Descriptions of creative practice by writers Emma Donoghue, Colum McCann and Colm Tóibín demonstrate how re-framing a conversation about biographical fiction, outside the (empirical) methodological positioning of the historian, points the way to a richer discipline-specific discourse about the cinematic process of engaging with an historical subject. But these insights can only be generated through a clearer articulation of the creative practice that is filmmaking, of which screenwriting is a part. And so the conversation returns to the question of methodology. This chapter reviews some recent texts that seek to define methodologies within the field of screenwriting and screen production practice, including a new framework designed to shift fundamentally our thinking about methodological approaches to generating screen production outputs (Batty and Zalipour in Media Practice and Education, 2024). Once the process of screenwriting and screen production is understood as ‘research-enabled practice’, employing core storytelling strategies such as mise-en-scène, a detailed working definition of narrative fiction filmmaking methodology can be outlined, one that stems from NFTS founder Colin Young's vision of filmmakers as ethnographically-engaged cultural producers.