Interview: Roberto Bentivegna (2012 Black List) — Part 1

Roberto Bentivegna’s original screenplay “The Eel” landed the writer on the 2012 Black List. Combining elements of noir and dark humor, the script offers an entertaining tale featuring compelling characters in the quirky subculture of a town on the border of Texas and Mexico.

Roberto was kind enough to agree to an interview and we had a wide-ranging hour-long conversation in which we covered a lot of territory related to screenwriting and movies. I will be posting the whole interview over the course of this week.

Today in Part 1, we cover how Roberto got into filmmaking and the genesis of the story for “The Eel”:

Scott: Let’s start with your personal history. As I understand it, you were born in London.

Roberto: Yes and I was brought up in Italy- both my parents are Italian. I grew up speaking English and Italian. I was exposed to a lot of different cultures when I was young and of course movies were number one on the list, always. My dad was one of those people who would just take me to see anything and everything at any age, including David Cronenberg’s “Crash” when I was 11. That has to be a new record of depravity inflicted on a child.

I moved to London when I was 16. I went to a very old English school there. I came to America when I was 19. I studied at Emerson College and did a Master’s at Columbia in Film.

Scott: When did you first start to think you might want to be involved in the film business?

Roberto: Probably around six.

Scott: Six years old?

Roberto: Yes. I actually found a creative writing book from when I was a kid. The teacher asked us what we wanted to do when we were older, and I wrote, “Movies.” I don’t think I understood exactly what that meant, but the concept of making movies, the magic of movies was definitely there. Actually, the movie that opened that idea up for me was “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.” When it came out at the cinema, it just did something. It was very inspiring, and just a great spectacle.

Scott: Highly cinematic.

Roberto: Very much so.

Scott: What were some of the films other than “Baron Munchausen” that influenced you?

Roberto: I would say definitely Scorsese, all the 70s guys. Then Kubrick, Peckinpah, Hitchcock, Powell. Altman’s “Short Cuts”. I saw “Pulp Fiction” when it came out. That was a huge one. “Trainspotting.” A lot of the Italian comedies from the ’60s. Noir. Lots of noir.

I love American film. But I also love the Europeans, the slightly more ethereal work that isn’t as concerned with structure and operates more subconsciously. I’m still trying to figure out where I fit, as a matter of fact. Probably on a raft in the middle of the Atlantic.

Scott: You attended Emerson. Were you in the film program there?

Roberto: Yes, I was studying film and English.

Scott: Were there any particular classes or experiences there stuck with you all these years?

Roberto: There was one, actually. It was a class called “theater into film”. The idea behind the class was we studied plays that had been turned into films. We looked at how the director either let the play “be”, and shot it almost as though it was theater, or how he managed to visualize the piece and really create cinema out of something that perhaps was not so cinematic. It was a very interesting idea. I think it showed me how cinema truly is its own language.

Scott: Also, too, wouldn’t that have been interesting- to look at the idea of adaptation, transforming something that would be a play into a film?

Roberto: Oh, absolutely. Adapting anything is this mysterious process. I don’t think there’s much of a method to it, in a way. You just have to let the original text grow in another form, in another medium, and still retain its original intention. I feel like those are the best adaptations.

I was actually thinking about Jim Thompson, the 50s author. His adaptations are really interesting. Most of them don’t quite capture his essence. But the best one for me is “Population 1280” which was adapted by Bertrand Tavernier. The movie version is called “Coup de Torchon” with Philippe Noiret and Isabelle Huppert. Originally it takes place in Texas but Tavernier set it in French-occupied Algeria. Anyway, the point is by adapting the novel and putting it in a completely different place he actually preserved the grit and the intention of the novel more than any of the faithful adaptations- which is amazing. He completely retained the original soul of the novel.

Scott: When you write, are you thinking of yourself as screenwriter or screenwriter-director?

Roberto: I think I’m splitting it down the middle right now. “The Eel” is something I want to direct. But I just finished a new spec that I am totally happy handing off. The next spec I write, again, I want to do something smaller that I can direct. I think in an ideal world I will dip in and out of it. Some people do that very efficiently. John Sayles, Paul Schrader. I love Paul Schrader. He is an amazing model to follow because as a writer he’s brilliant. And as a director he’s very interesting and quite underrated. Billy Wilder is another hero. At the beginning he was writing for… who did he write for? Lubitsch?

Scott: Wilder wrote quite a bit in Germany. Then when he came over to the United States, he did connect with Lubitsch early on including Ninotchka. Wilder has got over 70 writing credits, I think, so yes, he wrote quite a bit.

Roberto: Right. I will always feel that my heart is in the writing. To me writing is the key to everything- even to directing. There are exceptions of course. There are some directors who I think are incredibly unique and visual, and even if the scripts are not 100 percent there all the time, their visual ideas are just so captivating that they manage to compensate for it. Most of the time I’ve always thought a director should be a very good writer or at least surround himself with really, really great writers. So for me it was always about building my writing and really getting to a point where I knew what I was doing or at least I was fooling myself into thinking that I knew what I was doing, and then translating that into images.

Scott: You’ve had experience as a director on five original short films. Were those mostly through Columbia?

Roberto: They were all done at Columbia. They were very small, very low budget. One of them is completely silent without any dialog in it. Even now I think my approach a lot of the time is to try and tell moments visually. I love dialog, but I love seeing things happen on screen just as much.

Scott: That’s a nice segue into your script “The Eel.” You make the 2012 Black List with this original script. A terrific read, and it’s got a deft balance between the visual and dialog. Here’s a logline for the script that accompanies it on the Black List.

“An escaped convict is ensnared in a plot by a corrupt sheriff to kidnap the young heiress to an oil fortune, complicating his quest for freedom.”

How does that sound to you as a description of the story?

Roberto: I think it’s pretty good. I’m glad that they said he’s an escaped convict as opposed to an escaped murderer because we’re not really clear on what it is that he did. I wanted to be ambiguous about that. I’m letting the audience fill in that blank as to what it is that he’s done.

Scott: When I read the script, it brought to mind movies like “Red Rock West” or “Blood Simple.”

Roberto: Yes.

Scott: Desperate characters, desperate situations in a rural environment. Were there any movies that inspired you in writing “The Eel”?

Roberto: Well, I think you hit it on the head. I love “Red Rock West.” I think it’s Nicholas Cage’s finest moment, and it’s so underrated. In terms of influences, essentially it boils down to noirs and westerns. Those were the two. Those were the two genres I was looking at. For noir, it’s definitely “Out of The Past” — the Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas movie — and things like “Detour” and “Double Indemnity” and all the classics. On the western side I was looking at some really weird little westerns like “Terror in a Texas Town” where Sterling Hayden plays a Swede with a harpoon. It’s a weird movie, but…that sort of surrealism, I love. “Bad Day at Black Rock” is another big one.

Scott: Did “The Eel” originate with this idea of wanting to do a western noir film? Did you start off with a character? Did you have a concept or an idea? What was the genesis of the story?

Roberto: I was reading a lot of Jim Thompson and learned to love his crazy, violent fantasies. Then from there I was thinking a lot about movies, about what movies captured Thompson, either as adaptations or movies that were influenced by him. They say “write what you know”, and I wrote what I loved. I wrote what I really always wanted to see in movies or at least what I wanted to see at that time which was this weird mix of dusty western landscapes and double crossing and amoral characters. I think it started off in a genre exploration way.

Then as I got writing, it became quite emotional. The relationship between Fred and Lorna and Veronica. I always try to inject emotion into what I write. Make us care, you know? I think in the end it became less genre and more human. But it definitely started out as an exercise in blending genres.

Tomorrow in Part 2, we dig into “The Eel” and how Roberto developed the story world and its characters.

Please stop by comments to thank Roberto for taking the time for the interview and post any follow-up questions you may have.

Roberto is repped by CAA and Madhouse Entertainment.