Interview (Part 1): Gary Whitta

A few months back, I had the opportunity to interview screenwriter Gary Whitta whose movie credits include The Book of Eli (2010), After Earth (2013), and the upcoming Star Wars: Rogue One (2016). Having recently seen his first novel “Abomination” published, Gary and I had a wide-ranging conversation touching on a host of subjects which I think readers will find quite interesting.

Today in Part 1, Gary talks about how he segued from a career writing about video games to becoming a full-time screenwriter:

Scott Myers: So, you’ve been a journalist. You’ve managed and been editor of magazines. A video game designer and consultant. You written comic books. You’ve hosted podcasts. You’ve written movies and TV. And now with “Abomination,” you’ve added author and novelist to your list of accomplishments. My first question is, did you plan all this, or did it just happen?

Gary Whitta: It kind of just happened. I always knew I wanted to be a writer. As a kid, I was an avid writer of short stories and my own little comic books, and at school English was the only class that ever interested me. I never went to college, pretty much straight into the workforce at the age of 15. I knew pretty early on that I wanted to try to make a living as a writer because it was really the only career I could imagine for myself that wouldn’t bore me to death. But what shape that would take, I wasn’t sure.

I flirted for a little while with being a video games programmer, because when I was growing up the two things I loved were movies and video games, but the idea of making movies seemed a very distant possibility for a kid growing up in England. I would watch Hollywood movies, but the idea of ever going there and making films seemed like another world entirely, very unreachable.

But making video games… in the 1980s when I was growing up, computer games were mostly made by a single person sitting in a bedroom and coding. So I thought maybe I could do that. I picked up a book about machine code, assembly programming and I immediately realized, my brain’s just not wired that way at all. I’m not good at math. I’m not good at science. I’m very much more right‑brain than left‑brain. I’m good with words and creative things and imagination, but logic and math and numbers, I’m awful. So I was never going to be a games programmer.

But I also loved reading video game magazines and I thought, “Maybe I could do that. I could be a game reviewer.” I started bashing out my own video game reviews and sending them into the 8‑bit games magazines of the time. And for a long time, I put the film thing away as I got taken down the video game path very quickly. I got my first job as a video game reviewer when I was 15 and really went down that road. I worked as a video game journalist for many years.

Eventually that job brought me out to the US, to San Francisco, because the magazine I was editing in the UK, PC Gamer, launched an American edition and they asked me to come out and look after it. And that seemed like a great opportunity. I love America, had fallen in love with San Francisco on previous visits. And it also had rekindled the possibility of maybe doing the screenwriting thing, because I thought, this gets me 9/10 of the way geographically there, to the world where I’d be interested in writing this kind of stuff. It felt like a necessary move if I was ever going to take screenwriting seriously. The idea of writing the kind of films or television that interested me as a kid in the UK always seemed very remote as long as I remained in the UK, because I grew up on a lot of American entertainment. I grew up on Star Wars, and Star Trek, and Battlestar Galactica, and Big Trouble in Little China. I think there’s a little bit of institutional snobbery against science fiction and genre entertainment in the British film and television world. So, getting closer to Hollywood seemed the only way that would ever be reasonable for me to write the things that I wanted to write, the things that I grew up loving.

And so, PC Gamer got me to San Francisco, and I worked on that magazine for a long time. I often tell people, it was really circumstance that pushed me into being a screenwriter. If my magazine career had continued without a hitch, I might still be doing it today, and I’m sure I’d be perfectly happy about it. I don’t know if I ever would have found the courage to make a leap and leave a perfectly safe and satisfying job behind to go do something as risky as screenwriting. But what happened was, I lost my job. I got laid off in 2000 when the big dotcom crash happened. So now I’m sitting around thinking, I always promised myself that I would try screenwriting, but I never had time when I was working. Now, I’ve got nothing but time. And I had enough money saved to live very frugally for about a year, and I spent that year writing screenplays.

That was the beginning of the screenwriting career. It certainly wasn’t planned, aside from the idea of having a vague notion, a vague dream of what I wanted to do. There was never really a specific plan. I think most writers would tell you that. I mean, some writers, they go to film school and they have a formal entryway into the film industry. But for the majority of people, it’s not like that. It’s a combination of having a dream, having a persistence to pursue the thing that you want to do, and a bit of luck and being in the right place at the right time as well.

Scott: How did you go from that background to learning the craft of screenwriting?

Gary: My first ever attempt to script was in 1988. I still have a printed copy of it. Any time I really want to cringe, it’s a good thing to page through. It was pretty difficult to learn much about screenwriting back them because there was no Internet. These days, not that it’s easy, but it’s much easier for aspiring writers who want to learn about the craft and see how it’s done to go online, go onto message boards, to connect with other writers, to read blogs, to download screenplays.

When I was a kid, I would study movies by watching them, but it wasn’t easy to see what they looked like on the page. Finding a copy of a script prior to the Internet was not a particularly easy thing to do. So I tried to teach myself a little bit. I picked up a couple of books. I still remember the very first I have about on the subject was “How to Write a Screenplay in 28 Days,” the title of which appealed to me because I’m very impatient. I read a bunch of screenwriting books, but all I really learned was that I’m not very good at learning from books. I’m more of an autodidact. I’d rather make my own mistakes and learn from those mistakes and through practice and repetition.

So I would try to teach myself as best I could. I would sit with Die Hard, which I think to this day, you could teach a week long screenwriting master class based purely on that movie. It really does work like a Swiss watch. It’s so beautifully constructed. I was 16 when it came out, and I wore out the VHS tape watching it not just because it’s a great movie but because at that point, I was starting to develop an appreciation for why great movies like that one worked. It doesn’t happen by accident. There is a structure. There are techniques and practices that make the film compelling, and I wanted to try and figure out what those things were beyond appreciating them for the effect they have on you. I wanted to get under the hood and see how the machinery of the film operated.

Not having a screenplay to access, I would sit with my VHS tape and I would reset the tape counter so that there was a timer running through the movie and I would make notes to myself, trying to reverse-engineer the film as I watched it. That was how I started to learn. I wrote a few scripts based on what I thought I was learning, and they were all terrible. But it was start.

Then my games career kind of took over, and by the time when I came back to taking a serious crack at screenwriting around 2001, there were many more resources available, it was much easier to find scripts online and study them. It was almost a little overwhelming, how much stuff there was out there compared to the pre-Internet age. And it can be even more overwhelming today, where there’s a whole industry that’s sprouted up around screenwriters trying to break in. I often caution writers not to get too carried away in reading books and going to seminars and convincing themselves there’s only one way to write a script or that there’s some magic formula. There are certainly rules and guidelines and things that you should study and learn. It’s good to know them, but you can often get too hung up on rules. Although there’s a couple of books I might recommend, I am more likely to recommend you read great screenplays. You can go online right now and find the 20 or 30 best scripts from the past year. So watch great movies and read great scripts is what I tell people to do. It worked pretty well for me.

Tomorrow in Part 2, Gary and I dig into his thought processes related to the movie The Book of Eli, how he pounded out a draft of that script in one week, selling it, eventually to star Denzel Washington.

To learn more about Gary’s 400 page historical fantasy novel “Abomination,” go here.

To purchase the book “Abomination,” go here and here.

Gary has graciously agreed to answer reader questions, so if you have any, please post in comments.

Gary is repped by UTA and Circle of Confusion.

Twitter: @garywhitta.

Comment Archive