Feature: Screenwriter-Actor Brit Marling

NYT with a feature on up-and-coming screenwriter-actor Brit Marling:

For two years, she read how-to screenplay-writing books while working on scripts with her two roommates. In the mornings she wrote upstairs with her friend (and ex-boyfriend) Mike Cahill; in the afternoon she went downstairs and worked on another with roommate №2, Zal Batmanglij. Together the friends eventually managed to make both movies, with financing from an independent production house and an individual investor. Both films were accepted to the Sundance festival this past winter and bought by Fox Searchlight. In “Sound of My Voice,” Marling, who is 27, plays a crazed cult leader; in “Another Earth,” which is being released this month, she enters a complex relationship with a man whose family she killed in a drunken-driving accident.

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She spent the rest of college collaborating with Batmanglij and Cahill on experimental films. The summer before her senior year, though, she took an internship at Goldman. If anything, it left her disillusioned. “I started to feel like it was all a bit of a fraud, all these charts and regressions and models.” She turned down the subsequent job offer and took a year to travel to Cuba to shoot a documentary with Cahill. “Living in Cuba made me unafraid of whatever could happen to me. Nothing seemed as scary as waking up at 40 and realizing that I had not lived a very courageous life.”

So she moved to Hollywood. The three friends wrote some scripts together but decided they worked better in pairs. “Zal actually had a dream that he was bound and blindfolded and walking down to a basement. And I was like: ‘Who was there? Maybe a woman who never leaves!’ And we ended up with ‘Sound of My Voice.’ ” Their other film, “Another Earth,” which hinges on the discovery of a duplicate planet, came in part from a piece of video art Cahill made in which he interviewed himself in a split screen. “We were like, what if you could confront yourself? What if there was a duplicate you?”

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I asked Marling why she thinks she has succeeded so far as a screenwriter, and she paused for quite a bit. “First off, I think the fact that I come at it from an actor’s perspective is very helpful. When I’m sitting writing, I know that something works if I’ve made myself cry, or laugh, or have a visceral emotion. Also, I work with collaborators, and I think we’ve gotten very good at editing each other’s work. And lastly, I just practiced a lot. It was kind of like breaking in a horse — it keeps bucking and bucking, but one day it breaks.”

Many takeaways from Marling’s emergence as a creative talent:

* First and foremost, Marling didn’t just talk about writing a script and getting a movie made, she actually went out and did it. Twice! In one year. In an era when content is king (and queen), the most fundamental requirement is this: Create the content!

* She interned at Goldman. Lived in Cuba. Made experimental films. Shot a documentary. All of that helped her to realize a key truth about herself: “Nothing seemed as scary as waking up at 40 and realizing that I had not lived a very courageous life.” It takes courage [a certain kind of it] to try to break into the screenwriting and TV business. Go places. Do things. Put yourself — and your creativity — out there.

* “What if you could confront yourself? What if there was a duplicate you?” As I’ve suggested before — for example here and here — perhaps the two most important words in the story development process are “what if,” certainly at the story concept stage.

* “When I’m sitting writing, I know that something works if I’ve made myself cry, or laugh, or have a visceral emotion.” It’s maybe the single comment I read or hear more than any other from people in the film business, what they want when they pick up a script and read it: To feel something.

Since the default mode in Hollywood is cynicism [the topic of the next Business of Screenwriting post], if you can write a script that actually causes a jaded representative, producer or studio exec to have a meaningful emotional response to your story, you will have accomplished something — and more than likely generated interest in you as a writer.

* “And lastly, I just practiced a lot.” Nothing more to add to that.

In sum, when I read an article about a rising talent like Brit Marling, it inspires even an old fart like me. This sounds like a young woman who gets it. We can all learn from her example.

A trailer for Marling’s movie Sound of My Voice:

A trailer for Marling’s movie Another Earth:

Best wishes, Ms. Marling!

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