuum of support.”

For starters, after the January lab and the festival, the writers will be contacted for one-on-one conversations to discuss their next steps. One of those steps could be applying for the June directors’ lab; the eight slots in that lab are chosen from previous fellows, rather than an open call for submissions, like the January labs.

First, though, they’re told they need to have a new draft of their scripts — though not necessarily a polished draft.

“You get here, and you get all this great feedback, and you say, ‘This next draft is THE draft,’” McKimmie told the writers. “It’s not,” she said, adding that the post-lab draft often is pretty terrible, but can lead them to a better draft.

Sundance, Satter and McKimmie said, also can help writers build a network of movie pros — helping identify possible collaborators or find grant opportunities. The institute also has webinars and other professional development programs. The only thing the institute asks in return is a nominal fee, and a listing in the credits, when one of its fellows eventually makes a film.

“We can be a cheerleader, we can be a reality check, we can be a sounding board,” McKimmie said.

Sundance can boast an impressive track record. The posters around the foyer of the resort’s screening room represent filmmakers who have come through the Sundance lab system — including Ryan Coogler, Paul Thomas Anderson, Kimberly Peirce, John Cameron Mitchell and Miranda July. A makeshift sign on the restroom door denotes the space as the “Quentin Tarantino Memorial Bathrooms,” because Tarantino shot a scene there at a 1991 lab with Steve Buscemi from “Reservoir Dogs.”

‘I could actually do it’

Wright said the problems faced by the new writers in the lab are the same ones he, a seasoned writer, faces constantly.

“I wake up with days and I’ll have a manuscript at home that I’m at war with, and other times I’ll approach that same manuscript and just be wildly in love with it,” Wright said. “We’re hot and cold that way as writers.”

Another adviser, Nicole Perlman (who worked on the first “Guardians of the Galaxy” movie, among others), said coming to Sundance “reminds me of the values that bring us to writing in the first place. … I’m always creatively reinvigorated at the end of one of these. It sets the tone for the whole year. It reminds me of not just why we tell stories, but the importance of having some integrity to your own voice and to your own story.”

Wang credited Satter and McKimmie for being “incredible at reminding us that this is a space for discovery and exploration. … I find myself reminding the writers over and over that you don’t need to have the answers right now. … Absorb all of these questions and look at it as the clay with which you’re later going to be sculpting.”

Lee, the software engineer-turned-filmmaker, aims to sculpt something out of his script he’s been working on for two years, called “Rounds.”

It’s about two Korean American families in Los Angeles “who have to decide whether they forgive each other for their respective roles in a gang shooting that tore their Presbyterian church community apart,” he said.

Lee said the script was based on a true story, which he has since fictionalized, bringing in elements of his upbringing in a Korean Southern Baptist community in California. “It’s a world I know really well, and I think within that community, you’re dealing with forgiveness — the public side of that, and the harder private side.”

Lee graduated from grad school at New York University, and has been working as a cinematographer on other people’s films to pay the bills. Attending the Sundance lab, he said, has been a confidence boost.

“It’s kind of sad that you need that stamp of approval sometimes, but as an artist, if you don’t get those stamps, it’s hard to push through,” Lee said, adding that at the lab, “this is the first time I’m like, ‘Oh, I can make this feature.’ It’s like I could actually do it.”