Exclusive GITS Q&A: Jeremiah Friedman & Nick Palmer (Part 1)

Back in September 2010, I posted this announcement about newcomers Jeremiah Friedman and Nick Palmer who sold their spec script “Family Getaway” to Warner Bros.. Turns out the guys are fans of the blog and have been reading it for some time. Seeing as they are living out the dream of millions of aspiring screenwriters, I asked if they’d be up for a Q&A and they graciously agreed. It turned out to be an excellent dialogue back and forth, so much so I’m going to break up the interview into four parts. Today background on the writing team and on the sale of “Family Getaway”:

Since this a screenwriting blog, let’s try to be creative and start with a jump cut to the end of Act One: Describe where you were and how you reacted when you found out Warner Bros. wanted to buy your spec script “Family Getaway”?

NP: We were both at our day jobs. At the time I was teaching Lego Robotics as part of an after-school program but the semester hadn’t started yet, so the week the script went out I was doing inventory, literally counting thousands of Lego pieces, eight hours a day, just sitting there, staring at my phone, waiting for some news on the script.

JF: Obviously when we found out it sold it was kind of mind-blowing. We’d set our expectations pretty low and honestly, we didn’t expect it to sell and had just kind of hoped that people would like it enough that we’d get some meetings out of it.

What formal training have you had in terms of screenwriting? Which teacher or ‘screenwriting guru’ has influenced you most?

JF: Well, we met at the American Film Institute and even though we were both in the directing program, the school’s whole focus is on classical, narrative filmmaking so we spent a few years there thinking a lot about what makes stories work. Before that, I’d gotten my BA in Film Studies at Wesleyan University, which has this really outstanding and kind of unique program chaired by Jeanine Basinger. Jeanine’s great, she’s got this encyclopedic knowledge of film, she’s seen pretty much every movie ever made and her entire approach to film studies is rooted in critical analysis so the major’s much more story-based than production or theory-oriented. So that was one huge influence. I also took this one screenwriting class at Wesleyan that was taught by an alum, Mark Bomback. Mark’s kind of huge now, but at the time, he was just breaking out. His first film, Godsend, had just been released and he was working on the script for what would become Live Free or Die Hard. Luckily, he and I really hit it off and after I graduated, we kept in touch and he became an incredibly helpful and supportive mentor.

NP: Before AFI, I was actually an English major at UCLA. I knew from a pretty early age that I wanted to make films, but it was important to me to have a solid background in literature if I was going to pursue a career in storytelling. Because I wasn’t really studying screenwriting at UCLA, I decided to study it on my own. Mamet and Campbell were both big for me and I definitely read my way through most of the how-to books — Syd Field, McKee, Save the Cat — and went to a couple of McKee seminars too. I think I got a lot out of the books and classes but really I learned the most by just constantly writing.

The first screenplay you wrote you describe as an “Olympic sex comedy.” Setting aside “javelin” jokes, what’s that story about? Were you looking for an idea to write as a team or did you just happen to come up with that concept first, then say, “Hey, why don’t we write this together?”

JF: Development executives would probably pitch it as Wedding Crashers at the Olympics. It started when I stumbled across a couple of reports about the Olympic Village being this insane hotbed of sexual activity, which I thought was kind of hilarious. And then the more I read about it, the funnier it all seemed. So I approached Nick with the idea of doing a comedy about three, middle-aged American guys who concoct an elaborate plan to compete in the Olympics so they can basically get laid in the village. High brow.

NP: At this point, we’d just gotten out of school and while we’d never collaborated before, we were really good friends and I liked the idea so I figured let’s give it a shot. Once we started writing, it became clear that we worked really well together, and then the more we wrote, the more seriously we began to consider the idea of a professional partnership.

Your next script was “Family Getaway.” One logline I’ve found: “A man’s Thanksgiving at his parents’ house becomes a lot more dysfunctional when rival assassins crash the dinner, forcing him to take his family on a cross-country adventure in their station wagon.” I’ve seen the script listed as a Family Action Adventure story and as an Action Comedy. I’ve also seen it described as “The Bourne Identity” meets “Little Miss Sunshine”? Could you help us out here: What’s your take on the story’s logline? What genres do you think best describe it? Is it more “Bourne” or “Sunshine”?

NP: I think the studio or the producer actually came up with that logline. The script’s really an action-comedy in the vein of True Lies, Mr and Mrs. Smith —

JF: Midnight Run was also a pretty big reference.

NP: Yeah, definitely. We were really drawn to the idea of mixing a more traditional action-comedy with the family road trip movies we grew up with.

JF: And it was always important to us that the action feel real and dangerous and that comedy stay grounded in the emotional relationships between the family members.

How did you come up with the concept and what about it made you think, “This could be a hit movie?”

JF: Kind of a funny story actually. I get a lot of shit from all our friends because I see pretty much everything that comes out.

NP: He saw You Again. In theaters.

JF: I did. So anyway, a few years back I was sitting in a theater, completely alone, watching this Nicolas Cage movie, Bangkok Dangerous, which is about a freelance assassin on a job in Bangkok.

NP: And it’s dangerous.

JF: Right. It’s a pretty ridiculous movie and there’s this one sequence where a group of killers try to ambush Cage at his house and for some reason I thought well, this is kinda boring but if he were home with his parents for Thanksgiving that would be a funny idea. So I think that was the original kernel. Then around the same time, my folks came to LA to visit and I remember one day I was driving them around and I was trying to make an illegal left across three lanes while talking on my cell phone and my mom was going nuts in the backseat and it was just one of those moments where you really realize how difficult it is to go about your normal life as an adult when your parents are along for the ride.

NP: Yeah and that moment is actually in Family Getaway, we just put it in the middle of a car chase. Which is really the whole idea of the movie, telling the story of that universal experience that you’re always treated like a kid whenever you go home but telling it in the world of an action-comedy. As far as thinking about whether it would be a big, hit movie, we knew the concept wasn’t mumblecore and that it would be in the style of a bigger, commercial movie but honestly whether or not it would sell or be a big hit wasn’t really that much of a factor.

JF: I mean, we definitely wanted to use the script to get repped and we were aware of the type of movie we were writing. But what started us down the road and then kept us going for almost two years was really our love for the idea and the characters.

NP: Yeah, for us it came down to — is this a movie we want to see in theaters and is it a story we can stay excited about day after day.

JF: Yeah, because the truth of the matter is while it might seem like a really commercial or bankable idea, the market is really constantly changing and it takes a really long time to write a script and get it going. While we were writing Family Getaway, a bunch of similar-sounding movies opened and basically bombed –

NP: The Killers and Knight and Day being the big two.

JF: And while neither was actually that similar to what we were doing, the loglines were and if we’d been solely focused on writing to what Hollywood seemed to be looking to buy, we probably would have dropped Family Getaway and tried to write a vampire movie instead.

Tomorrow we pick up with more of the backstory on “Family Getaway,” then on Thursday and Friday we delve into how the writing team of Friedman & Palmer approaches writing a script. Some background on the pair:

Nick Palmer grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he spent all of his free time making horror movies in the backyard with his buddies. As he finished high school, and began his BA in English at UCLA, Nick started writing and directing short films with professional crews and name actors. This led him to the MFA Directing program at the American Film Institute, where he directed four short films. His thesis, DOCKWEILER, a dark drama about an ex-con running a beach clean-up crew played at a number of festivals around the country.

Born and raised in New York City, Jeremiah Friedman worked as a production assistant on ZOOLANDER before majoring in film studies at Wesleyan University. Jeremiah’s undergraduate thesis film, MISSING, earned high honors from the Wesleyan University Film Department, and went on to screen at the Northampton Independent Film Festival as well as the Hamptons International Film Festival, where it was awarded the student prize. After graduating from Wesleyan in 2005, Jeremiah worked for screenwriter Mark Bomback (GODSEND, LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD), and producer Amy Kaufman (Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN, SIN NOMBRE). In 2006, he enrolled in the MFA directing program at the American Film Institute, where he directed four short films. His thesis, PAWN, a conspiracy thriller centered around a Presidential assassination, played at a number of festivals around the country.

Jeremiah and Nick have kindly agreed to look at some follow-up questions, so if you have a good one, please post in comments.

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