Go Into The Story Interview: Eric Heisserer (2012, 2014 Black List)
My in-depth interview with one of Hollywood’s hottest screenwriters whose credits include Arrival, Lights Out, The Thing, and Hours.
I first intersected with Eric Heisserer via social media and I regard this 2013 interview with him as one of the best in the Go Into The Story series. Eric’s writing credits include The Thing, Hours (which he also directed), Lights Out, and Arrival for which he was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
In our hour-plus conversation, Eric and I discussed his unusual path into screenwriting, his writing across genres, and reflections on the craft.
Scott: What are some of the movies that most influenced you when you were growing up?
Eric: I was a child of the ’80s, so I was addicted to movies like “Aliens” and “The Hunt for Red October” and early Carpenter movies like “The Thing” and “Big Trouble in Little China.” That was my candy.
Scott: And when did you discover that there were these people known as screenwriters who actually wrote the stories?
Eric: Probably much later than I should have. It was along about the time that I got addicted to some of the later works of [James] Cameron. I discovered I could get a hold of the screenplays of his movies. I was curious to see the early thought processes of Jim Cameron and how he related to the world he was going to film before he filmed it.
Scott: How did you go about learning the craft?
Eric: I’m a bit of an autodidact, so I picked up Final Draft software and a couple of screenplays that I purchased through bookstores. I had an idea of what a script was supposed to look like, and I started writing.
Scott: Any formal training?
Eric: No.
Scott: I believe your big break was a spec script called “Dionaea House.”
Eric: Yes, that was my breakthrough.
Scott: Warner Brothers bought that.
Eric: Yeah.
Scott: What was that project about and what happened with it?
Eric: That was an interesting story of a project. Before that, I had gotten a couple of other options through independent financiers, enough where I had some money to move from Houston out to L.A. I got out here and immediately started hemorrhaging money and both the movies stalled, so I had no future income. I was trying to make it work, living out here alone in L.A., and visited a friend in Burbank. I got lost on the way there and drove past a house that looked exactly like a house I used to drive by all the time in my commute in Houston. That just stuck with me. That was odd, even down to the roof damage. I thought, “Why would somebody have the same looking house?”
Stories tend to work for me like mitosis. I have to have three or four disparate ideas that sort of converge and then I get the idea what the actual movie is. “Dionaea House” didn’t solidify for me until a couple weeks later, when I was up late at night, in a bout of insomnia, watching Discovery Channel and learning all about carnivorous plants. In particular the Venus Flytrap, which is called the Dionaea Muscipula.
The narrator was describing the flytrap, which looks actually very different from my initial idea of what the plant looks like. I had sort of like the “Little Shop of Horrors” picture in my head. In reality it’s this massive coffee table size plant full of tiny, little pod‑like mouths…hundreds of them. They’re all identical. They all look like each other.
The narrator said something like, “disguised as shelter for insects” That phrase then stuck in my brain and made me think, “Wait, what if those aren’t houses? What if we’re the insects here?” That led to sort of a Lovecraftian horror story that I wrote as a script.
Oddly enough, my rep at the time, when I called him I said, “Hey, I’ve got a new script I’m working on. It’s an original horror story.” He was very discouraging. He said, “Well, original material just isn’t being bought anymore these days and by the way, I’m leaving the business.” [laughs]
I was bit disappointed by that, but I’m also stubborn when I get an idea in my head. I said, I’m going to create my own source material. And using money I really didn’t have, I bought a domain, and created an epistolary story online through a series of websites and blogs and chat logs.
And it was all a work of fiction, but it was supposed to create some sort of narrative that I could point people to and say, “Here’s what’s the script is based on.” I guess I was about two‑thirds of the way through completing the online portion when the site was discovered, and it went viral. I mean, I spent one night with 26 hits, and that was all me just making sure that links worked, and the next night I had four million hits.
So, the response was interesting. I had a few hundred emails hitting me in the first couple of days, about 20 percent of them said that they thought it was an interesting story, or that it was terrible. There’s always the contingent of the Internet that says you suck, your writing sucks. And so, [laughs] I got plenty of those.
The vast majority of people who responded to the story thought it was true, to the point that they were telling me that they had gone to school with one of my fictional characters, or they lived down the street from them, or they knew them personally somehow.
And then I began to get contacted by professional paranormal investigators asking to take the case on, I had a private detective call my unlisted number at one point. I had some religious leaders, including a pastor from Louisiana, who emailed me, saying he understood the evil I was facing, et cetera, et cetera. It was a strange time. But I think all of that really helped to then market and sell the script to Warner Brothers.
At one point we had a director, Peter Cornwell, and we were just a few weeks from shooting from principal photography, when Warner Brothers pulled the plug on us. Because I think our budget was right at the same amount as the budget of some other move that had come out and bombed. And that’s how we almost made that movie.
Scott: The story behind the story. So when you did that online, you didn’t have a manager at that point. How did you get to Warner Brothers?
Eric: I used all of the attention that I got from the readers of the source material, online, to then shop myself around here in L.A. to a new manager, and that’s how I met Julie Bloom, who has been my manager ever since 2004.
Scott: Is the site still up, or did you take it down?
Eric: It’s been up for all this time.
Scott: Do you ever check it out?
Eric: Just to check on it and make sure it’s there? Yeah. Now and then.
Scott: Just to see if there’s any site traffic?
Eric: No, I don’t really pay attention to the site traffic on it that much anymore. I think it dwindled down to a certain level a few years ago, and I think that’s about all I get. I’m still happy that it’s available, and people can go read it.
Scott: I want to touch on three movies you were involved in writing. Nightmare on Elm Street which came out April 2010. Final Destination 5, August 2011. And The Thing, October 2011. That’s three movies released within a period of about 18 months. Must have been quite a whirlwind.
Eric: Well. You know what, it felt like a few years of steady work for me, and then it was just that the release schedule timed out so that I seemed to be working faster than I really was. [laughs] But, yeah, 2011 was a pretty big year.
Scott: How did you handle the weight of expectations that came with these well‑established movies and franchises?
Eric: Honestly, not very well. [laughs] I took on a lot of these projects because I am a fervent fan of the genre, and particularly these characters or these worlds. I was hopeful that I could do them justice, at least in my part of the chain that creates movies. I found out as a relative newcomer to the studio system that, as a writer on a studio property, I have a limited sphere of control, and I was also unaware of how many of the decisions get made farther down the road that I probably could have been better at communicating back in the script stage.
So, I would say, of those films, some I feel are victories and some are sort of failures. And certainly I take responsibility for some of that. But as a studio writer, you have to accept the fact that 90 percent of the dialogue in that kind of film isn’t yours.
Scott: Were you working on these simultaneously?
Eric: Well, I normally stack projects. That’s how I work. I work on two projects at once. I can’t do more than two, but doing two allows me to bounce around whenever I get stuck on one. So, I wasn’t a stranger to that. But when it comes to the actual writing services for those movies, they were back to back, they never really overlapped.
Scott: Each of the projects is either science fiction, horror or thriller. So presumably, at some point, you got put on those writer’s list in Hollywood. Had that been a conscious decision on your part and your representatives to pursue those specific genres? Or did that happen because these were just the type of stories to which you naturally gravitate?
Eric: I would say it’s sort of a happy accident. When I was put on Nightmare on Elm Street, I had probably a half a dozen specs, and other unproduced assignment work, rewrites and other stuff that I had done over the past five years, but only that one horror spec. It was because the “Dionaea House” stood out as a piece of horror writing that a lot of executives loved, I was brought in to pitch on Elm Street. When that took off, I think I just carried the horror writer banner around for a little while, and I was seen as someone who could get a horror movie greenlit. That’s what paid the bills for me, so I was happy to do that. I didn’t expect it to be the one genre that I would live in for the next two to three years, but that’s kind of how the business works. You get seen as this or that type of writer, and the only way to sort of break out of that or change gears is to deliver on spec, usually, a piece of writing in another genre.
Scott: That’s a nice segue to Hours, your new movie, which you wrote and directed starring Paul Walker. The plot involves a father who struggles to keep his hospitalized newly born daughter alive in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. And while it’s a thriller, it’s reality‑based. There’s no science fiction to it. There’s no horror, at least in the traditional movie sense of the word. Moreover, it’s based on a short story you wrote and published. So why did you write this type of story as compared to something in the sci‑fi horror thriller. Were you trying to expand out of that, or was this just a story that you needed to write?
Eric: I’ve been keen to work new muscles as a screenwriter, and every year, I at least attempt to write a screenplay in a genre that I haven’t done before. Because I find I learn a lot of new lessons and things that I can apply to writing and genres that I am normally comfortable in, like science fiction and horror. So, that was part of my choice…to write Hours. The other is that I was moved emotionally by a lot of the stories and a lot of the research I had done from Katrina survivors. Having lived in Houston for a long time and taking vacations and trips over the New Orleans area, I had personal memories there. And I felt like it was a natural arena to sort of tell a story of the father and newborn daughter inspired by a lot of real‑life stories.
Scott: What was the very first component of the story concept that came to you?
Eric: The thing that started it all was the story about the doctors and nurses at Charity Hospital, who manually worked the hand‑crank generators on the ICU equipment in order to keep the patients alive. That idea, that visual, stuck in my head for a long time. And when I realized that I didn’t want to be a doctor or a nurse, the character in my movie, that I wanted it to be a father keeping his own child alive, the rest of it started to fall into place. So that was sort of the crux of it.
There was also this dread, this horrible leash of the equipment…a lot of the time, a ventilator or a piece of ICU equipment has a backup battery that can power the device in case of a total blackout, and when generators fail, you’ve got something that keeps the patient alive.
But often those batteries have to be replaced every few months, because they can just sort of drain out on their own, or they lose all their capacity. And I realized that if we had a case of a piece of equipment that had an old battery in it, that gave my character a leash where he had only a certain amount of minutes in order to go and leave his baby’s side to try and get help, or get food or resources or anything else he could try and do to make contact with the outside world.
But he would always have to come back and crank that generator again. And that allowed me to tell what was in part I guess an episodic story, but also a very powerful and emotional story about the endurance required to love someone who constantly needs you. Which is basically what fatherhood is, you know?
Scott: How did you end up making the transition from short story to script to movie?
Eric: I wrote the short story first, because I hadn’t worked in that medium in a long time, and I wanted to make sure that I could still do it. But also, short stories, for me, have become like guinea pigs for ideas that might have the potential to be movies. And I wrote Hours first as a short story, to see if it had the right sort of architecture for something bigger. I was on the fence for a long while, actually. Some friends of mine finally convinced me to turn it into a movie. I wrote the first half of the script over the course of a few months in 2010, and it took me nearly half a year to get back to it and write the rest of it, because it scared me, honestly. It was very new to me, writing this type of material. It was emotional, and it tapped into my fears as someone who could theoretically be in Nolan’s shoes. And that worry that you aren’t good enough or strong enough or have the endurance required to be a parent.
So, there…where was I going with that? It took me a while to get the script. Once I did, I knew I couldn’t just hand the script over and make a spec sale and let it go at that. I had gotten very emotionally invested in the story and the character, to the point where I could close my eyes and see how the movie was supposed to look and sound.
And I shared that with my reps, who agreed that it was time to direct, to become a hyphenate. Thankfully, because it’s a contained thriller, and it doesn’t have a sprawling cast or a bunch of special effects, it felt like a good first effort.
Of course, it does have three things that they say you should avoid at all costs, which is children, animals and water. So… [laughs] I certainly made things hard on myself in that regard.
Scott: You made some key changes from the short story to the screenplay. For example, in the short story you wrote the husband and the wife “wanted a child so much for so long.” In the script they’re ambivalent about that, in fact the protagonist Nolan has decidedly mixed feelings. Why did you make that change?
Eric: That’s a good question. When I began working on this script, I found Nolan’s arc as a father, and it wasn’t someone who had been wanting to be this for so long. It was someone who discovered that he was going to be a dad, and whether he liked it or not, whether he was ready or not. And of course he loves his wife Abigail and has been completely in love with her since he met her. So, anything that comes out of the both of them, he knows he will love. But it’s an experience that he’s not sure he’s ready for.
It helped me to form his arc. There’s a line early on in the movie when he’s learned that Abigail has died, but the baby survived. And he says to the baby, “I don’t know you.” Which is to help the audience extrapolate that he’s lost the person in his life that he knows loved him, and loved him unconditionally. And now he’s with this little person who may grow up to love him, or…you know, the future there is murky.
He’s worried that he got the raw end of the deal. But over the course of the film he really bonds with his daughter, and learns what it is to be a father, and accepts that he is ready, that he does have what it takes. And that he really hasn’t completely lost his wife Abigail as long as this girl is in his life. The last line of dialogue in the movie is “I know you.”
Scott: You have a line in the script early on, where Nolan finds his wife Abigail, her body, and he says, “I don’t want the baby now, I want you back, I want you.” And so, by making that change from the short story, it’s like you lengthen the emotional distance, the psychological distance, that Nolan has to traverse. What do you think really appealed to you about this unique situation that Nolan found himself?
Eric: What appealed to me is that it’s a polarizing issue. Therefore I feel like it’s something that is worthy of exploration. Of all the fathers who’d read the script — whether it’s friends, or people in the industry, family members — I could split down the middle the two groups. The men who said, yes I absolutely know where Nolan is coming from, and I would be just as devastated and nervous and angry. And the other half that said, you know, I would absolutely never have any anger or ill will towards my child, the bond there is stronger than any of that.
Part of that I think comes from where the emotional connection lies. But I knew this was a character choice that isn’t often explored in movies or TV, of the reluctant parent. So that’s what appealed to me about it.
Scott: Much of the story, the only characters are Nolan and his baby daughter, who of course, can’t talk. What were some of the specific challenges you faced in sustaining the narrative with what is essentially a single‑character driven story?
Eric: I tried to look at it as realistically as possible, and come up with a long laundry list of things that a man would do in this situation, and that gave me plenty for Nolan to do in terms of action. But it also meant that a good deal of this script would be dialogue‑free. The thing I like about it though, is how it’s more designed as a play. The theater has done stuff like this for a long while, that there have been one‑man shows for hundreds of years. And this is a cinematic version of that, a cinematic execution of just a man alone in a room keeping his infant daughter alive.
The monologues that I’ve built in — where Nolan is talking to his daughter — is a way of therapy, a way of bonding, and just to try and prevent himself from going crazy. They’re soliloquies, really, that tell the story of Nolan and Abigail.
Scott: You made an interesting narrative choice, where you used physical objects with symbolic meaning, like photos, engagement rings, wedding bands, which Nolan shares with his daughter. What was the inspiration to use these objects as a sort of talisman?
Eric: I had friends that had a baby during the course of writing this, and I learned the husband receives the wedding and engagement ring when his wife goes in to have the baby, and so my friend was holding on to them in the waiting room. I saw a photo on Facebook of him just holding the rings, and it was such an evocative image.
That little seed grew into what other things would Nolan have on his person to help tell the story visually of his relationship with Abigail? Once I traveled down that road I realized I had all of these icons that were really story devices to share with his daughter. What better place for them to end up than the glass of the incubator? Pointed down so that his baby girl could see them?
Scott: In effect, this is a contained thriller, so it’s interesting another choice you made was to use a couple of flashbacks and even a delirium fantasy involving Nolan and his wife Abigail. What was the inspiration behind that?
Eric: I think you’ve already touched on it. It was to get the hell out of the hospital for a few minutes and just give the audience a breather. I thought, what better way to break up the monotony of this otherwise small story than to go outdoors or a lush environment with some new set dressing to look at.
Scott: The story is inside the hospital for almost its entirety, yet it’s very much a hero’s journey, isn’t it? The hospital is this new world. The death of his wife is like a Call To Adventure. He meets various allies and enemies. His ordeal, resurrection, return home. Were you at all conscious at all of the idea of the Hero’s Journey when you were writing the script?
Eric: No, I think that structure sort of snuck up on me. I guess I’d gotten to the end of the script, and had begun prepping it to figure out, as a director, what scenes I needed to hold on to and what I could shave away that the Hero’s Journey popped out at me. It was a great benchmark to see what worked or what didn’t with the story.
Scott: I’m going to put on my Joseph Campbell hat and throw out this analysis for you to see what you think. The hero Nolan enters the hospital. That is equivalent to venturing into the cave. And there he confronts the ‘dragon’ which is represented by the physical enemies he confronts as well as his own fears, “Can I be a good father?” to save the damsel in distress, his daughter. Does that resonate at all with you?
Eric: Yeah. [laughs] That’s pretty much it! It sounds simple now that you say it.
Scott: Let’s talk about directing the film. You mentioned the three big no-no’s of production: No kids, no animals, no water. With Hours, you have all three. How challenging was it for you as a first directing effort?
Eric: Because I survived it I feel like I could go back and do it again. If it had broken me then obviously I’d be singing a different song. What saved me the most was not knowing how difficult those elements would be. I had no stigma attached to some of these situations like dealing with infants or dogs or flooding. Because I was unaware of the magnitude of the difficulty or what a hassle it could be I sort of plowed ahead and said, “No, we can do this.” I was the voice of optimism right up until the time it dawned on me exactly why everyone was nervous. By then it was too late. One of my producers on set said to me was, “Eric, what’s great about you is you don’t know what you don’t know.”
I think that’s what really what saved the whole movie is we kept shooting and we kept plowing through. That statement was kind of a compliment.
Scott: Apart from the difficulty of working with animals, babies, water, what did you learn as a writer from your directing experiences?
Eric: I learned that directors have it a lot harder than we think they do. I learned how vitally important it is to write a script to be shot. That is to make sure that whatever it is that you’re writing is a cinematic experience, designed as a transitory document to get to the final product of the movie. Then you’re going to find things after you’ve shot it that you need to move around or change in order to tell the ultimate version of the story.
I’ve written scripts before that I would say could be perceived as good reads. You know, they pop off the page, they’re a literary experience. But having directed now and gone back and looked at those older scripts I can tell you that they really were not written to be shot. That’s my new mantra, my new mission is that whatever I write, I’m writing something that, in reading, the director knows exactly what kind of movie it is.
Scott: You’re heading out to South by Southwest for the debut of the movie?
Eric: Yeah, in a week and a half.
Scott: What’s it feel like to be approaching the premiere of the first movie you wrote and directed?
Eric: It’s pretty exciting. I’m just thrilled to show off Paul Walker’s performance. I’m really proud of him and I’m excited for what this might do for his career.
Scott: OK. I’d like to move to another story you are writing, another great script, Story of Your Life, an adaptation of a short story by Ted Chiang. Logline provided by IMDB:
“A linguist is recruited by the military to assist in translating alien communications.” How did you get involved in that project?
Eric: I’ve been a fan of Ted Chiang’s for years now and I carried around with me his anthology book like it was a Bible for a long while. One of the questions you get from producers on the “bottled water tour” of general meetings is, “Do you have any material you’re passionate about, maybe we can turn it into a movie?” People are always looking for that. I’d trumpeted Ted Chang and “Story of Your Life” as something I’d been excited about adapting for a long while.
But it’s science fiction and intellectual, so it’s a hard sell. I find the word “intellectual” scares off a lot of people in this town. It took years for me to find producers who actually read the story and understood some of the big revelations in it, and emotionally responded to it. I found it with the two Dans at 21 Laps, Dan Cohen and Dan Levine.
We teamed up and began the arduous journey of getting this movie made. It began with getting the rights of the story from Ted who was understandably wary. Because Hollywood loves alien invasion movies with lots of explosions and humanity as the scrappy underdog. This story was definitely not that.
Once we convinced Ted we were seeking a faithful adaptation, I then began to work the script on spec and wrote that for about a year before it was ready to go out. Thankfully we found a studio who believed in the project as passionately as we do.
Scott: You mention science fiction and intelligence and that made people nervous. It’s also got a female lead. Maybe you can talk about that. Have you ever worked with a female protagonist before in your writing?
Eric: I’ve written unproduced scripts like that before and some could say Nancy from Nightmare in Elm Street is the female protagonist. It’s one of the reasons I was so attracted to the story in the first place. I was hungry to do a movie with a female lead. I feel that there are not enough of those stories. Certainly there are actresses out there now fully capable of playing those roles. But yeah, there were plenty of studios that were discouraged by that. We got notes from a couple of studios that said, “If you’d change this to a male lead we’d be more interested.” But thankfully we stuck to our guns and we’re pretty proud of what we have.
Scott: A key narrative element is humans and aliens learning each other’s languages. As a writer, someone who works with words every day, I imagine you may have had a special affinity for this aspect of the story.
Eric: Very much, yeah. It’s easy to become hyper‑critical and hyper aware of your own writing so that was a dangerous rabbit hole for me.
Scott: Oftentimes I’ve noticed with movies involving aliens, they either (A) somehow already know a language, (B) they got some sort of translator device or © they get exposed to something like TV into a rapid downloadable language like E.T.. But Story of Your Life has a realism to it and learning a language is a very slow methodical step by step process. How much of a challenge was that for you to make that process as entertaining as you did in the script?
Eric: I think that was one of the things that came rather easily. Some of that was just lifted right from Ted’s gorgeous source material. Some if it was based on anecdotes that I’d heard from my father who was professor of ancient history at OU for 30 years. He had lots of little anecdotes that I’d collected over the years. Some of those worked their way into the script. I was more worried about how to make the movie escalate properly and realistically while still adhering to a natural three-act structure that movies need.
Scott: Story of Your Life made the 2012 Black List. What were the circumstances by which you found out you made it?
Eric: I imagine there were people out there who thought that had to have been a typo. “How could the guy who wrote Nightmare in Elm Street be on the Black List?” I grew up in a time when the same guy who wrote Carpenter’s “The Thing” also wrote “The Bad News Bears.” I came from a time where people weren’t monogamous to one genre. I hope the public at large will be curious and respecting of these different ventures. I guess I’m about to find out with South by Southwest in a few weeks.
Scott: Has being on the Black List benefited you either personally or professionally, or giving your projects more momentum?
Eric: It’s been beneficial to me in that it has reframed…what am I looking for? It’s broken me out of whatever box that I was put in before. I’m no longer seen as just a horror writer. I can compete for other writing jobs I’m passionate about that I wouldn’t otherwise have a chance with. So I’m grateful for that. What I’m most thrilled with is getting to meet other Black List writers and just talking about the craft and the business with them. There’s some extraordinary talent out there that I’m excited to be able to socialize with, to network with. Like Ryan Condall, and Scott Frazier, and Young Kim, these guys are cool. I’m thrilled to see the kind of voice that they bring to their writing and ultimately to the movies.
Scott: Some craft questions. How do you come up with story ideas?
Eric: [laughs] If I could figure that out then I would be able repeat that process ad nauseam until I had a giant library of ideas. I don’t know how they come or where they come from. Sometimes I’m seized by one in the middle of the night. Sometimes it’s a slow accumulation of different little pieces that Voltron up to give me a story. Sometimes it’s during a conversation or an argument. It happens at random times. They can show up in my brain fully formed, or I have to work long and hard at it. The end product is no better or worse, but there doesn’t seem to be one way to map the genesis of an idea. I guess that’s probably good, because if there were then a lot more people would do this, and I don’t need the competition.
Scott: How important do you think the story concept is to the overall strength and commercial viability of a screenplay, specifically a spec script?
Eric: I think it’s more important than we’d like. I think a really strong script that has a crackling voice and a unique character can go a long way. But it if it has a solid story concept that suggests a poster or a trailer, a story concept you can pitch to a friend in an elevator…that will make you a lot of money in this town. It used to be that there were two types of stories, two types of movie pitches. Pick the pitch that starts with “What if?” What if we’re all just plugged into some computer system, for example. And there’s another story that starts with “There’s this guy.” The indie movie world has a lot of movies that start, “There’s this guy,” and a lot of big studio tentpoles that start out with “What if.”
But I’ve discovered that my favorite stories are the ones that start out, “What if there’s this guy,” and somehow it merges those two together. You get a lot of interesting comic book character movies like “Spider-man.” That makes a giant concept movie still character‑centric. That’s what I try to write these days.
Scott: How much time do you spend in prep writing? What do you focus on the most? Brainstorming? Character development? Plotting? Research? Outlining?
Eric: It varies from project to project. I outline with note cards. I have a cork wall that I use and abuse regularly. I tend to split it into two groups, sometimes three. One will start the spine of the story and will map out the main narrative engine. The other part will be the flotsam and jetsam I feel are germane to the story. Sometimes it’s photos from magazines that I’ve cut out. Sometimes it’s lines of dialogue that I come up with while I’m at the grocery store. Sometimes it’s headshots of actors when I start to cast the story.
At some point I reach a critical mass where I have enough of the structure down and I have typically an intimidating amount of flotsam and jetsam on the other half of the board. I pull all that down and collect it into one document and begin the process of writing my first draft from there.
Scott: How do you go about developing your characters? Do you have specific things you go to time and time again when you’re developing, or do you feel your way through that process?
Eric: I have a few standard tools. One is the table read. Once I have a draft that I feel is ready for eyes beyond my own, I gather a group of trusted friends together and assign them roles. I just listen to them read the script and see what they infer and what they don’t get from the characters. I find dialogue that works or doesn’t. We have discussion afterwards. That helps a lot, because you’re putting these words into someone’s mouth. You’re hearing how it sounds out loud. That helps immensely.
Then I’ll think about the behavior that the characters have. If I just go out to a coffee shop for a day I tend to come home with a handful of observed behaviors that I’ll decide I want to use for characters later. Sometimes it’s just grabbing a behavior based on a friend or family member, like I have a friend who believes that he sees celebrities just about every time he and I go out somewhere. He always says, “Hey was that…? That looked like Tom Selleck, didn’t it?” or “I think that’s Anne Hathaway.”
They never are. [laughs] He’s always wrong, but he has this way of thinking that he’s always close to a celebrity. There’s something about that behavior that I think, “That’s going to end up in a character at some point.”
Those get me a good deal of the way. If at that point I need to develop the character further, typically that’s the harder work of trying to figure out what part of the story I’m not writing about. If I have to…and I hate it, but I’ve had to do this before…I will write act zero — what happens to a character before the story in my script begins — so I have a deeper understanding of where this character came from.
Scott: How do you deal with dialogue?
Eric: My wife polishes my dialogue. [laughs] Honestly, dialogue isn’t really a skill set that you can learn. You have to have at least some sense of how people speak in real life. If you don’t have that, it’s going to be really hard to build a career as a writer. I have just enough of that to get me through the hard part of character development. The table read does the rest of the work.
Scott: What are your thoughts about the concept of theme?
Eric: [laughs] Theme. That’s something that I have such a hard time engineering. If I were given nothing but the tool of “Here’s the theme. Write something with this theme,” that’s an impossible task for me. I can’t start a story with that. I can figure out later on, after I’ve written a story, what the theme is. I can’t start with that in the forefront of my brain. It doesn’t work for me as a storyteller. I think other people can. I’m not saying that it’s impossible for anybody else. I’m just saying it’s not how I’m wired.
Scott: What do you think about when you’re writing a scene? What are your goals?
Eric: Oh God. Get through this scene alive, Eric. [laughs] When I’m writing a scene, and if I’m blocked, it’s typically because there’s nothing in the scene I’m excited about. I’m dreading it somehow. My goal is always to find something compelling that I’m excited about writing in the scene, so that I don’t have any scenes that are just interstitial pieces or redheaded stepchildren. I know I’m in trouble if all I’m looking forward to is the scene that comes two or three scenes later and I’m just trying to mark time or connect the dots so I can get to that moment I really want to write.
When I see that I’m doing that I kind of check myself and say, “Alright, make this the scene you’re excited about. What are you exposing? What are you doing here? How does this advance the character and the story? And if it doesn’t do those things, why in the hell are you writing it?” Sometimes that helps.
Scott: How about scene description? What cues do you think there are to writing good, entertaining scene descriptions?
Eric: Oh! There are a number of great examples of solid scene description. I’m guessing for every rule there’s always an amazing exception, but I try to let the scene description match the pace of the story, first and foremost. If I’m writing an action sequence, I want my scene description to be terse and spaced out, with typically a lot of dashes, so that it is a very quick read, the way the movie would look in editorial.
And if I want the reader or the audience to linger in a space or sort of ponder something, then I prefer to take a little more time with my scene description, and I allow slightly larger blocks of text that I wouldn’t use elsewhere. And I just try and match the pace as best I can from that.
Then there’s always the eye toward economy. I think the best screenwriters are like the best artists, like cartoonists, for instance. The thing I picked up from cartoonists is that the goal is always to draw the most expressive characters with the fewest lines, the fewest strokes of the pen. And I feel as screenwriters that’s our job as well, to try and express the most about our characters in as few words as possible.
So much of our script is just one interpretation of the final product, and you need to suggest as much as possible, knowing that the final movie may not be at all what you initially imagined. Depending on where the location scouts find the settings, and the lighting that your DP uses, and the kind of sound library you have, and what the composer does with the score.
You can be very specific at times and very evocative, but quite often the most beautiful screenplays are the ones that just suggest the larger world without having to go in-depth to describe them.
This is a very long‑winded way of saying “less is more.”
Scott: When you finish the first draft, you’re faced with the inevitable rewriting process. Are there some keys that you have to rewriting your scripts? And if so, what are they?
Eric: Don’t be emotionally connected to it. Look at it as an exercise. Try to look at it with fresh eyes. And be prepared to murder your darlings. Yeah, that’s kind of what I have in mind when I look at rewriting.
Scott: What’s your actual writing process?
Eric: I work in private at my home office. I write to scores. I write to a lot of instrumental music.
Scott: Here’s one for you. What’s your single, best excuse not to write?
Eric: [laughs] Going to a movie.
Scott: That’s a good one because you can always justify going to a movie, right?
Eric: Totally.
Scott: What do you love most about writing?
Eric: Having written.
Scott: Finally, what advice do you have to offer to aspiring screenwriters about learning the craft and breaking into Hollywood?
Eric: Read as much as you can, screenplays…amateur screenplays of people who are also trying to break in, scripts from Oscar winners, novels, short stories, poetry. Be a consumer of the written word and devour as much as you can. With equal passion and fervor, write. Write as much as you can. Write any and all of those things…screenplays, short stories, novels. The more you understand the language in the world, the better.
I’d also suggest…I’d highly recommend that if possible you get a job in some other part of the film making process, even if it’s just as a P.A., or assistant to an editor, or a camera operator, a boom mic operator, hair and makeup — whatever way for you to get involved in it. So that you get a better sense of the bigger process outside of writing, and how writing can affect all of those things.
Eric is repped by WME and Art/Work Entertainment.
Twitter: @HIGHzurrer.
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