Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a little rundown of the big writer's panel at the 2015 Santa Barbara Film Festival. Writers typically have the best, most honest stories to tell about the process so we'll see how this one goes.
Your featured writers this year are The Imitation Game's Graham Moore, The Theory of Everything's Anthony McCarten, American Sniper's Jason Hall, Nightcrawler's Dan Gilroy, Foxcatcher's Max Frye, Birdman's Alex Dinelaris and Whiplash's Damien Chazelle. The always dependable Anne Thompson from Indiewire led the discussion.
I'll be keeping a running bullet points style list of interesting stories as they come up. Let's get started, shall we?
-Damien Chazelle: Started with rewrite jobs on low budget horror and cheap sci-fi. Said without his experience doing that he never could have financed a movie about a jazz drummer.
-Max Frye: Started as a painter and after a bad break up decided that instead of killing himself he'd go to film school.
-Jason Hall: “I was a really bad actor, so I started writing roles for myself.” That didn't work out either and wrote for hire for a long time.
-Damien Chazelle on original vs. adapted screenplay nom: Shot a sequence to raise money, about 15 minutes. It played Sundance as a short to raise attention and that helped get it financed. Academy decided that because the short was shown first it was adapted, even though the feature script was written first. People tell him he must be so pissed that he got nominated in the wrong category. He said he was confused, but hardly upset. He did get nominated for an Oscar, afterall. “This is the best problem anybody could possibly have.”
-Damien Chazelle: Met Blumhouse producers from writing horror stuff and it was their backing that got the movie made.
-Alex Dinelaris: Alejandro's first image for Birdman was a middle aged man floating in his underwear. Said most of the script was collaborating over Skype since the writers were spread across the world... LA, NY and Buenos Aires.
-Max Frye: Said he didn't actually work with his co-writer (Dan Futterman). Worked on the script for 6 months and then the writer's strike happened. When the dust settled from that Dan was on. Frye said the finished film resembles his structure work very accurately. He also said the script was cracked when he realized the story was a mirror image of a sport's movie where you start with a gold medal and the national anthem and work backwards from there.
-Dan Gilroy: Said he was ornery after doing a lot of studio jobs where everything had to adhere to conventions, so he wrote a script where there was no personal growth, nobody changed by the end of it, etc. Says the LA local news is “Kabuki Theater” and has always intrigued him.
-Jason Hall: Met Chris Kyle in 2010. Said he was obviously dealing with a lot of turmoil. Said he didn't think it was a story he could tell, but then he saw how he dealt with kids, saw him soften and something clicked for him about what war can do to someone.
-Jason Hall: Said the book was based on a tape recorded series of conversations right when he got back. The movie is more based on the guy he got to know, the softer version he saw in that moment with his kids. He worked closely with Kyle on the first draft. The day he turned it in they exchanged jokes via text and the next day Kyle was murdered.
-Anthony McCarten: Always fascinated by Hawking, but it wasn't until Jane Hawking's book was published that he decided to be a stalker. He showed up at her door saying “Don't be frightened, I just want to make a movie about your life.” Said it took 8 years, but he finally convinced her to sign over the rights.
-Graham Moore: “You're not going to believe this, but as a teenager I was a big time computer nerd. I know it's hard to believe now that I'm a big time screenwriter on the stage with these guys, but I was a huge nerd.”
-Graham Moore: Was obsessed with Turing because of his nerdy background and fate seemed to put him in the kitchen of the exact right person at the right time. Met producer at a cocktail party when he was freshly in LA and didn't know anybody and just by happenstance she had optioned the book on Alan Turing and Graham went nuts because he already had the movie mapped in his mind. Convinced her to let him write the script on spec and it all went from there.
-Graham Moore: “The movie was never intended to be the last word on Alan Turing. It was meant to be the first word on Alan Turing.”
-Damien Chazelle: “90% of my writing process is sitting on the couch, flipping channels and feeling shitty about myself.” Said he was surprised at how little the process of writing is actually writing. He wrote more during those times of procrastination than actually sitting down at the computer and typing.
-Dan Gilroy on the process of writing: Agreed with panel that the subconscious side of writing is crucial. Also says he writes via chisel and hammer and doesn't let anybody read them until they're bronzed.
-Jason Hall: Has three children under 6 at home so he's “that guy at the coffee shop that doesn't move for 13 hours.”
-Anthony McCarten: Wrote most of Theory of Everything on a train going through Germany while he was on a book tour.
-Graham Moore: Doing a pilot for HBO for Michael Mann, but said Mann will kill him if he said anything else about it.
-Anthony McCarten: Said Clooney called and wanted to do a journalism movie ala Good Night and Good Luck about the phone hacking scandal, “ironically at Sony.”
-Jason Hall: Spielberg handed him a book called Thank You For Your Service from a journalist that was embedded with servicemen and followed them home as they deal with the VA and PTSD.
-Dan Gilroy: Writing another spec, in stone of course, that'll be another indie film set in LA that he aims to direct.
-Alex Dinelaris: Birdman crew are producing a TV series for Starz and the writing team is in the writer's room. Also working with Guillermo del Toro on a smaller, personal story.
-Damien Chazelle: Whiplash has given him the push to do a dream project which is a song and dance musical called Lala Land, ala Singin' in the Rain.
There you have it. The SBIFF Writers Panel, in a nutshell.
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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