All Faculty Profiles
Paul Zimmerman
by Claire Cordonnier
When you write, “You have to trust yourself…You have to trust your voice, and you have to trust that your voice is going to work in the story,” says Gotham Character: Creation teacher Paul Zimmerman.
“I started out as an actor,” says Paul. “Well, I actually started out as a small child, and then I became an actor.”
After completing his bachelor’s degree at Bennington College, Paul moved to NYC in pursuit of a career in acting. Between roles, he worked in restaurants and as a bartender. “I felt good about my acting,” says Paul, “but…professionally…I [felt]... ‘I'm not really getting there.’”
He began to write and perform his own work, which was immediately well-received. One of the pivotal early moments in his writing career was his one-person play, Reno, which he wrote and performed himself.
“My idea was…a young guy in his 20s in New York who gets thrown out of college…[who] ends up starting to gamble and ends up going out to Reno,” says Paul. This guy “gets involved in this big, climactic card game where everything is kind of …going really, really well for a while, until he has this big, giant bet on the table.”
“I narrated it as it was happening. And so it's going by very, very, very quickly…the intensity is building.”
Paul went to pursue a MFA at the Yale School of Drama, after which he moved to LA to pursue screenwriting.
A bright spot in his career: Paul’s screenplay Love, Brooklyn was recently turned into a feature film. After debuting at the Sundance Film Festival, it received a limited release in theaters before heading to
streaming. It’s a character-driven story about friends and lovers struggling with life transitions amid a rapidly changing Brooklyn.
“As a writer, I'm really interested in characters,” says Paul. There are “subtle nuances of people not saying what they mean and people…trying to get what they want by pretending not to try to get it.”
Something that Paul wants to emphasize is the importance of coming up with original, authentic content for work. It’s important not to be overly reliant on media influences for inspiration or to resort to cliches to give meaning to your work. Writers can sometimes “struggle to write” a story how they “really hear it and…really want to tell it.” It’s difficult “not to fall into preconceived…story cliches or language cliches,” he says.
Instead, Paul advises writing about subject matter loosely inspired by your own life and experiences. For example, the events and people that surrounded Paul while he lived in Brooklyn were a rich inspiration for Love Brooklyn.
It’s about following “the natural course of…[a] story” to “wherever that story leads.” Because ultimately, Paul believes that a story will “land where it should land.”
