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Inside Sundance Labs

A lot is praised about Sundance Labs, but what are they really like?

The one thing they will not do in this cocooned Shangri-La is write. Though one or two Fellows tell me they’re itching to get back to work after a conference with an adviser or a conversation with a peer, most appear pleased to get a break from the solitude of writing — including the advisers, who are especially happy to be kept busy during the ongoing WGA strike. Over lunch, Satter and her young lieutenant, Illyse McKimmie, lay out the rationale for the informal no-writing rule. “We want them to stay fluid,” says Satter, a tall, bespectacled blond in her 50s with a low, musical voice and an unflappable manner that she puts down to hiking the mountain trails every morning for an hour before the Lab gears up. The Fellows will all have six meetings with the advisers, who will have read their scripts but not worked on them before they get here. The advisers will talk to them about character, intent, what they think the story really is. “It’s not Screenwriting 101 here,” Satter tells me. “It’s very collegial and all about responding to a particular script. There’s always a Fellow who will say on the first day, ‘Okay, I’ve figured it out.’ By the third day, they [realize they] probably haven’t figured it out, and by the fourth day they’re coming up with other ideas. It’s a very immersive, intensive experience that’s less about the answers than about finding the right questions.”

--LA Weekly - Behind the Scenes at the Sundance Labs - Ella Taylor

About J. Ott

John Ott is a writer, filmmaker and futurist. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.