Q&A: Screenwriter Dara Resnik Is Living Out Loud
The 'Home Before Dark' and 'The Horror of Dolores Roach' showrunner discusses her fearless approach to storytelling
Screenwriter Dara Resnik has always seemed to exist just at the periphery of my life in Hollywood, but somehow we never officially met in the flesh despite the fact that I now realize we were even present at many of the same events together. I find this is an incredibly common occurrence in the U.S. film/TV industry, but an unfortunate one because you’re always just missing out on meeting paths with people’s whose work you admire or whom you’ve heard wonderful things about over the years. Ships forever passing in the night, so to say. Well, I decided to do something about that when it comes to Dara - though maybe not with the perfect solution. As we live on opposite sides of the Pacific today, I asked the TV creator and showrunner to join me for one of my artist-on-artist conversations. She agreed, then swooped in and immediately started challenging how I see favorite films, dropping truth bombs, and blowing open her personal life to help you better understand her art and creative process. As I said to her during our chat, hats off to her for being such a bad ass.
(Note: Since I wrote this opening, I discovered Dara’s Not-Twitter handle is BadAssMomWriter, so she clearly agrees with me.)
Dara is what you would call a veteran screenwriter. She’s got an epic CV populated by titles such as “Pushing Daisies”, “Castle”, “Jane the Virgin”, “Shooter”, “I Love Dick”, and “Daredevil”. A few years back, she made the big leap to creator and showrunner when, with screenwriter Dana Fox, she created and ran “Home Before Dark”. She followed this up by running “The Horror of Dolores Roach”. She and I will go into depth about what she learned during this journey and how her life experiences informed her approach to and passion for both of the series she’s overseen. You’re going to learn a lot from this conversation, trust me.
Typically, I point out for aspiring/emerging screenwriters what to look for in my interviews, that might help them most, but this time around I’m going to suggest writers at all stages of their careers would benefit from considering the emotional honesty Dara brings to her work, her theory of “living out loud” (including on the page), and how that has helped her both land jobs and execute them in ways that helped her better understand herself.
COLE HADDON: Let’s begin with a question I always love to ask when I have drinks with other writers. What’s your comfort food when it comes to art? You know, the film you watch every time you need a warm hug? Or the album that gets played far too much? Maybe the TV series you’ve rewatched way too many times?
DARA RESNIK: My forever love is When Harry Met Sally... My best high school dude friend Chris Genteel showed it to me during a snow day when we were sixteen, and then we walked around the streets of Manhattan and talked about whether men and women could be friends - they totally can!
I watched it probably one hundred-plus times over the years and then, when I got divorced, it took on a whole new meaning and I realized that what nobody remembers about the movie is that it’s actually the greatest, most uplifting movie about divorce and second chances at love ever made. Here are these two broken people in their thirties, realizing that they can, in fact, have a mature relationship with a partner. They learn so many truths that divorced folks learn in their thirties and forties, even today. It’s timeless, it’s hopeful, it’s real, and it’s pragmatically romantic. Warm hug movie all the way.
CH: I have to thank you, truly, for this answer. I adore When Harry Met Sally…, though I’ve only seen it ten, maybe twelve times. Nothing like you. But it means something to me, I know it inside and out - and I have never paused to consider the film from the perspective of the divorced. I find this endlessly fascinating about art. It remains static, but our relationship to it can change over time because we change along with the world around us.
DR: Yeah, and I think the best art changes along with us because it’s real. The reason When Harry Met Sally… can hold up that way for me post-divorce is that it was born from conversations [Rob] Reiner and [Nora] Ephron were having after her divorce about men and women and break-ups. It simply told a true story.
CH: So, I recently had one of these artist-on-artist conversations with my last university creative writing seminar teacher, Peter Ho Davies, who is an incredibly brilliant novelist and short story writer if you’ve never read him. During our chat, I revealed to him that he was the first person to suggest I could make a go as a professional artist. Before that moment, it was all in my head, blind confidence — or hope — nothing more. But his encouragement propelled me forward in pretty unexpected ways. I never let up from that day on. Was there a similar moment for you, where that uncertainty vanished? Your inciting incident, so to say.
DR: I don’t think uncertainty as an artist will ever vanish for me. But I also think — possibly falsely — that’s why I work so hard. I always want to get to the best idea, find the best word, hone the work until it’s out of my hands. I feel like I was very lucky in that I was never uncertain that I could be an artist of some kind because I grew up in New York City surrounded by actors, creators, writers, visual artists. Those folks were the texture of my childhood. I understood early that getting paid to create was a job a person could actually have.
“I feel like I was very lucky in that I was never uncertain that I could be an artist of some kind because I grew up in New York City surrounded by actors, creators, writers, visual artists.”
CH: I love that description – those folks were the texture of my childhood. I’m always envious of people who grew up in New York City, this arts mecca, which is such a contrast to the childhood I had in an economically strapped and generally culture-arrested metropolitan Detroit during the eighties. Talk to me about your decision to pursue a life in the arts then. Was that always the ambition and was the moving image always the ultimate destination?
DR: When I was younger, I wanted to be an actress because that was my escape. I loved Broadway and auditioned for every school and camp play. I took classes at The Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theater in New York. And what I realized is…I’m not very good. I’m too in my head. I had a few moments of, “Oh, that’s what this is supposed to feel like,” and I think if I kept at it, I might have gotten better, but ultimately that heady analysis is probably what makes me good at writing scenes for actors. If theater paid better, I might have been a playwright, but I quickly realized if you want to get paid well as a writer, you better write for film and television. So, I pivoted. It was a pretty easy pivot because I loved movies and as much as I loved Broadway. I just suspected that career choice meant I’d have to leave New York. And I did.
CH: If I’m not mistaken, your first stop was USC to earn a master’s in Motion Picture Producing. I believe our mutual friend Dana Fox — your co-creator on “Home Before Dark” — was there at that time. Is that where you two met?
DR: She was a couple of years ahead of me. We were in what I like to call concentric social circles for many years - we knew each other, but didn’t really hang out until Joy Gorman connected us to run “Home Before Dark” together.
CH: Ah, got it. I love Joy, by the way. I’m curious about the focus of your master’s. Producing, not writing.
DR: I’d gotten an economics degree from Tufts University and had a really good GPA and GRE scores. I knew the Stark program cared about that a lot and I had a head for game theory. I thought maybe I’ll just go into this from the business end of things. But pretty much the second I got out here, I figured out that many, many scripts are terrible. I decided it would just be easier to do it myself.
Writing is something that for my entire life had tapped me on the shoulder - I had always journaled, always written for my school papers, always written short stories for the lit mags and scripts for fun. I recently found, weirdly, an assignment from high school where I had to pick a career and talk about how much I’d make doing that for a living and why I’d chosen it. I had chosen “writer” and didn’t even remember. Anyway, now it’s how I process. It’s an indelible part of my identity and psychology. Even if Hollywood is done with me, I think I will always write now.
“[Writing’s] an indelible part of my identity and psychology. Even if Hollywood is done with me, I think I will always write now.”
CH: Can you expand upon that a bit more, that you now process life through stories - is that right? What does that mean for you?
DR: The answer to this is related to my time at the Neighborhood Playhouse again. I am highly interesting in the human experience. In our existence, our feelings, our interactions with each other. I think that’s why I was drawn to acting. But like I said, even with a lot of work, I could have been very good and still not great. And I think the problem is that I have a hard time with embodying. I am much better at being outside myself, and outside others and observing the feeling, the body language, the interaction. So, I think writing speaks to that. It helps me take a good hard look at my emotions and my life and my relationships. Writing is how I work them from the outside in rather than the inside out as actors do or some writers do. It also means I’m great at narrative structure.
CH: What you’re describing sounds like a very necessary part of your emotional and mental health, but do you ever find yourself confronting your own life and balking? As in, what do you do when you confront truths about yourself and your relationships that you’re afraid of or otherwise not ready to deal with? I used to think there were limits for me, but more and more, I’m discovering I cannot self-censor even the parts of my life and experiences that I might be ashamed of. Any time I turn away from something or draw a line about what can be aired in any way, both my work and I suffer.
DR: I abandoned shame when I got divorced. There were a lot of secrets in my marriage, and when we split, I had this mantra, “Live Out Loud.” There is nobody more apt to talk openly about the terrible things I’ve done, the mistakes I’ve made, the ways I hurt someone else than me. Because shame is such a sticky, complicated emotion. It’s the fear that you are or have done something so bad, that your community, the world, will oust you. That’s how wired we are as humans to survive by connecting to each other - there’s an entire emotion dedicated to fear of rejection from the larger whole. And the only way to counteract that feeling is by declaring your truth. The good, bad, and ugly. And being accepted by other humans who say, “I get it,” “I love you anyway,” “We all make mistakes.” To live out loud, I have to be able to look at the worst and most painful parts of myself and of others too. It probably contributes to my depression sometimes. But I’ve got Prozac and therapy for that. And the only way to drive out darkness is by shining a light on it.