Kalos Chu, Class of 2023: Screenwriting & Production

In summer 2022, I worked at The Walt Disney Company as a production intern. Specifically, I interned with Lucasfilm (the studio known for producing the Star Wars films) in their physical production department, assisting the executives with the day-to-day operations of creating a film.

After graduation, I hope to pursue a career in screenwriting — a passion that has developed, in large part, due to my experience in the English department. I came in as a first-year not knowing what I wanted to concentrate in, and it was only a chance recommendation from my PAF that led me to apply and enroll in Darcy Frey’s creative nonfiction workshop. Amidst a particularly difficult freshman fall semester spent adjusting to college life, that class was one of the few spaces where I felt at ease, where I felt I truly belonged: a particularly rare thing, I think, during those first several weeks of college. Darcy was invaluable in not only creating a safe space to nurture my love of writing, but also in offering relentlessly detailed and incisive comments that constantly pushed the quality of my writing. That wholly positive experience led me to not only to enroll in creative writing workshops for all but one of my ensuing semesters at Harvard, but also to pursue a career in writing and storytelling.

Most of my past internship experience has been in the field of creative development. This is the branch of the entertainment industry responsible for crafting and fine-tuning stories for films. When I interned at DreamWorks, for example, I was responsible for reading drafts of scripts and writing up notes with my comments (e.g., “the break into act two feels too rushed,” “this character’s arc doesn’t feel integrated to this other character’s,” etc.) — a job that was made possible by the tools of literary analysis and critique I learned in my English classes. The internship that I completed this summer was not in creative development, but rather in production, a choice that I made to address a gap in my experience. Despite wanting to pursue a career in screenwriting, I had very little knowledge of how, exactly, a film is made — the practical constraints that screenwriters must grapple with that in their writing that novelists, for example, don’t.

Much of the screenwriting work I produced prior to this internship (as my thesis advisor, Musa Syeed, can attest) has been in somewhat of a creative bubble. I’ve written scenes that don’t take blocking into consideration and imagined set pieces that would be impossible to physically create on a soundstage. At Lucasfilm, I addressed those gaps in my filmmaking knowledge. I was able to spend time in a department responsible for coordinating every aspect of production, from set construction to prop-making, to facility rentals. I learned about the hundreds of people that are required to make a movie and, most pertinently, how creative decisions have cascading effects on the work of those hundreds of people. For example, a screenwriter’s decision to replace cars with horses in a scene triggers dozens of conversations between production, health/safety, and animal operations (not to mention significant time and financial costs). I got to spend some time on a film set and saw how the screenwriter is far from the only creative voice on a film — how directors, costume designers, production designers, etc. shape a project and give it life beyond the text on the page.

It goes without saying that there are many wonderful things about attending Harvard, one of which is the beauty and freedom of a liberal arts education. But the shortcoming of a liberal arts education is the lack of practical, technical, skills-based training that one can get at, for example, a film school. It’s for that reason that I’m grateful for an internship like this one: an opportunity that exposed me to the real-life applications of my work in the English department, and that formed the bridge between a liberal arts education and a career in the real world.