Rarely do you get to sit down with one of the writers of a blockbuster movie and ask, "So, what were you guys thinking when you wrote this?" But that's what Ars editor Cyrus Farivar and I (and a bunch of Ars readers) got to do last week at Ars Technica Live with our guest Gary Whitta. He's best known as the co-author of Star Wars: Rogue One, but that's just one part of a fascinating career full of highs and lows.
Whitta told us how he got started by writing about video games for a living, eventually becoming the editor-in-chief of PC Gamer magazine. He moved from the UK to the US to expand his writing portfolio just when the tech industry went bust in the early '00s, killing the company he worked for. So he decided to try a different path. He'd saved up enough money to take some time to work on screenplays, and he figured it was time to take the plunge. It took about a year of writing better and better screenplays before he was able to get a manager, but then he started selling his work. Of course, as he told us in hilarious detail, just because you sell something doesn't mean it will get made.
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