Go Into The Story Interview: David Guggenheim

My conversation with the 2010 and 2012 Black List screenwriter.

David Guggenheim broke into the business in February 2010 by selling the spec script Safe House which was produced and has grossed $208M worldwide. Since that time, Guggenheim has sold two more spec scripts: “Black Box” to Universal and “Narco Sub” to 20th Century Fox, as well as the pitch “Puzzle Palace”. He also is creator and executive producer of the CBS series Designated Survivor. Two of his scripts have appeared on the annual Black List (2010, 2012).

Here is my extended interview with David.

Scott: As recently as 2010, you were working as a senior editor at US Weekly. How did you end up there?

David: I’d always been a screenwriter, but I’m also a New York based screenwriter. After college, I didn’t want to go to LA, and our version of Hollywood here is publishing. I sent out query letters to every single magazine that was out there. Back then, Us Weekly had just become a weekly. It was more of the movie version of Rolling Stone. It was my first job right out of college. I started working there as a freelance fact checker, then eventually just kept working my way up from fact checker to writer to senior editor.

Scott: How many years were you US Weekly?

David: With the exception of a one year gap, I was there for almost ten years.

Scott: Aren’t both of your brothers screenwriters?

David: Yup. My older brothers Marc and Eric.

Scott: Marc wrote Green Lantern.

David: Yeah, Green Lantern, one of the creators of Arrow. And Eric wrote Miracle, and he was a writer on “Parenthood,” and now he’s a writer on“Hawaii Five‑O.”

Scott: How did the Guggenheim gaggle of guys get so dialed into movies, and specifically screenwriting?

David: We prefer Guggenheim Super Squad of Men. But movies have been our collective obsession from the beginning, but oddly we all ended up breaking into the business in a different way. Eric had gone to film school to be a director, but he knew the best way to break into the business was through screenwriting. So after college, he’d written this great spec that got him a ton of attention and off that he got a couple of pitches sold. Marc started out as a corporate attorney and used his legal experience along with a TV spec to get a writing job on the Practice. It took me a little longer than the two of them. I’ve been writing spec’s since I was 17. My first spec made the rounds when I was a sophomore in college. It got a lot of attention, but didn’t sell, but I just kept writing spec, after spec, after spec, each of them getting as close to as humanly possible to selling…literally making its way up the ladder to the yes man…who would then say no.

Scott: What’s interesting is that all three of you gravitated towards screenwriting. Most people, when they watch movies, they’ll think, “I want to be an actor” or “I want to be a director.” Where was it along the way you all said, “There’s people who write these things and that’s what I want to do.”

David: You know, I just love the craft of constructing a story, coming up with movie concepts. That’s the fun for me. Just you and a blank page and you’re just coming up with stories. I didn’t make short films on my own that I hear a lot of directors do when they’re growing up. I just wrote scripts. And believe me, no one wants me directing them. I can barely direct myself.

Scott: How did you go about learning the craft?

David: I went to NYU. Actually, it’s funny, I got into Tisch for filmmaking. I got to the film program, and the day before classes started, I was like, “What am I doing? I’m not going to be a director. I’m going to be a writer.” I had to convince them to allow me to switch majors the day before freshman class had started. Luckily they said, “Write a 30 page screenplay tonight, and if it’s good, we’ll let you in.” I went home, wrote a 30 page script, and they accepted me into the Dramatic Writing Program.

But in some ways, I learned a lot of the basics before college, just by getting my hands on as many screenplays as possible and reading this. Before the Internet you had to be very crafty, in how you got these things. I didn’t have any Hollywood connections, but there was this store in Boston, my brother Marc went to law school there, that sold screenplays. This tiny movie poster shop. They had hot off the presses specs plus movies that hadn’t been in production yet, plus abandoned movie sequels. It had a lot…I mean I got my hands on too many screenplays, to even name. Which, probably, was incredibly shady at the time, but it worked. I would save up and drop a $100 on all these scripts and just read them on the train back to New York, like Pulp Fiction, about a year before it comes out. I can remember reading The Game in 1995 and just going wow, such a great script.

And as you’re reading, you’re really teaching yourself, and seeing how the best are doing it. Then, when I started going to college, I got to hone the craft even more, and they grill it into your mind how important craft and structure is.

Scott: Let’s talk about Safe House. Is it true you wrote it in three months because you set a deadline to get it done before your wife gave birth to a baby?

David: Yeah, what happened was I had written this script before Safe House that was terrible. It was just a really, just bad spec. I didn’t send it out…I wrote it, and I liked pieces of it. I liked thematically what it was about, and I liked the tone of it, but it was just awful. Meanwhile, my wife’s about to give birth, and I had this full time job and I knew if I had a full time job, with a full time baby I wouldn’t get any writing done. So I was like all right, this is my…I wouldn’t say my last shot, but my last best chance to have the time to write something, but there was only this three month window, so I just cranked Safe House out and luckily, the screenplay gods were smiling on me.

Scott: No kidding! It was a big spec deal and ended up placing toward the top of the 2010 Black List. Here’s a logline from the movie.

“A young CIA agent is tasked with looking after a fugitive in a safe house, but when the safe house is attacked, he finds himself on the run with his charge.”

How did you come up with that story concept?

David: I love spy movies, and that’s my favorite genre to work in. And what I like doing, is taking a piece of a movie, that’s usually isn’t the focal of the movie, and blowing that up, and saying let’s do the movie from that point of view. I’d seen safe houses before in movies…you see them all the time. But I thought, “Well this would be interesting, if we just did the movie about the guy who’s sitting there…who’s sitting there doing nothing, and make that character, who’s usually in the movie about one scene…let’s make him the star of his own movie.” Once you have that idea, you go…OK, what’s the most interesting dynamic that you can come up with, and I love the veteran, freshman dynamic…I love The Color of Money dynamic.

And once I had that dynamic, I could then craft the story around that and I knew I wanted something with a clean set-up — like Three Days of the Condor — and to pair it with an anti-buddy movie, where your hero is in the same car as the villain.

Scott: You mention Three Days of the Condor. Two others came to mind for me, The Parallax View and Marathon Man. Did they influence you when you wrote Safe House?

David: For sure. I definitely owe anyone who has ever written a 70’s paranoia thriller a check: Condor, Parallax, Marathon Man, All the Presidents Men. Great points of view, great atmosphere, and really clean setups and concepts that, because they were done in the 70’s, were really character driven– and that’s why I try to do, strip down a high concept idea, and make it gritty and realistic.

Scott: Let’s dig into those characters. Denzel Washington plays Tobin Frost, this brilliant, shrewd, rogue spy wanted for being a traitor. Ryan Reynolds plays Matt Weston, a young, green CIA operative stuck manning a safe house in South Africa where literally nothing has happened for 12 months. You mentioned buddy story. You’ve got an intriguing dynamic, these two disparate characters who intersect. On the one hand, Matt goes from an innocence to experience journey. He wanted action in the beginning, and by God he sure gets it, but in the process he’s forced to confront some very dark aspects of his line of work and his own psyche.

David: Exactly, and it’s the reverse for Tobin. That’s what I really liked about it. You have two characters on opposite ends of the spectrum ideologically, professionally. And throughout the movie they’re going to switch roles a little bit so by the end of the movie, like you said, Ryan had gone through the transformation where he has seen the dark underbelly of his profession and ends up leaving the job that he always wanted. Meanwhile you have Frost who decides, “You know what? I’m not going to go out and be rogue on my own. I’m going to go back and try to save this kid who has reminded me why I was an agent in the very first place 20 years earlier.” I like that they got to flip on each other. Ultimately that’s what made it fun for me.

Scott: I thought that was a terrific contrast in characters, that Tobin goes from this cynic, to rediscovering his humanity, influenced by his relationship with Matt. That end part, where Tobin agrees to go back and help Matt is a really seminal point…

David: Yeah.

Scott: …which concretizes his re‑connection to humanity.

David: Absolutely, and he actually sacrifices his humanity, literally, for him.

Scott: Yes.

David: He discovers it, and then he gives it to Matt. Then he dies, and he passes off the knowledge and the chips to Matt, and says, “You go off and be better that me.”

Scott: Tobin is essentially a mentor or wisdom figure. In fact, he even has a line where he tells Matt about the CIA: “They’ll say, ‘We’ll take it from here.’ That’s when you’re screwed.” Literally that’s a callback later on.

David: Yeah, for sure. That was actually a reshoot.

Scott: Is that right?

David: Yeah, you’ll notice that Ryan’s hair’s a little longer.

Scott: Tobin’s almost got a bit of Hannibal Lecter in him, doesn’t he? The ability to read people…

David: Yeah.

Scott: A preternatural sense of calm, even in stressful situation. He can get inside people’s heads. Were you inspired by Lecter when you were thinking of Tobin?

David: I was, but I’ve got to say Denzel brought that out even more, than it was originally. Certainly, with this guy…he’s been handcuffed in the back of a car the whole movie…you’re taking away his physical abilities to do harm, so the only thing he can do is play mental games. Which is much worse…and who’s the best mental game player, than Lecter and Frost is gonna do and say whatever he can do to get underneath this kids skin, to manipulate him into doing whatever he wants.

Scott: Denzel was an executive producer on the project. How did he get involved?

David: He had read the spec and signed on soon after.

Scott: Ryan was in Green Lantern which your brother wrote.

David: I know. Of all the actors in all the world. I think Lantern might have done a day of reshoots or pickup shots, while we were doing Safe House, so there’s a possibility Ryan was doing dialogue from both our scripts on the same day. I

Scott: How terrific to have those two actors in your movie. Must have been so exciting.

David: Oh my God, it’s beyond. And I mean, the first actor I ever met was Denzel and he was so, unbelievable cool…I mean for real, just incredibly smart, and just very respectful of the script, and the words, and then coming up with some really great ideas of things that he would want to explore, and encouraging all of us to get in there, and make the script better. And Ryan I thought was so beyond perfect. I can’t imagine anyone else doing it.

Scott: I was going to say playing that role of Matt was really challenging because you already knew that Tobin had this capability of doing what he does, but for Matt, he has to go on this journey, innocence to experience, really tapping into some dark places, and you see that emerge. That was a difficult role.

David: Absolutely. On top of that, you have to also believe that this person who is a novice, who is this guy who doesn’t have any experience, is still physically capable enough that you buy that he could keep a gun on Denzel Washington. That Denzel Washington’s not going to take the gun away from him and make him eat it. Which is…there’s definitely, I think, a consideration to be made when you’re casting that role, so physically Ryan’s totally up to par, but then he can just get to those emotional places, and he’s your “in” to the movie, you’re seeing the movie through his eyes so you want to make sure that you’re emotionally invested in his journey, and then through Denzel as well.

Scott: There are two key moments at the end of Act Three, one of which you talked about where Tobin comes back and in effect saves Matt’s life. How soon in the story development process did you hit on that?

David: That was always there from the beginning, that Frost was going to abandon Matt at the safe house, and he was going to have a change of heart and come back, for sure.

Scott: How about with Matt, when he’s doing that debriefing with Harlan Whitford played by Sam Sheppard where two or three times, Whitford ‘s asking Matt information about Tobin, that he was carrying something. Matt denies it each time. How soon did you land on that choice that he was going to basically go and spring this information, and leave the CIA?

David: That changed a lot after filming, in post. There was a lot of discussions about how to come up with the most satisfying way to end the movie. We tried a lot of different ways. The original script always ended with him quitting, but in the end, we looked, again, to Three Days of the Condor, for inspiration, where Redford has the information about Cliff Robertson, and he decides to release it,

Scott: Of course that great line in Three Days of the Condor: “But how do you know they’ll print it?”

David: Exactly, it’s unbelievable. It’s such a chilling, perfect ending. The trick with ours was to come up with just as satisfying a conclusion to the Whitford plot, and to Matt’s relationship with the CIA.

Scott: You leave the door wide open for a sequel, but within that story universe, he’s now gotten this information released, which is going to presumably piss off a bunch of covert people around the world whose identities have been revealed…

David: Exactly. That’s certainly part of the jumping off point.

Scott: For the sequel?

David: Yeah, it’s definitely one of the elements of it.

Scott: Safe House makes 200 million dollars worldwide. Did you have any idea it was going to be that big?

David: No, no clue…The Thursday night when it opened, the first midnight showing, I went to one in New York, and it was sold out. I just thought that was so bizarre. figured it was midnight on a Thursday…I was just going to sneak it, and it was sold out. I go, this is really cool…this may actually do well. Then when it got to 40 on opening weekend, it was like oh my God, this is ridiculous. Then people just seemed to really, really respond to it in a great way. I just couldn’t believe it…I really couldn’t believe it…still can’t.

Scott: Let’s move on to another big spec script sale, “Black Box,” which sold last year in a bidding war, and also landed on the 2012 Black List. Here’s that logline:

“When Air Force One crashes, a journalist discovers a cover‑up, after gaining access to the planes black box data, and must unravel the mystery.”

How did you come up with that idea?

David: I had the opening page of the script in my head for years. The idea of just seeing the plane crash into an ocean felt like such an opening for a movie. I didn’t know what’s going to happen next (laughs) but you just start playing out scenarios into your head and who do you want the main character to be — and just an important did he have a relationship to anyone on the plane, so he can have a real emotional connection to the crash and therefore, the story.

Scott: Whereas Safe House featured Matt as a pretty innocent protagonist, here in “Black Box,” the protagonist has a tortured past, due to the shocking death of his wife. What was it like working with a central figure, who’s laden with that burden of tragedy, and grief, and eventually a desire for revenge?

David: Well, that’s the fun of doing character driven action. You get to also tell a drama. And with black box it’s about the grieving process. That’s the journey that this character’s on. In between conspiracies to unravel and mysteries, and people trying to kill him and huge villains, you get, at the core, a small story about this one guy who lost his wife and how he’s struggling to come to grips with that.

Scott: You talk about the grieving process, of studying the drama of Alex’s grieving process, as being such a compelling emotional point of connection. How important is that for you… to have characters with some layers of things going on in action movies?

David: I think it’s critical, especially for action movies, because you want to, whether you’re successful or not, is to try to elevate whatever genre you’re working with. For me, the best action movies are always the character‑driven action movies and they’re the one’s you always remember. The Fugitive, In The Line Of Fire, two great examples and they set the bar so unbelievably high, I’m just trying to get there. I’m nowhere near close, but I’m trying, I swear.

Scott: You’ve got conspiracies working in both these movies. Do you think that conspiracies have a special resonance with movie audiences, and if so, why?

David: I definitely do because I think there’s always gonna be a Big Brother distrust feeling and for a story telling point of view, I think there’s just so much fun to be had in that shadow world. What’s really going on behind the scenes? The mistrust of the government is something that I don’t think ever goes away.

Scott: “Black Box” is another story where you feature a pairing of two characters with considerably different personalities, Alex and a rogue figure named Hirsch. Why these two characters, and what’s the appeal of you working with essentially buddy stories?

David: In Safe House, it was born out of the concept cause it was two guys on the run. With “Black Box,” I think he needed a partner because the story was much bigger and the things that he had to find out, he couldn’t have found out on his own. So Hirsch became a necessary character for the purposes of the story in that way. But overall, there’s the opportunity to infuse a great dynamic into the plot and give the story a new turn because for the first act, it’s just Alex and then there’s this new player and he can help the story evolve and then we get to explore their relationship and the conflict that comes from them on top of the conflict that’s coming from the plot and the people trying to stop Alex.

It’s always good to have one conflict coming out of characters going on with the conflict coming out of the situation, so that the action between two characters talking in a car is just as exciting as the action going on around them.

Scott: In reading “Black Box” and watching Safe House, a quote came to mind from the late screenwriter Jeff Boam, who wrote Lethal Weapon 2 and Lethal Weapon 3.

David: Wow. Thank you. He’s one of the greats.

Scott: The quote was, “People go to action movies because they have a deep‑rooted need to see a heroic figure go through physical torture and come out victorious.” Does that have any resonance with you?

David: I can’t agree with that enough. I think you want to see a character go through as many struggles and obstacles and get bloodied up and beat up, knocked down, and keep pulling himself up until the third act, where he emerges victorious. For me the most fun to do that is if you take your main character and make him the least likely to be able to succeed, not the expert. Make him the novice or the ordinary man. That just harkens back to Hitchcock films as well. It’s much more interesting for me to tackle an action movie from the point of view of someone who shouldn’t be in an action movie.

Scott: You’re working both the fish‑out‑of‑water and the underdog elements…

David: That’s a great tool that you’ve got, that screenwriters have, and it’s fun. As long as you make it believable that in an action scene they could do the stuff they’re doing, then I think you’ve got something there. Because then I think also the audience goes, “OK, that’s me up on the screen. That’s what I would be doing in that situation.” I think, again, you make a much more personal connection between the audience and the film, and all that is all great stuff.

Scott: Safe House had a lot of plot twists and turns, but I think you outdid yourself on “Black Box.” How do you go about doing that? Is that intuitive, or are you consciously saying, “I want a twist here, I want a twist there.” Or maybe you’re just following the choices of the characters?

David: A lot of times, I’m following the characters. I knew what some of the bigger twists were in “Black Box.” I knew I wanted it to be more twisty than Safe House, because Safe House was essentially a chase movie and this was going to have to be much more of a puzzle. But as far as knowing exactly what was gonna happen, it was little bit of both. I knew what the big twists were gonna be, but some of the smaller, character-twists, I just let happen as I was writing. Sometimes though you go off course and you call bullshit on some of the turns you make, but that’s what the delete key is for.

The benefit, when you’re writing specs, is you can explore more than when you’re doing an assignment for a studio. It’s like driving. If you’re being paid to go somewhere, you should follow directions, there’s a time you have be there. But if you’re not on a clock, you can get lost and find new routes and find yourself in places you didn’t think existed.

Scott: It seems to me one of the biggest challenges for writers of action or action-thriller movies has got to be, how to come up with fresh ways to do action.

David: Oh, for sure, yeah.

Scott: How do you do that?

David: One of the tricks is coming up with location first. That can help dictate what the action’s going to be. The other thing is really about who is involved in the action, because they’re going to dictate how the action can happen. Like I said, if you have a main character who’s never been in an action scene, you can’t give them a Bourne‑style action scene, because only Bourne can do the stuff that Bourne does.

Obviously, for the sake of the read, you want the action to jump off the page as much as possible, but what’s more important than the actual choreography is to come up a fresh way figuring out how the characters got into the action scene in the first place and how they get out of it. Because once you have those beats you can then play with the action inside the scene. You can reconceive it, and reconceive, and reconceive it and it won’t change anything that happens before or after the story.

David: My advice for action writers isn’t to sweat the action, Make it fun, but remember the director’s going to come up with amazing ideas how to do an action scene, or the choreographer’s going to come up with some great ideas or turns out the location where the script was set, we can’t get there, so we have to improvise and come up with something else entirely.

Scott: Let’s talk about the Black List. You’ve made it twice. What has that experience been like?

David: Unbelievably humbling and I’m honored by it. It was unbelievable. The first time, I couldn’t’ believe it. I thought it was just the coolest thing, because as an up‑and‑coming writer, you want to get on the Black List. You should aspire to write a script that people really love and that they remember. When I’d heard, I couldn’t believe it. Then with “Black Box,” it was just really special as well because I really love spec writing, so it’s nice to get acknowledged for that.

Scott: Did you follow along when Franklin [Leonard] was tweeting all the people this year, or how did you learn that you were on the Black List?

David: Alexa Faigen at Scott Stuber’s company. She was the executive producer on Safe House and one of the producers on “Black Box,” and she emailed me. Again, I was shocked.

Scott: At this point, I assume you could go up for virtually any writing assignment. Yet you still like writing spec scripts. What’s the appeal of a spec script?

David: I just personally get so much more satisfaction from coming up with my own concepts and selling them, working on them, than I do taking on an assignment. That’s not to say I’ll never take on an assignment. I’ve actually been thinking a lot about doing that lately but as long as I can come up with ideas and write them and sell them, and get them into a place where the movies could get made, I hope to do that.

Scott: Do you have any desire to write outside the action or action/thriller genres?

David: Absolutely. But I’m not as fearless as other people so I’m probably gonna stay in the genre a little longer — but try to evolve within it. For example, Safe House was an intense chase movie whereas this script I set up, Narco Sub, with the late great Tony Scott was a submarine drug thriller. So they’re both action movies, but with different action.

Scott: How about directing? Any interest?

David: Oh God no. No. After seeing people do it, they’re like superheroes to me. Just watching how many things they have to juggle, I just don’t think I could do that. I don’ think I have the confidence to be a director. I like doing what I’m doing. I like being the writer.

Scott: What about TV?

David: I did a pilot two years ago and it was one of the greatest experience I ever had. Unfortunately, the thing with me is that I’m based in New York so I can’t really commute to LA to work on a show. I still love coming up with ideas for shows and breaking stories for shows, but I’m not skilled enough to make a lot of what I like to do producible on a TV schedule.

Scott: Let’s get into some craft questions. How do you come up with story ideas?

David: They come from everywhere really. For example, I had read a bunch of articles about narco trafficking and reading about these narco subs, I just said “Well that’s a movie.” Right then and there I knew that’s a movie. I was going to do a story about transporting drugs on narco mini‑submarines. The concept that drug cartels had submarines blew my mind. That got me really, really excited. The idea of doing a twist on the submarine genre. “Run Silent, Run Deep” scenario but with drug lords.

Scott: How important do you think the story concept is to the overall marketability of a spec script?”

David: I think it’s critical for a spec script. I think you need that strong hook. I think there’s a lot of things you can get away with in other assignments that you can’t get away with in spec and vice versa. I think in a spec you need to make sure you’re hooking your reader in that first 15 pages, and that it has a strong enough concept. Because your concept it what’s going to set it apart. Because you don’t have a title like “Batman,” or you’re not based on preexisting material, you’re selling point is the concept.

Scott: How much time do you spend on prep writing, on brainstorming, character development, plotting, research, outlining?

David: It depends on the project.” Safe House,” didn’t require that much. It required a little bit of outlining and reconceiving the set up of the movie. But if I have a really clean set up, I feel confident that I can just go ahead and start writing it. That’s all I really need is that clean set up, because I think in action movies that’s what is the most important thing. A clean reason for why all this is happening so you can get your heroes on the road.

As far as research, I do as much as I can to make sure I have a working knowledge of the world I’m writing but if I’m feeling inspired I’ll do the research as I go or sometimes after I get a draft down. But usually I’m too excited to write, and I just want to get it down on paper and see if I have a movie there first before I actually look stuff up and realize I don’t know what I’m talking about at all.

Scott: Do you do a formal outline when you write a script?

David: I’ve been outlining more and more, for sure. I think definitely when you’re dealing with studios and producers, they want to see an outline. And if you’re doing a pitch, the pitch is the outline. You have to go in there and be able to say, “Here’s your first act, and here’s your second act, and this is where the movie is going to end up.” However, I don’t love pitching or writing in an outline what the action is going to happen, because I do like writing action as it’s happening. That way I’m putting myself in the shoes of the main character. It’s just as surprising to the character as it is to me, and I think that’s key to good writing.

Scott: How do you go about developing your characters?

David: For me, it either comes out of the concept — who is the most interesting person I could drop into this specific scenario or I first start with “what type of person interests me” and build a story around them. Then I put a lot of time into the first 15 pages,so I get a really good sense of who they are and what they stand for and what they want. Then that tells me where they’re going.

Scott: What about dialogue?

David: Dialogue, for me again, is something I get down as quickly as possible, then go back and play with it and fix it where it needs fixing or let it lie. If you have a good enough sense of your characters, the dialogue should come easier. I’m a very instinctual writer. If I’m having a lot of trouble coming up with dialogue for a scene, I realize the dialogue is not the problem, the problem is the scene. If it’s the scene, then it’s the characters in it or the story beat.

You have to be able to be flexible and go back and say, “Alright. Why is this section not working? Why am I not writing well today?” There’s got to be a reason.

Scott: Let’s talk about scenes. Are there some questions you ask, or think points you want to hit, when you’re writing a scene, or constructing a scene?

David: You definitely always want a scene to have point, to be able to move the story forward and have conflict. Lately, I have been starting to write little bullet points for myself going, “This is what needs to come out of the scene. Emotionally I want this, thematically I want this, and if it’s a big plot in the scene, I want this.” You also have to be very aware of the scene that came before it, and maybe the scene that came before that.Where’s your character in the story? If there’s a scene later on, you have to infuse the dialogue and the scene with everything that happened before it. What they’ve been through. The stuff they’re going to say now is not going to be stuff they would have said 60, 70 pages earlier.

Scott: You mentioned theme. How do you work with theme? Do you have a working understanding of what theme is, and then how do you apply that when you’re working with a script?

David: If you come up with a really great, strong concept, hopefully a lot of that stuff is coming together with it. It brings with it who your characters are going to be. Then…like, Air Force One goes down, OK. Well, my main character, I know, is going to have someone on that plane. Now I have that, and he’s going through the grieving process. I now know, and guess what, America’s going to be going through a grieving process. I think thematically, I’m going to make the movie about that. You never want to hit it too much on the head. It’s a balancing act, so it’s all about picking and choosing and sprinkling in the moments. Sometimes it happens organically if you’re in a good place. It does the work for you.

Scott: Obviously if you traffic in action writing, you’ve got to be very good at writing entertaining, compelling scene description. How do you go about doing that?

David: Again, you learn from the masters. Shane Black was the master, I think, of that. But that style was very specific to him so I wouldn’t recommend emulating it too much. So you look at how other people write. You look at the way that Tony Gilroy writes all the action of Bourne movies, it’s exactly how it is when you’re watching it. It’s just as frenetic and just as quick and exciting and pulsating. You want to infuse that into your action scenes.

Scott: When you finish a first draft, and you’re faced with the inevitable rewriting process, what are some of the keys for you that you take into consideration when you’re rewriting your script?

David: I go into it, with any rewriting process, or any note process, of going I’m not the smartest guy in the room. I will take any idea and I will try it. I may not agree with it when it’s given to me, but I always give the idea a chance, and I’ll try it. If it doesn’t work, then at least I tried it, and I can make an informed argument why it doesn’t work. But I’m not afraid to do a lot of heavy lifting. That’s part of it. Writing is rewriting, for sure. I think you have to be ready to tear apart anything that doesn’t work on your script, and start from scratch. It’s pretty amazing to go back and see the first draft of the scripts, after you’ve seen the movie come out…see how much work was involved in changing it. But at the same time, most of the time I would say, the core spine stays the same, and the concepts stay the same. You have to be able to make all the important chances without what people liked about it in the first place.

Scott: That’s an important point, isn’t it?

David: Yeah.

Scott: You give it a clean read, but you want to make sure you also pay attention to what works and preserve that.

David: Right. There’s time where you can go too far, for sure. That’s happened to me…you write…you can tell on the fourth draft I’ve went too far, and I changed more things than I had to. Because by the time you’re there, maybe you’re too close to the material and you lose sight of what’s important. But it’s all part of the process.

Scott: What is your actual writing process?

David: I write everyday…The benefit of living in New York, is you get to almost live on LA time and when you’re a night writer, like me, it helps that you don’t really have to get up until 9 AM, LA time, which is noon my time. So I can write until like 6 in the morning, which I like to do a lot. My process, really is that I like to write the script, or as much as I can of the script, and as fast as humanly possible. Literally…don’t worry about descriptions…don’t even really worry about so much the choreography, the action…it’s strictly bare‑bones as possible. Don’t even worry about the dialogue…just getting all the information down on the page, just so I know that I can tell the story.

I’ll do that for one night, and then the next day, I start‑up back on page one, on a new file, and I start writing the script based on those “sketches”. Most of the time I don’t even have to look at the other page, I do it from memory, and I’ve been finding that the more fleshed out version comes out so much easier because I’ve already done a first take on the script.

Scott: So literally at night, you’ll do what Darren Arnofsky calls a ‘muscle draft,’ where you’re just muscling it out. Then in the next day, you’ll go and rewrite those pages?

David: Yeah, and usually I’ll muscle out, let’s say like 16 pages, of a script, and that will actually end up, usually, turning into my first act. That’s how little I’ll have actually written of the descriptions and the dialogue, but I’ll have every single important piece of information on that page. I’ll know what the character moments are and what scene goes after the next, and if there’s going to be a twist in the scene, I’m going to know that as well and so forth. But I don’t want to slow the process down with other factors. Some people say my scripts, they read really, really, really fast, and the actions are fast, and it’s very, very intense, and I think that all comes out of the style that I do it in now.

Scott: If you were writing a drama, maybe you wouldn’t have that same approach?

David: Exactly, but with writing an action movie, it needs to get on its feet very, very quickly, but logically and the story after that needs to keep moving like a freight train, but then…like a roller coaster…it has to have those quiet, lull moments, where you can take a pause and really make it about the characters.

Scott: Do you and your brothers ever share scripts…look for advice from each other?

David: Oh yeah, I take advantage of them, more than they take advantage of me. I wish that they would give me more stuff of theirs to read. I would love to do it, although they’re better than I am, so I think they’re fine. I’m the youngest, so I do pass up stuff to them. They’re so busy though.

Scott: What is your single best excuse not to write?

David: Oh man, I guess I could say it’s the kids. I got two now. That’s my excuse. I can’t write, I got the kids today. If I didn’t have the kids, there’s a good movie on, I’m just lazy. I don’t even need an excuse, I just don’t do it.

Scott: What do you love most about writing?

David: I love it when it works. I love the nights where you really just get an incredible amount of work done, and it’s work you’re really happy with. You may hate it in a week, but for that moment, you’re like I’m a writer. It’s working, this is great. I’m doing what I love and I’m delivering on what I promised the studio and the producers I could do, and I love that feeling.

Scott: In an ideal world, where are you in five or 10 years?

David: In an ideal world, I want to keep doing what I’m doing, I want to still be here in New York, hopefully. I just love it here. I think I’ll never stop writing specs, because I think I just love the process of it so much, and I get too excited about coming up with my own stuff and seeing if that works. But hopefully we’re in production on Black Box and we’re in production on Puzzle Puzzle and Narco Sub and hopefully just churning out more and more material. Hopefully I’m just going to get better and better and better. Really, that’s my goal is that every single script, I hope I learn from the mistakes I made in the previous one and evolve.

Scott: Finally what advice can you offer to aspiring screenwriters about learning the craft and breaking in to Hollywood?

David: I’ll tell you this, and I think this is always the case, I think screenwriting is the cleanest and quickest way to break into the industry. I think it’s much harder to make a short film than it is to write one. I do think that all writers, they should learn from reading other scripts. I think that’s a key part of the education process. It’s also watching the movies that are getting made, I think is very important too.

I think you have to almost be scientific about the movies that are being made and watching them and saying, “Why did that movie get made, and why didn’t that other one get made?” It informs the stuff that you’re writing. I do think you learn the craft by failure. I think it’s all about writing drafts and seeing what’s wrong with them, and analyzing them, and then fixing them and repeat, wash, rinse, repeat.

I think looking at scripts, scripts that have gotten made, is a great way to learn things. It teaches structure and it teaches you how to construct a scene. It shows you this is what worked. There’s something about this writing that got studios to respond to it, that got actors wanting to do it, the directors wanted to do it and they put millions of dollars behind it. That’s all free education that you can do on your own.

For my interviews with dozens of other Black List writers, go here.