“He loves outlining. I hate outlining.”

Neustadter and Weber have written together for more than twenty years — (500) Days of Summer, The Spectacular Now, The Fault in Our Stars, Paper Towns. They have almost never written in the same room.

So Storytelling360 did something unusual: interviewed them the same evening, in the two cities they work from, separately. Neither heard the other’s answers.

What follows is both conversations, cut together. Edited for length and clarity.

How they met, from both ends of the phone

Michael H. Weber: I was at college at Syracuse, and I went home for spring break to look for an internship. I opened the phone book — which obviously dates this story, because there’s a phone book in it — and cold-called every production company in New York.

I had no connections. I didn’t know anyone.

Some places picked up the phone, others didn’t. The person who answered the phone at Tribeca was Scott.

He’d just graduated from Penn and started working there. I went in to meet him for an interview. And we’d both just seen Rushmore. We just geeked out about it — holy sh*t, this movie’s amazing. I think we spent most of the interview talking about Rushmore.

That was it. I got the internship.

Scott Neustadter: I was a development executive at twenty-one at Tribeca Productions in New York. I was quite young and didn’t really know what my job was, but I did everything.

One of the things I did was hire the interns for the summer. And Weber was one of the interns we hired — mostly because I was young, and they were the same age as me, and I needed friends.

So I was hiring friends.

And he noticed that all I was doing was complaining about how bad the scripts I was reading were. Because as a development executive you read an enormous number of scripts.

And he said: we should write one.

Which was something I’d always wanted to do and had never done. And I said, okay. Let’s try it.

What they learned at Tribeca

Michael H. Weber: The best thing about that internship, aside from the friends — and especially building the relationship with Scott — was that the interns had access to the script library.

I just remember reading as many scripts as I could get my hands on. Every day. Produced scripts, unproduced scripts, scripts in development, older scripts.

I probably learned as much from that as from anything else.

Scott Neustadter: My film school was reading scripts. I interned from seventeen. I had no confidence in my life, but I was a really good script reader, and that was my whole education.

I recommend it to everyone. Not just the genres you’re interested in — read the worst scripts and the best scripts. The more you read, the more you understand what your own voice sounds like.

I somehow finagled my love of reading scripts into a job. I got hired out of college as a story editor. Eventually they made me director of development, only because they recognised I was reading everything and giving useful feedback.

But you can only go so far. Eventually they said, you’re also going to have to do all the other parts of the job. Take lunches. And I said — nope. Not me. Sorry.

The first thing they wrote

Scott Neustadter: It was basically an extended Family Guy episode. A ridiculous, broad comedy.

A guy discovers he has a terminal disease, and instead of doing all the bucket-list things you’d do in a movie, he just wants to tell everybody what he thinks of them. So he burns every bridge, he’s a terrible person — and then he finds out he isn’t dying, and has to repair them.

Nothing happened with it.

But we finished something, which was cool. I’d never done that before.

Michael H. Weber: It’s the only time we’ve ever written something in the same city. And even then we didn’t write in the same room. He lived on the Upper West Side, I lived around here.

We’d outline a lot in person or over email, and then just divide up small batches of scenes.

Then we wrote a screenplay called Suck the Marrow, probably in about six weeks. And we were just excited we’d finished something.

The outlining split

This is the one place the two conversations openly disagree — and neither of them knew the other was being asked.

Scott Neustadter: He loves outlining. I hate outlining.

We talk a lot at the beginning, and eventually that turns into an email exchange, and the email exchange turns into an outline. And that’s a roadmap. It works for us.

If it were up to me, I’d go and experiment and do different things and often hit a wall, get lost, say screw this, and start something else.

Do you still outline now?

I recognize the value. I don’t enjoy it. Because you want to get to the part that makes you excited — where you hit on something and it’s great — and in an outline that doesn’t really happen. It has to be so predictable.

Michael H. Weber: I came from a background where that outline is sacred. Because the more problems you solve in those eight or ten or twelve pages — just mapping out as much of the movie as possible — the faster the writing goes.

And that voice that says this is so terrible, or you don’t know what you’re doing, or nobody’s going to give a sh*t, or there have been ten other movies like this —

That voice is a little quieter the faster the writing goes.

It’s also just easier to diagnose problems in a shorter outline. Why do we need this scene? Could we move this? Where are the act breaks?

Working three thousand miles apart

Scott Neustadter: We never write in the same room. He’s in New York and I’m here, and we spend a lot of time emailing things back and forth.

I know other people who stand over each other. That’s not us.

And we know each other very well. If I send him something and it doesn’t come back quickly, I know. If he sends me something and I say this is amazing, we’re off to the races — he knows.

I can hear in his voice what’s happening. That’s twenty-five years of friendship.

Michael H. Weber: We’d socialize more if we were in the same city. Scott and his family were in New York last week and we all went to Katz’s Deli with our kids.

And it’s funny how often we’re together and we should be talking about work, and one of us pulls out a deck of cards and we just play cards and talk about anything else.

So the further apart we are, the more we get down to business.

For anyone thinking about a writing partnership: take the pressure off. If you share a sensibility, if you think it might be fun, if you think you’ll actually finish something — just try it. It doesn’t need a grand plan where the first thing is this and the second thing is that and by year ten you’re here.

See if you’re proud of the work. See if you’re stronger together than apart. If you enjoy it and want to do it again, great.

We don’t have a secret. We just want to keep working. We’re not aspiring to direct. We don’t have a company with forty-seven projects in development. We’re both happiest when I’m in a coffee shop here and he’s in a coffee shop in LA, doing our thing.

The industry does sometimes make you feel like you should want more. Why am I not doing that? Look at that person over there.

That’s actually where living in New York has been easier, because it isn’t a one-industry town. I have industry friends here, and I also have deep lifelong friendships with people who don’t know what Deadline is and don’t care.

I like having that balance.

Where (500) Days of Summer came from

Michael H. Weber: Scott had left Tribeca and moved to London for a year. He told his family he was getting a master’s degree, which he did — but the truth is he went there to discover British bands before anyone else had heard of them.

I was living with a girlfriend at the time, not my wife, who I hadn’t yet met. And Scott was dating here and there and met a girl in London who broke his heart.

We’d always known we wanted to do a relationship story. It took Scott getting dumped to become the catalyst.

And here’s the thing — we didn’t have a writing career. Nobody gave a sh*t what we were doing. This was a side thing. I had a day job, Scott was moving to LA to have a day job.

There was something very liberating about that.

Because at the time, in the early 2000s, the romantic comedies and coming-of-age stories getting made in the studio system felt very hijinks-forward. As if the question was what’s the trailer going to look like? We’ve got to have crazy shenanigans, because you can market that.

We missed when those stories came from a more real place.

When Scott was still in New York there was a group of us at Tribeca, all early-to-mid twenties, and once a week we’d go to the movies and get drinks afterwards. And we were having so much more fun at the drinks — telling our own relationship war stories — than we were watching the films. Those stories were somehow more relatable and funnier than what was on screen.

That frustration is what drove us.

And nobody was waiting on it. No reps. Nobody asking when are you going to get that done? We were writing it just for us.

That’s a muscle we started building on that movie and still use. We ask ourselves: what’s the version of this we’d want to see?

Scott and I talked on the phone for twenty minutes today and spent fifteen of them on something he watched on the plane back to LA. That love has never gone away. So even when it isn’t a romantic comedy, we ask what version of this we’d be excited to go and see — and just hope other people would be too.

It really starts with us.

The Ikea scene

Michael H. Weber: That was mine, not Scott’s. That happened with my ex.

Relationships that don’t work out — you think of them as the way up the mountain and then the way down. Or in some cases up the mountain and then off a cliff.

We’d gone to Ikea on the way up. And then again on the way down. And they could have been the same event, and yet they were utterly different. The mood, the vibe of it. I remember it so well.

The first time we were there for a very long time and we played house. A little like Rebel Without a Cause — we just pretended some of those rooms were ours.

Years later my ex saw the movie. And I said, Ikea?

And she said, yeah?

And I said, that was us.

And she said: we never went to Ikea.

I started describing it and she said, I have no memory of that.

It definitely happened. But something that was so powerful to me she has no recollection of — and that fog of war around relationships is actually what the film is about. It’s utterly from Tom’s point of view. We never do learn what she really thinks. The mistakes are his. That’s why it’s ultimately a coming-of-age story: it’s about a phase of his life, with an older narrator looking back on it.

And the greeting card job came from a truly terrible coming-of-age screenplay I wrote in college. Awful — just learning how to do it. The only thing that survived from it was that the guy wrote greeting cards.

So you end up using everything at some point.

On voice

Scott Neustadter: I never know what’s good. It’s more like: this sounds like me. This represents me. This is my voice.

I knew the earlier one wasn’t. This one was. And it was so personal that I put a pseudonym on the cover page.

I only showed anybody the script because I’d been fired.

I’d gone to LA as an assistant and got fired quickly. And it was either move home to my parents in New Jersey, or show people the script.

It was very lucky that people liked it.

Craft is a real thing. There’s a formula to it and you can nail it. But that’s what they’re training AI to do.

So the most gratifying thing, for you and for the audience, is finding your voice, celebrating it, and delivering it as well as you can. Because you’re the only one who can deliver that.

Who are you actually writing for?

Scott Neustadter: Because I was a script reader first, I recognised that the first people who read this are people like me.

It’s Sunday night. You’ve got things you’d rather be doing and a stack of scripts.

So forget the audience you imagine when the movie gets made. You have eight people standing between this and the producer. Get that person to love it.

That’s where structure comes from — getting that first reader. And a reader would love experimentation, so that should free you up to have fun with it.

On the note that a hero has to be likeable:

To me that always translates to: the hero has to be recognisable. Relatable, I understand.

We all have big flaws. We make mistakes and do unlikeable things. You don’t have to make somebody likeable. You have to make them real.

On whether there are different rules for established writers:

Every reader of a script wants to be released from the stack. So if you have a clever idea and a fun way of doing it — yes, they tell you not to do that. But that’s who you are. Do it.

The computer is getting better at writing the safe version. The only way to mitigate that is to do something different. Do something nobody else is doing.

When we were first trying to get representation on (500) Days, I sat down with people who said: I see something here — let me give you some scripts to read so you can see how they’re written.

And I said, I spent the last four years as a director of development reading scripts. I wanted to show you there are other ways to do it.

The default is safety and protection. But now that everyone’s protecting themselves, I think big swings are going to be welcome again.

That’s my hope, at least.

We’re both happiest when I’m in a coffee shop here and he’s in a coffee shop in LA, doing our thing.

Michael H. Weber speaking at a Storytelling360 StorySocial