Interview (Part 1): Chris Sparling

Variety recently named Chris Sparling as one of their 10 Screenwriters to Watch. With good reason. Chris made his first splash in the business with his script for the movie Buried, starring Ryan Reynolds and followed that up with another contained thriller ATM. He has multiple projects in development and two movies slated for release: The Sea of Trees, starring Matthew McConaughey, Naomi Watts and Ken Wattanabe, directed by Gus Van Sant, and The Atticus Institute, written and directed by Chris. It comes out on iTunes on January 9, then on VOD and Blu-Ray/DVD on January 20.

Chris and I had an in-depth interview about how he broke into the business, analyzing some of his movies, and his thoughts on the craft of screenwriting. I will be featuring the interview throughout the week.

Today in Part 1, Chris talks about his background and how he came to write Buried, his breakthrough script:

Scott Myers: Let’s jump into this. Where’d you grow up, and were movies and TV an important part of your life?

Chris Sparling: I grew up in Providence, Rhode Island. I basically still live in that area. As far as what the role film and TV played, I was just a kid that loved movies. I loved the big spectacle of movies. As I got older I started to appreciate smaller indie films. We had, and we still do have, a really great independent movie theater here in Providence, called The Avon, that showed a lot of small indie films. That exposed me to a whole different side — a different side of filmmaking, a different side of storytelling.

I think I always knew I wanted to be a part of it all somehow. It just wasn’t until later in life that I understood you actually could be.

Scott: As I understand it, you start off trying to be an actor.

Chris: Yeah, that’s right. I moved to LA when I was pretty young. I spent about two years out there acting, and at the same time I started writing as well. I ended up moving back east to finish college, because I had left just after my freshman year.

I was trying to do too much in L.A.. I was trying to act, I was waiting tables, I was taking acting classes. I was also taking college classes part‑time. So, between homework, and work, and auditions, and acting classes and everything else, I was like, “This is impossible.”

I finally said, “Let me just move home to finish college, and then move back out to LA,” which is how it went down. By that point, I think I shifted more to writing, even though, when I did move back to L.A. for a second time, which was only for a four‑month stint, I was still there for the purpose of acting.

I returned to L.A. on September 10th, 2001. I woke up the next day, and it was September 11th. I didn’t know what was happening for several months afterward, career-wise, so I said, “I can’t stick around,” and I moved back east again.

Scott: Where did you go to school?

Chris: I got my undergraduate degree from Roger Williams University, which is in Rhode Island, and then my graduate degree at Bridgewater State, in Massachusetts.

Scott: You were doing some writing in LA and then began to focus more on that. How did you go about learning the craft?

Chris: I was self‑taught. I wrote my very first script right before I moved to L.A. for the first time, when I was in college. I wanted to learn how to do this. I don’t know if I ever had a knack for writing in general — maybe I did, maybe I didn’t — but writing was never anything that was daunting to me.

At any rate, I found out how to write a script, at least in terms of the formatting and the structure of it, and went from there.

I remember I found Michael Hague’s book, “The Standard Guide to Screenplay Format.” It was at the library and I photocopied the entire book. I also remember getting Syd Field’s book and just pored through it. So those books gave me a good, basic sense of how to do this, how to write a script.

And then I spent my first college year writing my screenplay, saying to myself, “All right. By the last day of school, I will finish this.” And I did. It’s funny, I still have it — I still have that script. I’ve never actually looked at it since, but I remember it was atrocious. So, yeah, I did it, I finished it, and it was an eye‑opening experience to be able to say, “Hey! That wasn’t too, too hard to do. Now let me do it again.”

Scott: You parlayed some of those scripts into short films and indie films?

Chris: When I moved back east the second time, I basically moved saying, “You know what? I don’t know what’s going on.” This was my career. My life. And I had absolutely no idea where it was going, which I didn’t like one bit.

So I then said, “All right, I’m going to move back east and I’m going to make my own film.” So I did. I pulled together a little bit of money, between my own money from working regular jobs, and some money from friends and family.

I had a little bit of money and I made a feature that I had no business making [laughs]. I had almost no idea how to make a movie — period. But I still did. I didn’t have any grand illusions that it would go on to become some breakout, indie darling or anything, but I hoped it would do something, anything.

Somehow, it did end up on Netflix for a while. I think it was on HBO Europe for a while, too. It, by itself, didn’t land me representation, but it started me down a road with the person that eventually became my manager. It started my career.

Scott: You took a similar approach with BURIED, which was your breakthrough as a writer. I’d like to ask a few questions about that. Here’s a plot summary:

“Paul is a US truck driver working in Iraq. After an attack by a group of Iraqis, he wakes to find he’s buried alive inside a coffin with only a lighter and a cell phone. It’s a race against time to escape this claustrophobic death trap. Starring Ryan Reynolds.”

The movie made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival in 2010. It won a number of awards, including Best Original Screenplay from the National Board of Review. I thought this was fun: It won the MTV Movie Award for Ryan Reynolds as the “best scared‑as‑shit performance.”

Chris: Yeah, it did.

[laughter]

Scott: As I understand it, because we’ve talked about this before, you wrote this script with the thought that you were going to direct it. That choice of setting a story inside a coffin, how much of that was based on budget, the benefit of one location. Or how much of that was based on, “I could basically do the ultimate contained thriller, literally inside a coffin”?

Chris: It was definitely in the order you just said. First and foremost it was budget. As I said, I had made a feature beforehand, and it suffered because it had way too many locations, way too many actors. All these characters, all these locations, all this stuff that I couldn’t support with my budget.

You learn from the mistakes you make, you know? You try to, anyway. So with BURIED, I realized, “Well, this time, I’m not going to star in it. I just want to direct it. I want to write something. I want to have something produced, in a pretty meaningful way, that I wrote and I directed.”

The intention was to come up with a story that I could shoot for about five grand. I had been working, probably at a job I hated — because I hated almost all of them back then, put aside a little bit of money and said, “All right. I can make a movie for five grand and not completely turn my life upside-down.”

So, naturally, with that small of a budget, I had to keep thinking smaller and smaller and smaller in scope, and also find a way to have less and less and less characters — which all ultimately left me with a guy alone in a box for a whole movie.

I wrote a totally different script based on that idea, about a guy buried alive. But it was more of a horror film; it was about a deranged person who put the protagonist in the box to punish him or something like that. I got to the end and was like, “Well… I did it. I did write a feature that takes place in this one location, and it plays.” But, at the end of the day, that script was OK. For me, at that point in my career — or, kind of my lack thereof, I needed more than just OK.

The thing is, prior to that, I’d made movies — a feature, a short — that played small festivals and people sort of pat you on the head, you know? You occasionally win some awards, which I definitely appreciated at the time. But I was at the point where I felt I had graduated from that scene — or, at least, I wanted to graduate from it. Anyway, long story short, I ended up scrapping the whole script. I just said, “All right. I’m starting from square one. What is the reason this guy’s going to be buried alive that’s not because of some deranged lunatic or whatever? What’s a more dramatic, compelling — and realistic — reason?”

That’s when I started researching what was going on in Iraq and Afghanistan at the time. That’s when I discovered that civilian contractors, all different kinds — truck drivers, kitchen workers, people that were re‑building over there — were being taken hostage, quite frequently, and ransomed. It was one of the only functioning businesses in Iraq at that time. When these contractors were being held captive, obviously they weren’t being held in the best of conditions. They were normally kept in these tiny little rooms, or beneath floorboards of these little tiny shacks in the middle of the desert.

So I pretty much said, “What if I marry that truth with my fiction?” I did quite a bit of research, spoke to a lot of contractors — not ones that were taken hostage, but people that did the job of truck driver out there — and got a sense of what that job was like, so on and so forth. Anyway, I said, “That’s it. That’s the movie.” I went back, and I did a page one rewrite on the script, and wrote that version of it.

Here is a trailer for the movie Buried:

Tomorrow in Part 2, Chris discusses how Buried went from script to movie and the genesis of his movie The Atticus Institute.

Chris is repped by UTA and Kaplan / Perrone Entertainment.

Twitter: @chrissparling.