Interview: Seth Lochhead — Part 2

Seth Lochhead’s original screenplay Hanna made the Black List in 2006 and was produced, then released in 2011, the movie starring Saoirse Ronan, Cate Blanchett, and Eric Bana. Seth’s background is an interesting one, so I was pleased when he agreed to do a Q&A with me. I was even more pleased by Seth’s responses which I am sure you will find both entertaining and informative.

Today in Part 2, Seth talks about how he wrote Hanna and got it in front of industry insiders:

Let’s shift over to Hanna, an original spec script that made the 2006 Black List, then was produced into the 2011 movie starring Saoirse Ronan, Cate Blanchett, and Eric Bana. Here is a logline from IMDB:

“A sixteen-year-old girl who was raised by her father to be the perfect assassin is dispatched on a mission across Europe, tracked by a ruthless intelligence agent and her operatives.”

How did you come up with the central idea for the movie?

It started with an image of a girl running through the forest hunting a deer. I’m not sure if it was a dream or some image I was exposed to, some advertisement or some subliminial alien messaged beamed to my brain, but I was at VFS and we were under pressure to come up with a feature idea. I had two ideas I liked, one was HANNA, the other was a teen sex comedy ala Woody Allen (or, that was my inpiration anyway). I called it LIAM FORTHWRIGHT’S GREAT AMERICAN TEEN NOVEL. It was about a herpes outbreak in a high school where all the cool kids get herpes (because, you know, all the cool kids have sex) and all the losers don’t get herpes but are willing to risk infection for, you know, sex. There was a werewolf in there, I believe, and a cult that worshipped at the altar of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Oh, and one of the characters, Liam’s younger brother, spoke only nasdat ala A Clockwork Orange. It was 80 pages long. And it’s a fucking masterpiece!

So after handing that sucker in and being demolished by my peers, HANNA became my main pursuit and my only hope for a commercial breakthrough. I took that initial idea — the girl in the forest — and I began to progress through the story discovering each beat, one beat at a time. Why was she there? Her Dad took her there. Why did he take her there? To protect her from the outside world, etc. We wrote treatments (25 pages or so) but I didn’t really start answering these questions until I dug into the script pages. My style has changed quite a bit since those early days, but style (and character) seemed to be one of my strengths. I handed in the first 16 pages and my mentor, Rick Drew, read it and acknowledged something special was going on (positive reinforcement is a very good thing!). As I got deeper into the script, as I first experienced the horror of that white abyss (it must be fed or it will eat your living soul and give you sleepless nights), I threw whatever I could at it. I clawed out every squishy bit of experience and knowledge my 24 years of life had accumulated (it was like that VW Bug sized clog of fat they found in a London sewer — I scrapped and scooped out every crevice and sinus and cavity, emptied it all out, and forced it to conform to the confines of the screenplay format).

One breakthrough was a memory of a psych class I took and something B.F. Skinner said, “Give me a newborn and I’ll shape it into anything.” This led to an exploration of my own “shaping”, what was it like for me to interact with the strange and the new — feeling emotionally alien to others, my exposure to the world through travel, not being able to communicate even with the people to whom I shared the same language, violence and anger and frustration with my own inadequacies and the inadequacies of other human beings to understand me.

Were there any specific movies that inspired you as you developed and wrote the script? If so, what were they and what about each informed your creative process?

Consciously, The Bourne Identity was important. I think it was the first time I’d seen an existential spy thriller like that (where I actually understood it was existential). Unconsciously, Leon. It became the reps’ pitch, Hanna is Leon but in reverse (silly, but sort of accurate… sort of). Both of those films treated their characters as human beings, as opposed to vessels hell bent on bombast. There was action and consequence. The filmmakers respected each character as morally complex and didn’t compromise from making them do things an audience may perceive as “bad” or “unlikeable”. In fact, it seemed, they took it as a challenge. To create characters that you can understand, empathize with even if they do things you may not like (which, of course, makes them more human and therefore more likeable).

Hanna is a smart action genre movie with great detail paid to its characters. Is that balance — action, character — something you were strongly conscious about as you wrote the script or were they more a result of you simply trying to write a good story?

Sure. I always come at it from the character. I think about their choices — how A leads to B leads to C. I like to call myself an intuitive screenwriter, but what I actually am is a linear screenwriter. I cut a path through the forest one tree at a time and I only cut down the tree that’s directly in front of me or off to one side or the other (if I don’t, I quickly lose the path and, well, I get really fucking lost).

Wedding action and character wasn’t a conscious choice per se (but it might have become that way in my subsequent work after Hanna found success; I pigeon holed myself… which sounds really dirty). That initial image of the girl in the forest evoked something visceral in me, something that could only be hinted at with words and definitely not expressed through dialogue. I’m positive, when discussing it with my mentor and peers, Action as a genre was quickly applied. But my action (I think of it more as violence, because it was explosive and short) serves a dramatic function; the action/violence has a consequence on the character moving forward, it affects their choices, who they are and how we, the audience, and the other characters perceive them.

From the moment you conceived the idea until you were ready to send the script to market, how long of a time period was that? How many drafts do you think you wrote during that time?

I wrote 50 or so pages at VFS and 50 or so pages after graduation. It was, in total, approx. a 6 month process. I wrote one draft and that’s the draft that eventually sold to Focus. It took a while before it reached Focus and in the meantime, on a parallel track, I did an Americanized version of the script at the request of a producer (I changed the locations to suit an American audience, you know, because they don’t know where Europe is or that it even exists! J). By fulfilling that request, unknown by me, those producers became attached to the project which made things a bit complicated when Focus expressed interest (leading to almost a year of contract negotiations). It all worked out in the end, but baby writers beware!

Drafts in total (from the time it sold to the time it got made)? I wrote 3 drafts before David Farr was brought on. He did two drafts. There was a production draft done by another writer when Joe first signed on, but I’m not sure anyone has read it but Joe. Then Joe (and one of his friends) did a pass and then I came back and did the final draft (on set!! A continuous process that lasted for almost the entirety of principal photography). So 7 drafts in total (plus one mystery draft that I very much want to read).

Rumor has it that in order to get your script in front of potential Hollywood reps, you basically carpet-bombed hundred of managers and agents with emails, some which were simply this: “A girl is trained to be an assassin; would you like to read my script?” Is that true and what were the specifics of your outreach process? How long did it take for you to land a Hollywood rep?

Yup. I did it. And it was almost completely, utterly futile. But I learned a few lessons: 1. Be succinct with your letter writing (it took me a long time to realize Hollywood wasn’t interested in me as a person, they’re only interested in my ideas, so keep your query on point — tell them the idea and sign it so they know where it came from). 2. I wouldn’t have had to email so many folks if I had just done a bit of research into the companies I was approaching. After a bit of research, I found a small handful of companies that suited my needs and, lo, I got two and only two responses (both within a week of each other, both toward the end of my carpet bombing cycle). One was from a kindly direct to video producer who made pulpy action movies and the other was from a kindly intern, Kemper Donovan, at Circle of Confusion (a company that represented some of the best A-list pulpy writers in the business). This all happened within 6 months of finishing the script. I signed with Circle, Kemper was promoted, and within three months Focus expressed interest. Three months after that I signed with WME (née WMA). And I’ve been a professional writer ever since (8 years… yikes!).

Tomorrow in Part 3, Seth digs into the psychological and metaphorical dimensions of Hanna.

For Part 1, go here.

Please stop by comments to thank Seth and ask any questions you may have.

Will is repped by WME.

Twitter: @SMLochhead.