The screenwriter for “Sing Sing” was among six Oscar-nominated writers who shared their insights at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Writers Panel held Saturday morning at the Arlington Theatre.

“Bolts from heaven are rare. I have to write every day to keep the muscle moving,” said Clint Bentley.

“These are the smartest people in the room, with the best movies,” said film journalist Anne Thompson, longtime moderator of this festival-favorite industry panel.

She guided the writers through questions about the act and art of their craft, including their daily routines, big breaks, major challenges, and more.

Peter Straughan (“Conclave”) had already won the Golden Globe and received the Critics Choice Award the night before the panel. He was an Oscar nominee in 2012 for “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”

“’Certainty is the enemy of unity,’” he quoted from the film, which is set in the Vatican during the selection of a new pope, to talk about his own writing process.

“You have to embrace uncertainty and move on,” he said. “If I don’t have something I like by lunch, it’s not a good day. But I always try to leave something slightly started so I don’t have to face a blank page the next day.”

Popular actor Jesse Eisenberg received extended applause – he was a 2010 Oscar nominee for portraying Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network.” Eisenberg wrote, directed, and stars in “A Real Pain,” which is loosely based on his life. It follows two cousins’ trip to Poland to honor their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor.

Fast-talking and with the timing of a standup comic, Eisenberg revealed that he writes his first drafts in email form (“because the program automatically saves it”) and doesn’t decide a project’s final form at the start.

“I didn’t know if this was going to be a play or a movie or what,” he said. “I write like diary entries. I didn’t feel it was a movie until I had my personal exorcism first.”

Seated next to Eisenberg, Mona Fastvold ironically quipped, “Do I always have to follow Jesse? I’m from Norway, I’m not funny.” It got one of the biggest laughs from the crowd.

She is co-nominated with partner Brady Corbet for “The Brutalist” a three-and-a-half-hour film about a Hungarian architect (Adrian Brody) pursuing the American dream. It has 10 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. Corbet won the Best Director Golden Globe and the film was named Best Drama.

“I was obsessed with writing,” she said. “I didn’t want to hold back, but to dream big and let the story take it where it does. We became unwilling to cut it, so we wrote an intermission into the script.”

She also addressed the stresses of living and working together with a partner.

“Life is so messy, it’s wild chaos to try to have a family and a life,” she said. “We just mix it all up.”

Tim Fehlbaum co-wrote (and is co-nominated) with his “film school buddy” Moritz Binder for “September 5,” which recounts the 1972 Olympics’ Israeli hostage crisis from what was an unexpected point of view.

“We first wrote the script from multiple perspectives: politicians, police, perpetrators, and
victims,” he said. “After interviewing an eyewitness from the ABC Sports crew covering the games, we deleted all those other storylines.”

The panel members groaned in sympathy.

“The hardest part was the ending,” he said. “We kept trying to get the characters to say lines about the movie’s themes. We had to learn not to force it.”

Clint Bentley and his writing partner Greg Kwedar started working on the script for “Sing Sing” eight years ago. Both were documentary filmmakers wanting to take on a feature film. Kwedar had heard about an arts program for inmates in maximum-security prisons.

They became volunteer teachers as part of their research, using what they observed to write the script.

“We’d have these profound experiences and go away and write,” Bentley said. “We took it in sections, writing five scenes at a time and then trading.”

There were readthroughs with cast members, many of whom are program alumni who play themselves, plus actor Colman Domingo, an Oscar nominee for two years in a row (in “Sing Sing” and last year for the title role in “Rustin”).

Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin and John “Divine G” Whitfield, two of the inmates (both since released), share the Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay with Bentley and Kwedar (also the film’s director).

“We had nine rewrites,” said Bentley. “Once we started on production, we learned to let life into the script and allow changes during shooting. Letting go of control got us closer to the truth of the story.”

“Nickel Boys” co-written by Joslyn Barnes, is also based on a true story, adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book in which two young African American men endure brutality at a racist reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. (The now-closed Dozier School had a hidden history of atrocities, including secretly buried bodies.)

Barnes has produced more than 60 films, and met RaMell Ross, her co-writer and the film’s director, by chance at the Sundance Film Festival. They decided on a radically new way to write and present the film – what she called the “sentient camera.”

“The camera is an extension of consciousness, and follows the protagonist Elwood’s point of view,” she explained. “There are no cuts, and the story moves forward and backward in time, as if in a memory. How the viewer would see the film had to be integrated into the script.”

Archival footage and photographs were also integrated, and Barnes drew as well as wrote to help “crack the structure and create the narrative.”

“We picked very specific images, including some forensic items found in the graves, such as a marble,” she added, “which visually reminds the viewers that these were children.”

“Nickel Boys” is also nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.

The Santa Barbara International Film Festival continues through Feb. 15. Visit
www.sbiff.org for a schedule of screenings and events, and ticket information.