We recently connected with Gianmarco Giacomelli and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Gianmarco, thanks for joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

I recently wrote a half-hour TV pilot that was selected for the Sundance Episodic Lab – it’s a period satire about the Catholic Church, set in the 1300s, and was a project I never thought would get any attention. Basically, I wrote it for myself. But I realized during the Sundance process that what captivated people about it – besides the fact it was a period comedy – was how personal it felt.

Having grown up in an Italian Catholic family, faith was an integral part of life, both at school and at home. But eventually in high school, I grew disillusioned and unsatisfied with the answers I was being provided with. This disconnect forced me to reexamine my relationship with faith and the church, and got me asking a lot of questions. I didn’t necessarily have, or find, the answers to them, but I eventually realized it might make a great foundation for a story.

The reason I wrote the script in the first place was thanks to my ever-changing, always-dysfunctional relationship with faith and the church. It was therapeutic. Those feelings and experiences were things I felt deeply, on a visceral level, and they spilled on to the page – both consciously and subconsciously.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m a screenwriter by trade, and I got my start after moving out to California from Canada for graduate school. I don’t think I could have timed it more perfectly – right when I was in the midst of the program, the WGA started their battle with the agencies, and writers had to fire their agents; when I was finishing the program in 2020, COVID hit, and Hollywood and the industry shut down for a while; then right when things started picking back up… the WGA writer’s strike hit in 2023. It’s been a whirlwind few years and not something anyone has seen in many, many decades.

But throughout it all, I tried to keep my head down and continued writing. No matter how bad things got, I could always open my laptop, notebook or phone, and write. And the more time I spent doing it, the more scripts I had, and the better they got.

That might be one of the things I’m most proud of – perseverance over the last few years to just keep going. Eventually, I found representation (a manager), optioned a script, got hired to rewrite someone else’s, was selected for a Sundance fellowship, and things seem to be moving from there.

Perhaps due to the adversity I’ve faced over the years, both personal and professional, most of my writing veers into the darker genre space – be it sci-fi, fantasy or thriller, but usually infused with a comedic twist. I love finding the absurd and the heart amidst the darkness.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

For me, the most rewarding aspect of being an artist or a creative might be getting to work on different projects involving different ideas. No one is just one thing all the time – we change, we morph, we live, and those experiences shape the way we think, the way we feel. The point of writing, for me, is to be able to explore these nuances of myself in different ways via different stories.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

In the world of TV and film, no one green lights anything unless they think it’s going to make money. It sounds like a fairly easy concept to understand, and of course it makes sense, but as a writer it’s a difficult one to wrap your head around.

Knowing this, you’d think the focus for any story would be on making it as commercial as possible, so that, in turn, someone would say I want to buy this and make it. I tried this with the first things I wrote, but lo and behold, they sucked.

It wasn’t necessarily that my writing was bad (although it was in the early days), but that in trying to write trendy, commercial ideas, they fell flat. Or felt derivative. We’d seen them before.

It wasn’t until I said I’m just going to write this thing for myself that something clicked, and I found readers connecting to my work on a deeper level, commerciality be damned.

Contact Info:

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