GEORGE STRAYTON
 GEORGE STRAYTON
Where do you live (City, State, or Country)?
I split my time between Los Angeles, CA and Edinburgh, Scotland, two cities that couldn’t be more different yet somehow feed into the same creative impulse. Los Angeles is where I’ve been building a career. It is the center of the machine, after all. But Edinburgh is where I reconnect with why I wanted to tell stories in the first place. It’s quieter, older, and closer to the kind of mystery that first made me pick up a pen. How did you discover The Palm Springs International Screenplay Awards and how did you decide to enter this contest among all the others? I found the Palm Springs International Screenplay Awards through FilmFreeway, but what made me submit wasn’t just visibility, it was credibility. Some competitions feel like marketing; this one felt serious. I’d heard the coverage was thoughtful and detailed, and that’s what I value most: rigorous, constructive feedback that treats the work like it matters. Your script or media entry stood out among hundreds of others. What was the inspiration for your project ? I had two scripts place as semifinalists, The Skywalker and The Breaking of Bob Howard. Both grew out of my fascination with the minds that built worlds from nothing. The Skywalker explores George Lucas’s early struggle to carve out a new kind of myth in a system that didn’t yet believe in him. The Breaking of Bob Howard dives into the opposite: a genius who couldn’t escape the darkness of his own imagination. In both men, I saw the same tension: the cost of creating something original in a world that resists it. How long did it take you to write your script or produce your pitch deck/sizzle reel/trailer...and what was your development process? Each script took about six months: four buried in research and two writing/re-writing. For both, I had to inhabit the main character completely. It wasn’t about studying them from a distance; it was about becoming them. Living in their heads, carrying their fears, and letting the story move through me instead of around me. It was exhausting emotionally and physically, but also exhilarating. For me, that’s the paradox of writing something true: it drains you, and somehow, it fills you at the same time. What is your ultimate ambition as a writer or filmmaker? My goal as a filmmaker is to build original worlds that stand alongside the ones that shaped me like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Back to the Future. The kind of mythic cinema that invites audiences to feel wonder again. I’m currently writing and directing an epic science-fantasy feature called The Star Cycle shooting in Scotland. But beyond the filmmaking itself, my ambition is to make work that brings people together. The world keeps fracturing into smaller tribes, each convinced the others are the enemy. Great movies can still cut through that noise. They remind us, for two hours, that we’re part of the same story. Which film directors or screenwriters inspire you? Why? I’ve always been drawn to the filmmakers who built entire worlds from imagination and discipline like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, visionaries who made emotion and myth feel cinematic. Denis Villeneuve inspires me for the precision and meditative quality of his storytelling; every frame feels like it’s carved from silence. John Milius, for his unapologetic boldness. And Tom Stoppard, for the intellect beneath the rhythm, i.e. the way he weaves philosophy into human conversation without ever breaking its pulse (and it helps that I’m a massive Bardophile). Together, they remind me that great storytelling balances scope with soul. What’s your all-time favorite movie or television show? Star Wars. The first one. I watched it at a drive-in from the open back of my friend’s parents’ station wagon at the age of six. I didn’t know it then, but that night rerouted my life. It made me realize stories could reshape the way we see the world, and maybe even the way the world sees itself. How do you approach competition entries, and what have you learned from participating in these contests? When I enter a competition, I treat it as an experiment. Each submission is a test of resonance. Of whether what I’m trying to communicate actually connects. The feedback I’ve received over time has been invaluable, especially when it cuts deep. It teaches you where the emotion lands, where it doesn’t, and how to make the work undeniable. I’ve learned that contests aren’t about validation, they’re about calibration. What advice do you have for others hoping to win a contest or place as a finalist as you have? Structure is the skeleton that keeps a story standing. But the life of that story comes from the body. You have to write from the part of yourself that feels, not the part that calculates. And whatever you write will always be terrible at first. That’s how it’s supposed to be. The only real compass you have is internal: your body, your instincts, the pulse that tells you when something is alive and when it isn’t. It knows more than your intellect ever will. Writing is just learning to listen to it. What else are you working on that the world needs to know about? Right now, I’m focused entirely on The Star Cycle, an original epic I’ve been developing for years. It’s a science-fantasy feature — think Lord of the Rings in space — but built from emotional rather than mythology for its own sake. At its heart, it’s about a young man who discovers that the universe is both darker and more luminous than he ever imagined, and a warrior, who’s the last of her ancient order, who must learn that strength means nothing without love. It’s the kind of film I’ve always wanted to make as a writer-director: mythic in terms of scope, but human at its core. Where can the world find you? (Website, IMDB, etc.) https://atomicpunkpictures.com https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0833971/ |
