For the last few years, the Hollywood Reporter has brought together screenwriters just in advance of the awards season to talk about their movies. This year’s version:

The Hollywood Reporter’s Jay A. Fernandez and Matthew Belloni gathered six screenwriters — Mark Boal (“The Hurt Locker”), Scott Z. Burns (“The Informant!”), Geoffrey Fletcher (“Precious”), Nick Hornby (“An Education”), Scott Neustadter (“(500) Days of Summer”) and Anthony Peckham (“Invictus,” “Sherlock Holmes”) — who not only managed to get their work produced this year, but also had films that are generating talk.

Excerpts from the written portion of the interview:

The Hollywood Reporter: How does today’s reality of the film business stack up with your expectations when you first flirted with becoming a screenwriter?

Nick Hornby: I’m not sure I’m entirely representative because I have another job. All I can say is that, I don’t know how you guys stick with it. I was constantly on the verge of packing it in because it seemed utterly pointless. Books are pretty straightforward by comparison. You write a book and your editor wants to help you with it and then he wants to publish it. And that’s it! That’s the whole process.

Mark Boal: One thing that’s really changed is the independent landscape. I didn’t really know much about it, but I learned about it in the process of writing “The Hurt Locker” and producing it. That was like a four-year thing, all in, and by the end of that period I felt like, “Wow, I’ve learned a little bit about how independent films work.” And in the last year, I’ve watched that entire business model crash and burn. I don’t know that the film I set out to make four years ago could get made again today.

Scott Neustadter: I wrote this script with my friend as therapy. The fact that it did get made is still mind-blowing. But at the same time, I don’t feel any closer to getting anything else made than I did when I was a 21-year-old college kid.

Anthony Peckham: I’ve probably been at it longer than anyone here. I came and did film school in 1981 and have been writing ever since. The landscape has transformed from a multicolored one with all sorts of different niches and places to go to a very monochromatic one. It’s either very lucrative and exciting, or nothing.

Geoffrey Fletcher: With “Precious,” if you list all the things a studio wouldn’t want to do, or all the things that aren’t commercial, we’ve got most of the checklist taken care of.

And here’s Part 1 of the accompanying video interview: