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Sam Meikle: the challenges and opportunities for Australian screenwriters in 2025
41 Plays21 days ago
We’re joined on Breaking Screen by Sam Meikle, a writer and creator with hundreds of hours of produced credits that range from television comedies, dramas, animation, and web series. Sam was a co-creator, head writer, and Executive Producer of the 2022 ABC/Netflix series MaveriX and the previous year he was a writer, executive producer and co-showrunner of the series Wakefield for the ABC, BBC Studios and Showtime. Sam was also selected in 2023 to take part in The Creators, the inaugural showrunning program from Screen Australia and the Australian Writers’ Guild.
Throughout the episode, Sam talks to everything from the importance of knowing your writing strengths, his advice of taking ideas to markets, why Australian writers are like Swiss Army Knives and what some of the challenges and opportunities are for local screenwriters in 2025.
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Transcript
Introduction and Acknowledgement
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to Breaking Screen, a podcast about the Australian screen industry and the creative people within it. I'm your host, Karis Bazaka, and I'm recording this podcast from the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, where I'm very grateful to be a visitor and be able to work on these lands.
00:00:19
Speaker
Always was, always will be.
Guest Introduction: Sam Meikle
00:00:22
Speaker
Today's episode will feature writer and creator Sam Meikle, but before we get to that chat, here's some news from the Australian screen industry.
Industry News Highlights
00:00:30
Speaker
For creators of children's television, applications have opened for the exclusive content pitch initiative, which is part of the Australian Children's Content Summit and offers $20,000 prize.
00:00:43
Speaker
Applications will close on the 25th of July And as the ACCS website says, selected delegates will get the opportunity to deliver a 10-minute elevator pitch to industry decision makers and potential partners.
00:00:58
Speaker
In addition to that, the August event in Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, will also offer numerous one-on-one pitch sessions with representatives from some of the major broadcasters and streamers.
00:01:10
Speaker
In other news, the Australian Writers Guild has had a bunch of announcements drop. It's published the names of the nine scripts and writers shortlisted for the John Hind Award for Excellence in Science Fiction Writing.
00:01:22
Speaker
And it's also announced the shortlist for the 2025 Emerging Writers Awards, with eight writers and their scripts selected from over 500 entries across the short-form and long-form categories.
00:01:37
Speaker
Those shortlisted projects will soon be available for producers and executives to explore on the AWG's Pathways Showcase. And the winners for both of the awards will be announced at an industry event in Melbourne in mid-July.
00:01:52
Speaker
And that's your news wrap-up for now. Remember, you can also head to any of the trade publications for more. Now to chat with today's guest.
Sam Meikle's Career Journey
00:02:01
Speaker
We're joined on Breaking Screen by Sam Meikle, a writer and creator with hundreds of hours of produced credits under his belt, which range from television comedies, dramas, animation, and web series.
00:02:12
Speaker
Sam was a co-creator, head writer, and executive producer of the 2022 ABC Netflix series Mavericks, And the previous year, he wrote, executive produced and was a co-showrunner of the miniseries Wakefield for the ABC, BBC Studios and Showtime.
00:02:30
Speaker
In 2023, Sam was one of those selected to take part in The Creators, the inaugural showrunning program from Screen Australia and the Australian Writers Guild. Throughout the episode, Sam talks to everything from knowing what kind of writer you are, his advice for taking ideas to markets, why Australian writers are like Swiss army knives, and what some of the challenges and opportunities are for screenwriters in 2025. Here's that chat.
00:02:58
Speaker
here's that chat
00:03:02
Speaker
We like to talk about inciting incidents in the screen industry. So if you were looking at your career and trying to identify an inciting incident, what would that be?
00:03:16
Speaker
Well, It would probably be being cast as one of the wagon wheel kids when I was about seven years old. Oh my gosh. I started as a child actor and I did commercials when I was little.
00:03:30
Speaker
And then i went to school and high school. And in high school, I started to get into plays, acting and writing. And it all took off from there.
00:03:42
Speaker
Wow. That was not the answer that I was expecting. Yeah. Look, it's I mean, to be fair, I mean, the inciting incident is possibly like my father was an actor and he was quite good and quite well known. So, I mean, I had an insight into the industry from birth really.
00:04:01
Speaker
And that I think certainly will have colored some of my choices. So then what was the switch from acting to writing?
00:04:14
Speaker
When I was about 16, I really got into acting at school and did school plays and school musicals. At the same time, i in the school holidays between years 10 and 11, wrote a play.
00:04:29
Speaker
I sat down. i was compelled to write a play. i did it. I went back to school the next school year and went to my drama teacher, a man called Alan Kingsford Smith, and I gave him this play and I said, what do you think?
00:04:42
Speaker
And he said, we're going to put it on. And that was ah amazing to me. So at the same time that I was doing my first plays, I was also writing plays and having those plays put on.
00:04:56
Speaker
And that play was a one-act play and it went pretty well. The auditorium seated about 300 people and they seemed to laugh at the right places and gasp at the right places and it was like a drug.
00:05:10
Speaker
So much so that in the school holidays between year 11 and 12, I wrote another play, which was a musical, where I took some existing songs and rewrote the lyrics and did did a comedy murder mystery.
00:05:24
Speaker
And then I took that back to Alan Kingsford Smith and I said, what do you think of this? And he said, we're going to
Breaking into the Industry
00:05:28
Speaker
put that on too. So then in my final year of school, we put on this this musical and it was just a fantastic experience.
00:05:37
Speaker
And it really, even though i had an experience recently where I found some very, very old work and in some senses wish I hadn't, um i i could really see how having that experience gave me the confidence to keep going.
00:05:55
Speaker
oh So then how did you actually kind of crack into the Australian industry as a writer? Well, I cracked into the industry to start with as an actor.
00:06:09
Speaker
When I left high school, I went to drama school and then I was an actor and I would go out on auditions. But i when I went to drama school, I met a guy in the year above me and we just got on like a house on fire and we started writing together and we wrote a screenplay that was very nearly produced as the first directing effort of quite a well-known actor.
00:06:29
Speaker
And that didn't happen, but again, it just gave me that confidence to keep going. And so what I would do is i would buy, every time a new screenwriting book came out, I would buy and i would write a screenplay based on that theory just to see how it worked and to really unpack it.
00:06:46
Speaker
And those screenplays should never see the light of day. But after I'd written about eight or nine of them, my then girlfriend, who is now my wife, said to me, you know, you can write in our bedroom, but no one's really going to know what you can do unless you get out there.
00:07:02
Speaker
And one of the ways you can get out there is to apply to the film school. So I applied AFTRS got in. and got in And so I did a graduate diploma, which I then immediately rolled into a master's. So I was there for two years. And in my second year, while I was doing my master's, I also applied to the NIDA Playwrights Studio.
00:07:21
Speaker
And so in the year 2000, I did my master's, but I also did the NIDA Playwrights Studio. And I was completely immersed in writing and making things. And I looked around and i i kind of thought to myself, how can I make a living as a writer? And the answer was obviously in television.
00:07:42
Speaker
And I loved television. I'd loved television since I was a kid. So that was that was a happy coincidence. And so while I was in my final few months at Afters and NIDA, started doing observerships in television shows where you go along and just sit quietly and watch the professionals work.
00:08:01
Speaker
And I went to All Saints and that the show was being run by a really fantastic writer called Sarah Walker. And she had just taken over the show and she and I got on really well and somebody had been promoted from within the department recently and she said to me at the end of the the three days, do you want a job when you get out of film school? And I said, yes, please.
00:08:22
Speaker
And so when I got out of film school, I had a job to go to and i i went into All Saints Script Department as a trainee script editor. And that gave me a really good grounding in television, particularly high volume television, which we made a lot of then.
00:08:36
Speaker
So we we made 44 episodes of that a year. So there were multiple drafts of multiple episodes coming into the office. I would read and proof them. i would get coffee.
00:08:48
Speaker
i would answer phones. I would go to read-throughs and take notes, learning all the time. And then eventually I got into the story room and I was taking notes in the story room. And then finally, I would sort of start writing amendments as well under under Sarah's direction.
00:09:02
Speaker
And then I was given a script and that script went relatively well and that meant that I was off to the races in terms of being a freelance writer as well. So I was working in-house at Channel 7 but also working as a writer and i Went to work at Home and Away and back to All Saints and then I went freelance as a writer and started also working in development, which is just being a hired gun to come in and develop the shows for producers and production companies. so And that's really how I got my start.
00:09:36
Speaker
And what was kind of, you were saying that you read all of those books and I know that a lot of emerging writers read those books.
00:09:47
Speaker
Do you have a favourite or do you think that there's nothing quite like the practical experience of being in a room? I think they're all really good. to read and to analyse and to break down the mechanics of each theory as long as you're not a slave to it.
00:10:05
Speaker
Ultimately, I think that as a writer, what you want is you want a really good sense of what you want to say at any given moment in time and a really fantastic toolkit to be able to find the right form and the right tone to say what you want to say to the audience you want to speak to.
00:10:26
Speaker
And you can get tools from all kinds of different places. Sometimes you pick up writing tools in conversations with other writers. i have a note in the notes app on my phone that is wisdom of writers that I hear. And some of that's what I read. Some of it's in conversation with writers that I know when they say something really interesting about writing, I just write it down.
00:10:44
Speaker
Because I just, I really am hungry for more tools to be able to do this work and do it as well as I can. Yeah. And it's one of those things where, you know, you've done a master's, you've been the industry working as a writer, but we're all going to be writers for the rest of our lives. So it's kind of something that you're always learning about, I suppose.
00:11:07
Speaker
i I love it. I love talking about writing. i particularly love talking about writing with writers because everybody's got a different take. And I also think there's no one way to do it. Like I know plenty of great writers who've never been anywhere near a film school. It's not the be all in it all. It worked really well for me because i really liked that sort of collegiate atmosphere and also I got to make lots of things. that I went through afters in the days when writers would write on a project, directors would direct and producers would produce and sound designers would sound design and so on down the line. And it meant that
00:11:45
Speaker
During that two years, I wrote, produced or directed six shorts. And the great thing about that was some of them were not particularly good, but I learned how to be better by making those shorts. Some of them went really
Understanding Writing Styles
00:11:59
Speaker
well in the festival circuit, but ultimately just the making part of the film school and NIDA was fantastic learning and also Particularly, i think most of particularly the screen industry, but I don't have as much experience in the theatre industry, but it's a team sport.
00:12:19
Speaker
You've got to have like a number of great minds all working together really well to produce a great piece of work. So those institutions are really good for teaching you how to work with people, how to assimilate notes and make the best of them.
00:12:32
Speaker
Mm-hmm. And there's something that we've spoken about before and i was wondering if you could elaborate on it a little bit here and that was um this concept of knowing what kind of writer you are or you want to be, whether that's working on your own things or being a writer for hire or a bit of both.
00:12:56
Speaker
Could you talk to that a little bit? Yeah, I think every writer has their idea of a dream career and then also we're all met with the practicalities of being a creative and earning a living and, you know, being able to put food on the table and pay the mortgage.
00:13:14
Speaker
And I think it's a constant juggling and balancing act. where you need to keep alive that creative flame but at the same time you also just need to earn a living.
00:13:25
Speaker
um So that balancing act is real and it's something that I think everybody juggles every day. But the thing that I think informs it is it's really helpful to know what kind of writer you are. Like i I'm really fortunate to know a lot of writers and one of the things that I've kind of come to over the years is that you really do, as you were mentioning, you need to know what kind of writer you are. And there are all different types of writers.
00:13:55
Speaker
But what I meant by that was there are writers who are absolutely fantastic at writing on commission. They're happy for other people to lead and and have the framework of the idea and they're happy to contribute to that.
00:14:10
Speaker
There are other writers who just can only do their own thing. They can't take creative direction. That's not a judgment all. It's just about where their sensibilities lie.
00:14:21
Speaker
And then there are writers who do both. And knowing which one you are is really helpful in working out the kind of work that you can do and do well, because I think it's a real privilege to be a creative and to get paid for that.
00:14:35
Speaker
And I think that my obligation as a creative is that whenever I get paid for a piece of work, I've got to give it everything I've got. No matter what else is happening in my life, I have to give it every fibre of my being in that creative space to deliver on the promise that either I'm contributing to or that somebody is paying me to deliver.
00:15:00
Speaker
I think that that's my obligation. So, If I am one of those writers who really can only write for myself but I'm trying to write on commission, that's going to create a lot of tension because there's going to be a wrestle for control even even if it's not the way that writer is set out.
00:15:19
Speaker
Equally, if there's a writer who is just more comfortable on commission, taking the lead might be uncomfortable and may not deliver the results that everybody's hoping for.
00:15:31
Speaker
Just knowing who you are and where you are in your creative life is really helpful in bringing the best of yourself to a piece of work. And that's not to say that you can't aspire and you can't change where you are, but you need to be conscious, I think, of where you are in order to be able to deliver the best work that you can because ultimately whether you're a writer for hire, whether you're a writer who is working on something of their own or or whether you're doing a combination.
00:15:59
Speaker
Every piece of work has to be as good as you can get it because it is the advertisement for whether you get work going forward and whether you get opportunity going forward. Mm-hmm. And if you are someone that's developing their own ideas, can you talk a little bit about developing your own slate as a writer? Like how many things should you have on the go, especially if you're, you know, thinking of pitching and things like that?
00:16:27
Speaker
I don't think that should comes into it. I think it comes down to from a creative perspective, it comes down to what's driving you, what is engaging you emotionally and intellectually and what do you feel that you can bring your talent to.
00:16:41
Speaker
i mean, there's obviously, if you're a professional writer, there's a financial constraint to it, which is that you need to earn a living. So I think that's part of it. But in terms of developing your own work,
00:16:52
Speaker
the best chance of a piece of work succeeding and and A, you getting made and B, paying you, i think is a work that you're really passionately engaged with.
00:17:03
Speaker
So
Navigating Content Markets
00:17:04
Speaker
ah it's an infuriatingly imprecise answer to say you should do what your creativity dictates that you do. So if you're a writer who needs to be focused on one thing and one thing only and be obsessive about that to get the best result, then do that.
00:17:19
Speaker
If you're a writer who needs to have multiple projects and to be able to switch between them, then do that. It's again, it's that thing I think of knowing who you are as a writer and playing to your strengths.
00:17:33
Speaker
Yeah. and If you do have, you know, whether it's one really solid idea or a couple and you're deciding on, say, some markets to attend, how do you go about forward planning for those?
00:17:52
Speaker
I think it depends on a few things. a lot of the markets, you know, i'm thinking particularly of places like NIPCOM and Content London, A lot of those markets are very serious network and finance markets where what they're looking for is very highly sort of highly developed works that are ready to go to market, ready to finance, ready to be made.
00:18:19
Speaker
So there is something to be said for going to those markets so that people get used to seeing your face around them. I think there is real value in that at the same time. There is so much competition from around the world for the limited resources that people want to give their time to people and projects that are going to potentially deliver for them and their businesses.
00:18:43
Speaker
So you need to sort of bear that balance in mind. In terms of how you prepare, you've got to take projects that are really well and precisely developed that you can articulate really well And that you think the market might be interested in. i mean, there's ah there's a something to be said for a passion project where you're an outlier and nobody is in that space. That actually really has value, but it's a much harder road.
00:19:13
Speaker
There's something else to be said for really understanding where buyers are at the moment, where networks are at the moment, where audiences are at the moment. and taking something that you want to say and putting it in a form that an audience might come to.
00:19:28
Speaker
And is it also about before you're even kind of booking those flights, even if it's something in Melbourne and you're in a different part of Australia, like making sure that you have...
00:19:41
Speaker
enough meetings in place that you've got enough kind of reason to go there? Because, yeah, like you said, great to show your face and things like that, but to make it worthwhile?
00:19:53
Speaker
i Look, ah I personally think so. I think that you want to organise the meetings before you go um If you turn up and you hope to get meetings, there's a very good chance you'll be sorely disappointed because it is so competitive, whether you're in Australia or whether you're outside, it is so competitive that everybody has pre-booked their meetings. So if you're hoping to get a meeting when you get there, those slots are already gone and then the only chance you will have to engage with people is in the social events that are around a lot of these markets and that makes the road very much more difficult.
00:20:30
Speaker
ah Would you be able to talk to, you don't have to name project names or anything. I know particularly if things are still like in progress, but perhaps a market that you went to, how you prepared and pitched, what materials you had, things like that.
00:20:51
Speaker
So, yeah, of course, i I went to Content London in 2023 as part of the but the Creators Program and then I went back again 2024.
00:21:03
Speaker
And I went back in 2024 for a few reasons. The first is that there's a show that I have which we're trying to finance. So that show has a pilot script and it has a pitch deck which is quite extensive and lays out the story arcs and the characters.
00:21:19
Speaker
And we're trying to finance that show. So the company that that show is set up with here together with the Irish co-production partner and i all went to Content London to speak to a wide variety of some networks and distributors to pitch the material or to pitch the show and then to follow up with the materials.
00:21:37
Speaker
And those materials also included a finance plan. So at that point, the market knows that we're very serious about getting the show financed and getting it made. But i also went to follow up on the relationships that I began in 2023.
00:21:53
Speaker
So I met deliberately met with a number of distributors and then I followed up with most of those distributors when I was in Content London this year. And at the same time, I have a slate of work some of which is more developed than others.
00:22:09
Speaker
And so when you go and do ah sort of, I think there are two umbrellas for meetings. There are specific meetings that have a particular aim, which in one instance was trying to finance a show.
Challenges and Opportunities in the Industry
00:22:21
Speaker
But then there are general meetings where you're just either introducing yourself or reintroducing yourself, but also trying to get a sense of what those companies may be looking for and whether there's a potential partnership opportunity there.
00:22:34
Speaker
And so in that instance, I have a slate of work and I will sit down and and really just chat to people and get to know them a little better, find out what their taste is and find out what they're looking for at the moment and then I may have a project or two that can speak to what they're looking for at that point I'm in a position where I can do a soft pitch so I can over the course of a minute or two just lay out a couple of broad strokes for a project at which point they may say hey that sounds really interesting what materials do you have can you send me some follow-up materials and that's generally speaking how it goes
00:23:12
Speaker
And what do you think are the biggest challenges and opportunities for Australian writers at this point in time? So the challenge I think is that in Australia since about the year 2000, we've seen 60% contraction in screen content and and screening employment is the largest source of employment for Australian writers, whether that be drama or kids or film,
00:23:41
Speaker
or comedy um and and animation, that is the largest employer of Australian performance writers. And we've seen a 60% contraction since the year 2000 in Australia.
00:23:53
Speaker
Mm-hmm. At the same time, we've also seen an emergence of the streamers, which the world has seen, and that has very much disrupted the old model. And we've moved away, Australia's moved away from making volume television, which was a really huge employer and very, very successful around the world.
00:24:14
Speaker
to programs that are shorter run and more of bespoke. And so just the sheer number of employment opportunities are greatly reduced.
00:24:26
Speaker
And there is a serious question around how streaming in commissioning and in sort of secondary employment and secondary royalties, how that is going to shape itself because that's in a state of flux at the moment.
00:24:46
Speaker
At the same time as all of that, what we've seen in the last year is a 40% contraction in US production and about a 25% contraction for the rest of the world. And then the other factor that's really difficult in Australia is that the current government has come out of the gate when they were elected and said that they were going to do quotas.
00:25:08
Speaker
And there's been a lot of consultation around those quotas, but they haven't managed to land on a model and legislate it. And that has meant that there has been a lot of uncertainty and I think a slowdown in commissioning while people wait to find out how that's going to land.
00:25:24
Speaker
The net result is that the greatest challenge for Australian screenwriters at the moment is just being employed. Mm-hmm. It's really, really difficult at the moment. And I don't think it's going to stay that way, but the question is how long people have to hang on before it changes.
00:25:42
Speaker
And is there any um positives at the moment? Is there anything in terms of... I do think that there are some positives. so The first is that when I started writing, broadly speaking, there were three commercial networks, two government broadcasters and a pay television broadcaster.
00:26:01
Speaker
There are now eight streaming services in Australia. There are still those three broadcasters, still those two government broadcasters. So I think that there is a real variety in the palette of shows that you can pitch.
00:26:18
Speaker
It used to be that even though you were making shows for any one of those original six broadcasters, Tonally, there wasn't a great deal of variety. There was lots of difference in the writing and lots of difference in the premises and the characters.
00:26:33
Speaker
But tonally, there wasn't a great deal of difference. Now, with the number of broadcasters and streamers that are available, I think that there's a great variety of what you can actually do creatively, particularly in television.
00:26:47
Speaker
And I think that that's really exciting. I also think that the ability for Australian writers to work globally has grown exponentially. One of the drawbacks to being Australian is that we are just as good, if not better, than everyone else in the world creatively because we have to be.
00:27:07
Speaker
But we're often being muscled off our own screens by the larger players like the UK and the US. But the net result is that we have a lot of foreign content that's on our screens, which means that Australian writers are kind of like Swiss Army Knives. We're able to do just about anything and do it really well.
00:27:26
Speaker
And that makes Australian writers hugely employable in just about any English language market in the world. And that is not to be sneezed at in a global entertainment environment.
00:27:38
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Okay, so some silver linings. Definitely, definitely. and there is And there's definitely an appetite in the UK and the US s for Australian writers. um We're really robust creatively because of the way our system is structured and I think in foreign territory, sometimes writers can get pigeonholed and that does happen here to a degree, but less so. You're able to work on multiple genres and multiple forms in your career and sometimes at the same time.
00:28:08
Speaker
And that versatility is gives Australians you know, to come back to what we were talking about earlier, gives Australians a remarkably good skill set that is really transferable. And I mean, there are situations where some Australian writers have more credits across more forms than whole rooms of British or American writers.
00:28:31
Speaker
And that's not to say that British and American writers aren't fantastic. Of course they are. It's just looking at what we have that is a point of difference and a point of positivity and opportunity for Australians.
00:28:43
Speaker
And so this then brings us to the final segment, which is just this pay it forward segment. So
Future Aspirations and Podcast Conclusion
00:28:52
Speaker
a previous guest on the podcast was Maria Lewis, a screenwriter.
00:28:57
Speaker
ah Her question for you is, is what film franchise would be your ultimate dream to work on? can be a singular film, I guess, if you can't have a specific franchise, but doesn't have to be Fast and Furious. doesn't have to be Marvel. It could be Universal Movie Monsters. It could be Before Sunset Trilogy. It could be, you know, anything.
00:29:23
Speaker
Such an interesting question. I'm thinking about all of my favourite films and thinking can they be franchised and mostly mostly they're one-offs. Yeah. wow I mean, i would one of my favourite films is the film was like made in 1985, I think, called Midnight Run.
00:29:42
Speaker
And I would love to write the sequel for that. I just loved that film when I was sort of 15, 16 years I loved that film so much. So I'd love to write a sequel for that.
00:29:53
Speaker
But barring that, I'd like to expand the James Bond universe, the double, I'd like to create and to build a a double O universe with double o five and double O nine and see who those people are and what skills they have that are different to bonds um and how they all work together.
00:30:12
Speaker
Oh, great. Great answer. Well, that brings us to the end of the chat. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. I really appreciate it. It's absolutely my pleasure.
00:30:24
Speaker
That was writer and creator Sam Meikle. Thanks to Sam for joining us on Breaking Screen. This episode was produced and edited by myself with logo design by Shara Parsons and music by Seb Sebotaj Gavrilovic.
00:30:38
Speaker
If you liked this episode, please hit that subscribe button and leave us a review. See you in a fortnight.