Interview: Jay Eden — Part 2

For the last few weeks, I have turned attention to screenwriters, TV writers, and filmmakers who are on the front edge of making their mark in the business. Their insights, so recently on the outside looking in, reflect the excitement of breaking in, yet the challenges of attempting to carve out a career.

Today the last in this mini-series of interviews: U.K based screenwriter Jay Eden who set up his original spec script “Incinerator” with the Boies Schiller Film Group.

Here in Part 2, Jay Jay reveals how he came up with the idea for “Incinerator” and some of the key dynamics present in the script:

Scott: Let’s talk about your spec script “Incinerator.” As I was reading through it, I was thinking this is “Reservoir Dogs” meets “The Bucket List.”

Jay: [laughs]

Scott: You’ve got this group of people who have nothing to lose.

Jay: The story idea started with the basic premise or the basic idea of morality.

Scott: You really literally started with a theme?

Jay: Yeah. I didn’t even know. I struggled with theme for a long time. I think that all newbie writers struggle with it. I didn’t even understand theme, to be honest. I couldn’t get my head around it to make it work. But the stories I was writing, maybe the theme was there but I didn’t really understand it in my head. Then one day it clicked and then I started having these thoughts and these bigger thematic ideas.

That was the original idea. I liked the idea of having a character that was generally trying to be a good guy and then he finds out that he’s got a very different future than the one he planned. How would that change your view of the world? How would that change your morals?

I thought that it’s a really nice, universal question because most people, when they’re young, they’re immortal and you don’t every really think about the future. Even when you do see dying, unless it’s something really specifically close to you, it’s still something that…That sounds strange if I describe it, but it’s something that happens to other people and it’s very difficult to have empathy for it.

I wanted to really work with that. That seemed like a nice idea for me. That’s pretty much how I had it. I knew I wanted to have the camaraderie of a group of guys. It just seemed to fit that whole story. It went from there.

For a while, that’s all I really had. The first draft I ever wrote of the script was very much a black and white vanilla gangster story. There was no love story. It was just a bunch of guys.

Scott: How did you go about developing this group of characters?

Jay: Originally when I first drafted the story years and years ago, they were all 30‑something males. There wasn’t much distinguishing any of them. I think that’s how I was writing at the time. I didn’t really understand character. I didn’t really understand arcs. When I started up for this idea, I was a 30 something male, so I just inhabited the world with characters I could relate to. It took me quite a while to realize that that wasn’t going to work, that wasn’t very interesting.

I had my first meeting with Boies, Schiller, the producers. We were speaking on the phone one day and he said, “You know what would really, really make this script great? If one of the characters was a woman.” I said, “No. How can you do that? None of them are women.” I’d been working on it for years and I’ve never had the notion that one of them was a woman. He said, “It’s quite a male film and we would like to make it a bigger audience. Could you consider making one of them a woman?”

That’s pretty much how the character Nadine came about, really. It was a bit of a mishmash of getting from five very white, very 30‑something characters to an ensemble cast. I think that’s just a case of me learning about characters and learning about what you get from different types of characters.

Scott: So it’s a combination of the writer thinking about it and also putting on a producer’s hat. “Let’s widen the audience up. Let’s think in terms of a female here.”

Jay: Yeah, definitely.

Tomorrow in Part 3, Jay talks about how the deal went down with “Incinerator” and offers some advice to aspiring screenwriters.

For Part 1, go here.

witter: @jayeden238.