Exclusive GITS Q&A: Justin Rhodes (Part 2)

Back in July, I posted this:

Warner Bros. acquires sci-fi spec script “Second Sun” from writer Justin Rhodes. Per Hollywood Reporter:

Story is an adventure set on another planet with twists.

Rhodes is repped by ICM and manager Kevin Donahue.

Recently I caught up with Justin who agreed to do a GITS interview, my ongoing focus on screenwriters who write and sell spec scripts. In this three-part interview, today we cover how Justin wrote and sold the spec script “Second Sun”:

What was the genesis of the spec script “Second Sun”?

I think most of what’s portrayed as science fiction these days is actually fantasy with lasers. But what I’m more interested in are the impacts that science has on us as human beings. It’s an arena where you can bend one rule about how the universe works in order to tell a more heightened version of some particular emotional journey than you otherwise could. For example, the replicants in BLADE RUNNER allow the writer to question what it means to be human in an external way that’s directly relevant to the plot.

With that in mind, I read a lot of science and technology magazines and web sites and came across this discussion of the reality of space travel to another star. And the reality is this: Einstein is probably right about faster than light travel being impossible, and of the four or five propulsion methods that engineers can even think about building in the near future, none of them are fast. If by some chance we were to discover a habitable planet as close as say, twenty years away (which by the way would be really close), it would take any ship we could conceivably build thousands of years to get there.

A lot of science fiction writers have tried to get around this by accepting suspended animation as a viable way to survive the trip. But to me, suspended animation of a human body for something like 5,000 years requires the same logic leap that warp drive does. And so I started to investigate what it might actually take to put a human being on another planet if mankind suddenly decided that we had no choice but to send him. And the answers I found raised all kinds of emotional questions that really resonated with me.

Could you describe the writing process on “Second Sun”? When did you start developing it? How long did you work on it? How many drafts did you write?

I wrote the first draft as a spec by myself, but in the middle of it my agents set me up with a general meeting with Scott Aversano. Scott expressed some interest in having me rewrite another script I’d written, but my head was really buried in SECOND SUN and I slipped him my first rough draft to see if he might be interested in developing that instead.

It turned out that he was, and we spent most of the next year together working on it off and on. All together I think I wrote six drafts, including the first one I did on my own, with huge differences in structure, tone, and characterization between them.

The trades have a less than helpful summary of your script: “Story is an adventure set on another planet with twists.” Could you give us just a tiny bit more insight into what the story is about?

I’d love to, but I’m not sure how much more I’m allowed to say beyond what I’ve already mentioned.

Since it’s a story set on another planet, could you tell us how you went about brainstorming the ‘creation’ of another astral object? Was that hard? Complicated? Fun? Would you ever write another movie set on another planet?

From a strictly craft perspective, it’s more difficult because you can’t take anything for granted. With a story set on Earth, for example, you can just write “INT. MOTEL. Seedy.” and the audience gets it. But if you’re inventing a whole new place with no reference point, you end up having to find ways to explain a lot of complicated visual ideas without putting too much black on the page. Lots of a description in a novel is fine, but it’s verboten in a script.

Another difficulty was dealing with characters far removed from our own world. You lose all the slang patterns and shortcuts for revealing characters that you know. Movies like AVATAR get around this by having space marines and space horses and space Native Americans. But if you really make an effort to avoid doing taking this approach, you find you have to be very careful lest your dialogue end up feeling bland or cheesy or mannered. There’s a prejudice against science fiction that starts to feel too complex or contrived, especially for female viewers, and you have to guard against that. Even naming characters is tricky. I ended up pulling all my names from an 1860s census in the hopes that they would sound slightly off from modern names, but be internally consistent and not sound like George Lucas had named them.

In terms of choosing what went into the worldbuilding, that was something that evolved slowly over the various drafts. Eventually the theme solidified and suddenly it became very clear what we needed to include on our world and what we didn’t.

But there’s a lot of fun to be had as well. More than any other setting, you have the freedom to force the world to obey the requirements of your story. And in a lot of ways that’s very liberating.

What was the single most difficult aspect of writing “Second Sun”?

Probably the sheer number of permutations we went through in development. You think you’ve run out of ways to look at an idea, but then another better way comes along and you’ve got no choice but to try and write it. By the end of the year I was pretty exhausted.

What was the most enjoyable aspect of writing the script?

I had a lot of fun with the action elements. Writing gunplay gets boring, and this was kind of my chance to channel JURASSIC PARK.

Okay, now the fun part. You finally finish the script. Could you describe what the process was where it went from you typing FADE OUT to Warner Bros. stepping in to buy your script?

Once I finished the draft, my team went about trying to package the script with a director, maybe a bit of cast. The conventional wisdom is that you can’t sell a naked spec these days. But before anyone really got a chance to implement our plan someone from Warner Bros called my agent and said they were looking for a script with some big ideas. My agent gave them SECOND SUN, and the studio expressed their desire to buy it within a couple of days.

What were the precise details of where you were when you heard that Warner Bros. wanted to acquire your script?

I was working at my desk when my agent’s assistant asked if I would be available to meet with someone at Warner Bros. I asked her which company, because I thought we were talking about some development executive for a producer with an office on the lot. But she told me, no, someone at Warner-Bros-the-Studio wanted to meet me. Today if possible. As in, can you go get in your car? My agent came on the line and told me what was going on, and that’s when I finally knew enough to get excited. It was a fun call, because as far as I knew the script hadn’t even gone out yet.

Did you celebrate and if so, how long did your hangover last?

I’m not much of a drinker, but I did go to a Brazilian steakhouse with my wife. The kind that carry around endless skewers of steak, all you can eat. I may not have had a hangover, but I succeeded in shortening my life by a few months at the very least.

How did selling “Second Sun” as a big spec script affect your life as a screenwriter? Have you had a lot more meetings with producers and studio execs? Opportunities to go up for more and better open writing assignments?

It’s only been a few weeks, so this is still evolving. I don’t know that the number of meetings has really changed, but the tenor definitely has. You move from being someone they feel they have to take a chance on to someone who’s at least shown that a studio is willing to buy what you generate. I’ve been fortunate enough to book a couple of other jobs this year before the sale, so my schedule hasn’t really let me put myself up for many new writing jobs. I will say that I may have a chance to develop a project with a writer hero of mine, which I’m really looking forward to.

Tomorrow in Part 3 of the three-part interview, Justin talks about the craft of screenwriting.