Go Into The Story Interview: Justin Marks
My in-depth interview with the screenwriter of The Jungle Book and creator/executive producer of the hit Starz TV series “Counterpart”.
Back in May 2013 when I interviewed Justin Marks, he had recently published a guest column in The Hollywood Reporter entitled “My Life as a Screenwriter You’ve Never Heard Of.”
Things have change quite significantly for Justin in the years since.
At the time, Justin had written on such development projects as The Raven, Super Max, Suicide Squad, Shadow of the Colossus, Hack/Slash and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Captain Nemo. Then he wrote The Jungle Book which had a worldwide box office gross of nearly a billion dollars. He also took a crack at Top Gun 2. Currently, he is riding high based on the success of the hit Starz TV series “Counterpart”.
In our hour-plus conversation in 2013, Justin and I talked about how he became interested in screenwriting, various projects he’d written, and his approach to the craft.
Scott: When did you first realize that there were people known as screenwriters?
Justin: I grew up with movies. My family moved to Texas because my father had a job down there. My mother didn’t know anyone and I was the oldest child, so I was the one who got dragged around with her. We used to go to movies. It was always the thing I knew I wanted to do.
Scott: What were some of the movies you remember from your youth that inspired you most?
Justin: I was remembering this on Twitter recently. Top Gun for me was one of those seminal moments. I had never seen a movie that sounded or looked or felt like that before. I saw it six times in the theater — probably because my mother wanted to see it six times also. It just left such a mark on me, in terms of what a movie could be, and how it’s not just a filmed stage play. You look at it now and it still feels like a contemporary movie.
Scott: How much fun is it for you to be working with Jerry Bruckheimer?
Justin: Really nice. In every project there’s a pinch‑yourself moment. Growing up, movies were the language I spoke. Every Thursday in elementary school, and middle school… I had a whole legal pad full of movies I wanted to rent for the weekend. I’m always reminded… not to sidetrack, but I think this is relevant… I’m always reminded how easy people have it now, being educated about what are the good movies to watch, who are the great filmmakers. When I was growing up, and I’m not even that old, the only source was this book at Blockbuster Video. It was a phone book‑sized thing. I would open it up and they would organize it like IMDB now organizes things, by director, by actor. That was it. You couldn’t organize by screenwriter. But I would go through it and write down these movies I had to see. Of course, Blockbuster carried none of the good movies. But then I would find other video stores in the area. Those would be my weekends. Movies were my friends. So now, working with the people who used to be just names in that book… it’s amazing.
Scott: I notice a number of short films on which you’re the credited writer including “Fast Forward,” “The Stranger,” “Unbroken.” What was your thought process or goal at the time on working on short films?
Justin: When I got to college I started to feel like maybe the film program…I went to Columbia University… I started to think that maybe the film program wasn’t the best way to pursue this career. So I studied architecture. I really love design, and it factors largely into things that I write. But because I was doing that, I was still bitten by the bug of making movies. So I started working in documentary houses, and I met other young filmmakers. Brad Furman is one of those guys. We made shorts together. We came out to LA together. He just wrapped on “Runner, Runner” with Ben Affleck. Before that he did “Lincoln Lawyer.” He’s actually largely responsible for keeping me motivated and keeping me hungry to pursue this dream.
Scott: Would you recommend that aspiring screenwriters get involved in writing and producing short films nowadays?
Justin: Oh yeah. Anything that a screenwriter can do to be close to production is the best film school they can possibly have. Look, I’ve only been doing the writing thing full time for less than a decade. I’d hardly consider myself a veteran. But having seen my work produced on a few occasions, the amount of learning you do in production, as opposed to what you do sitting behind your desk, it can’t compare.
Scott: It also sounds like not only just the learning experience of being on the front line of translating what’s on the page onto the screen. But in your case you actually worked with some people who moved up into the business themselves, so they become part of your network.
Justin: Yeah, it’s not luck, it’s designed that way. I never went to film school. Those shorts were my film school. You go to film school because the people you work with will be your peers in the professional community. It’s always great, you see another name or a director who sold a pitch or something — it’s like, oh I remember him. We worked on a video together back in New York. That’s how it works.
Survival in this business is all about holding onto the branch until you finally find your place. That’s what everyone’s doing. When you do that, you start to form these communities with the other people who are holding on next to you.
Scott: What was your first big break that led to an actual paid writing assignment?
Justin: I was working as an assistant for three and a half years. I worked in independent film at Single Cell Pictures. They did Being John Malkovich and Saved at the time that I was working for them. Through my boss, I met my first agent. There was this script that became what I guess was a calling card. This was before the days of the Black List, which has made it even easier to bring those calling card scripts into the world. My agent sent it around to a bunch of people and it got me those, whatever it was, six months of meeting everybody in town. Out of those meetings I met a producer who worked at the Mark Gordon Company. He said that they were working on a project called Voltron.
Voltron was something I knew very well from childhood. They were looking for takes. They had some really great ideas. This was before Transformers. At that time no one wanted to do a giant robot movie. No one knew what a giant robot movie would look like, which was fantastic, because I had no competition to get that job. Nowadays if I wanted to go do a giant robot movie I’d be competing with the top tier screenwriters. But I pitched Mark Gordon what my take was. I actually used my drawings from architecture school, showing how the visual aesthetic of Voltron could look in the real world. We took it around and we found an independent financier who paid me to write the script. WGA minimum, which was probably twice as much as I was making at my day job. I left my job, seven or eight years ago, and I’ve been writing ever since.
Scott: When did you cross paths with Adam Kolbrenner and Madhouse Entertainment?
Justin: Adam had actually been in my life since college. Brad Furman introduced us, when we were trying to peddle our scripts around. I came out to LA during spring break. I told my parents I was job hunting. Of course, there is no job hunting, you’re basically just meeting people. I came out to LA and he introduced me to Adam who liked the script that I had written. Because I was an architecture student, I didn’t have to write a papers. So I could spend a lot of time writing scripts with Adam instead. He’s the one who shaped me from somebody who wanted to write movies into someone who actually wrote movies.
Scott: Your first writing credit on a feature length film I believe is Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun‑Li. What did you learn from that experience?
Justin: [laughs] Oh, I learned so much from that experience. [laughs] One is, it’s all about everyone in the process believing in the same mutual vision. Which that movie did not have. But I was lucky, I guess. That was the second assignment I ever had. It paid me money and I could continue my writing career. At a certain point when you sign off on a script, that’s it. You leave your hopes at the door. I know that they did some things on that movie… let’s just say I can’t get all the way through. But it was exciting at the time. It seemed so easy, when the second thing I wrote got made. It’s like wow, this must be what it’s like. The batting average is going to work like this. Then, seeing it for the first time, seeing what it became, it was mortifying. You want to rewrite the movie in real time. I felt so helpless. Street Fighter was tough, it was my first real scar. But I’m glad I have it. I’ve always been candid in my opinion of that movie, as my friends know.
Scott: You’re drilling down here into two points. One is that it’s really hard to get a movie made. The second thing is you want to get that produced credit. Not only about getting a production bonus, it’s like having a credit and getting residuals and all that other stuff.
Justin: That would be great, except I wasn’t in the Writer’s Guild at that time. [laughs] I get no residuals for that movie. As much as my friends think they’re helping me by renting it on DVD so they can make fun of it, I get none of that money, [laughs] which is heartbreaking.
Scott: Let’s drill down a little bit into how hard it is to get movies made. Someone once described that getting a movie made is like a space shuttle launch. A million things can go wrong. Is that your experience with the process of getting films made?
Justin: Yeah, I think it’s even harder than that. I mean, as a writer at a certain point you have to let go, because that’s not why we’re doing this. We’re doing this because we love what we do. I love getting up in the morning, walking my dogs, having my coffee, thinking about movies, and then sitting down at my computer and getting to write. Everything else becomes secondary. Obviously, you get hooked into it when people say hey, the movie’s going to get made. But I’ve had enough of those, I mean, I could go through war stories of movies that were cancelled at the last minute, movies that were greenlit, and then the head of the studio was fired on the very same day. Things like that just go on. It makes you cynical, it really does. But the best thing a screenwriter can do, is just don’t let it faze you. Just keep writing, because that’s what you’re doing it for. You’re not doing it for the money, you’re not doing it for the name in lights. You’re doing it to keep working. The fact that people pay us for this is crazy.
Scott: A lot of projects you’ve worked on are based on comic books including “Green Arrow, Supermax,” Suicide Squad, “Hack and Slash.” As well as the video game Shadow of Colossus. How did you get on that list in the movie development circle?
Justin: David Goyer was a mentor to me very early on. I was lucky enough to work with him on Green Arrow: Escape From Supermax. He was a producer on that movie. He must have grown up in a house made of comic books. I never had that. I grew up on those shows, and played with those action figures, and read comics just like any boy in the 1980s. But really, I just try to look at those properties and say, what about this would this be interesting to someone who had never heard of it? How do you bring the best parts of these characters and translate them to an audience? Fans will dispute this, but I think that’s what The Avengers did best. The Avengers was so pure and so true to those characters. But it also found the best aspects of those characters, and managed to make them play to everyone. That was always my strategy in terms of those branded things. Nowadays I’m trying to do that less. I like original things better.
Scott: That segues into what are the advantages and disadvantages for being known as a writer who specializes in one particular genre or type of writing?
Justin: Well, the advantages are… I think it may have been John Swetnam who said this to you. People say you don’t want to be put in a box, and he said of course you do. You want them to put you in that box because then they will call you for that box and you will be hired for that box. I completely agree with that. It is absolutely the best thing that a screenwriter can do. If they’re making an action movie, and they’re putting together an action list, they know that your name is on an action list. A comic book movie, they know you’re on a comic book list.
But I do think, or I personally feel this way after eight years… eventually the real job is to find your way out of that box. To find a way to surprise not just the marketplace, but yourself, in terms of the choices that you make. I think it’s really dangerous to just write the same thing for your entire career.
I look at the writers whom I consider heroes of the screenwriting trade, and none of them stayed with the same thing all their lives. They always kept themselves stimulated by doing things that were outside of their box. It’s important to flex your muscles and to continue to grow as a writer, otherwise you run out of things to say.
Scott: Interesting. There’s a project, “The Raven” based on a short film. Is Mark Wahlberg attached to that. Is that right?
Justin: Mark is producing it, yes.
Scott: I remember covering that when “The Raven” the video hit. I was blogging, so it’s nice to know that you’re involved with that. Let me read a description from the video site where you can actually still get the six minute video.
Chris possesses a power that could lead to the destruction of the current regime. They will stop at nothing to destroy him. The chase is on as Chris runs for his life in this sci‑fi thriller set in an alternate and futuristic Los Angeles. What can you tell us about working on “The Raven,” and what’s its status?
Justin: “The Raven” came about because of Ricard De Montreuil. He was actually my next-door neighbor in Los Feliz. We met at a barbecue when I moved in. How’s that for reasons to live in LA? He was a great independent filmmaker, he wanted to break into commercial films, and he was talking about doing this short. It was just an idea that I loved about this character. So he went off, and did this short film. I visited him on set, it looked really great. And then suddenly, the short blew up. It was like, “Oh, so this is real.” It happened very quickly, which was really exciting.
Here was the thing about The Raven. Writing that script was all about, “How could we find a way to make this huge, cool sci-fi movie, for no money?” I mean, who knows what they end up making that movie for someday, but it’s not a 100 million dollars. We looked to The Terminator as a great example of a guerrilla style movie. Ricardo, and I had to construct a story that was all about, “Look, we can only afford this many action scenes.” But we can’t make it feel limited, or claustrophobic. That’s one of the advantages of working with a director when you’re developing. We always had to be intelligent with the choices we made.
Scott: Good luck to you on that. I think that you hit that sweet spot, making a low budget action film. Because then you open yourself up to not just the seven, or eight, or nine major studios who can afford to do 100 million, or 150 million dollars worth. You’ve got all those 50 to 75 financing companies, financiers, out there that could. You widen your scope of opportunities, right?
Justin: Yeah. It makes people comfortable. What I hope to see in the future of sci‑fi, I look at Looper or I look at Monsters, I look at a movie that I just love, Trollhunter, and I say, “These are really clever ways of making movies”. They’re doing them for so little money. I think if you want to do sci‑fi, that’s the way to do it, and to give yourself the freedom to push the boundaries a little. Otherwise you’re always going to be accountable to too many people, the more money you spend.
Scott: Let’s talk about a spec script you wrote called “Earth Prime”. Here’s a description I found on it:
“A detective is sent to an orbiting colony in space to investigate an act of terrorism, only to become embroiled in a much larger conspiracy, when he learns that one of the victims is a girl he once loved.”
I read the script, great script.
Justin: Thank you.
Scott: In the story, most humans are living in these huge orbiting residential space stations, because the Earth has pretty much become uninhabitable, due to environmental reasons. What attracted you to this futuristic setting?
Justin: One of the lessons I learned while writing that movie, and going out with it, is you can’t just create blown out sci‑fi like that with no respect for how much the movie would cost. But Earth Prime started with themes for me. I love being able to hone in on one central idea that is both about the world and the characters. Earth Prime asked the question, “What does it mean for us to move on?” As a civilization, and as people individually. And if we move on, what baggage do we bring with us?
I had this idea of seeing a group of Sunni Muslims praying to Mecca, except in this case Mecca was orbiting below them. We’ve moved on from our world, but we’re still tethered to it. Spiritually, emotionally. We’re trapped in the past.
Scott: Interesting because the protagonist character Simon, who is basically like a law enforcement guy, is tethered to his own past, so it works on an individual level there as well.
Justin: Yeah. He’s someone who has a lot of regret, and lives with it, and has to confront that over the course of the film.
Scott: Why do you think post-apocalyptic and dystopic stories are so popular nowadays?
Justin: I don’t know. I think it’s just a safe place for us to reflect on how we feel about the world today.
Scott: Here’s a related question. There’s a substantial conspiracy at work in Earth Prime. That’s another thing that seems to be popular in TV shows as well as movies. What do you think is the appeal of complex conspiracies?
Justin: It’s the cynical world we live in. I think a whole conspiracy implies that something is broken. You look back at movies in the seventies and they did the same thing with the Watergate era. Our world is fundamentally broken and the institutions around us are fundamentally broken.
I love a future where nothing works, where things are built the way you would hope they’d be built, but they don’t function right. I love 2001, but it’s just so clean and so ideal. It’s a commercial for Pan‑Am. I want to see futures where all of these ideals are just shattered by reality. I guess I’m just innately disappointed by our world. I think the movies should reflect that.
Scott: One of the challenges associated with science fiction stories is what generally we call world‑building, creating a palpable, coherent sense of what the futuristic setting is, while not getting bogged down in too many details in the script. How much of an issue was that for you when you were writing Earth Prime? How did you go about handling that?
Justin: It’s a huge issue. When you’re writing a sci‑fi script it’s everything. Specificity is everything. Because no matter what story you’re telling, no matter what the plot is, sooner or later you’re bringing up old tropes or clichés of the genre. It’s just going to happen. Other movies have treaded this ground. You have to find a way to make a reader think, fundamentally, “I’ve never read this before.” So what you do is, you draw a blueprint of the world, and then you try to see the way people would unexpectedly inhabit it. It’s like architecture. You can design a building, but once you open the doors, people are going to make it their own. That contradiction, of spontaneity and planning, has to be present when you’re doing world building and sci‑fi. There has to be a sense of a future that has unintentional scuff on it.
If you start to build that out, suddenly, the world starts to feel real and lived in. Voltron is a great example where I tried that. My goal has always been to give sci-fi scripts moments of, I don’t know, verisimilitude I guess.
Scott: If I’m not mistaken, Earth Prime, that hasn’t been set up yet.
Justin: No. It was never set up. There were some things going on with it, but they all fell through, in terms of the way I wanted the movie to get made. I had a very ambitious plan for how that movie could look. I wanted it to be shot, actually, on location in Paris. All of the fake cities are actually just real cities, real neighborhoods in Paris. You would paint the sky, as I called it, to give it the impression that you were actually somewhere else. I wanted it to feel very much there and not there. I thought that’s how the movie could actually be made at a price. Not everyone agreed with me.
Scott: But if I understand it, didn’t that script help you, in terms of getting some writing assignments subsequent to that?
Justin: Oh, very much so. This goes back to that thing about breaking out of the box. At that time, where I was as a writer, I had been doing a lot of comic book stuff, a lot of action figure stuff, a lot video game stuff. I love video games, I write video games as well. I was doing that on the side, too. I got to this point… after I wrote 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for Disney. It was a great process, but then it all fell apart very quickly, which was heartbreaking. I had this moment… this is just a personal thing. But we are, as writers, putting our hearts into everything we do… I had this moment of saying, “I need to grow.” I wasn’t satisfied. Like all writers, we hate what we wrote yesterday and we love what we’re going to write tomorrow.
I used Earth Prime as an opportunity to say, “I want to try to do something that’s more mature, more thematically ambitious.” As a result, what it got for me was a string of jobs that filled that mandate. I wrote a character piece for Paramount. Well, it was an action movie about Air Force One crashing in Afghanistan, but it was really about the meaning of the American presidency, as seen by a number of different people. I’m working on a project right now, with a high profile director, that’s a period piece set in turn of the century Russia. It’s actually an espionage thriller. But it’s also a satire set in the early days before spies had rules. I’m doing a project with Bruckheimer that is very much a Disney drama, something that I never thought I could write. Just a really heartfelt, emotional buddy movie.
For me, I think it’s about finding those locked areas of your head that you didn’t think you had the key to. Challenge yourself. Everyone always says, “Write what you know.” But if you always write what you know, you’re never going to grow.
When I started this Bruckheimer project, I had no idea if I could really write it. Now, I think it’s probably my favorite thing of anything I’ve written. You have to take that leap. That’s what Earth Prime represented for me. That’s how I started to change.
Scott: That speaks to two things that are really important for aspiring writers to understand. One is that spec scripts have value, even if they don’t sell.
Justin: Always.
Scott: Secondly, this goes back to Joseph Campbell and that idea of following your bliss. If you translate that into the creative realm, it’s like, “Follow your creative instincts.” You did that with Earth Prime. You just said, “I want to do something that I feel creatively drawn toward.” As a result, you benefitted by getting all of these other gigs.
Justin: Yeah, even when the script didn’t sell. That’s a really important lesson. We all read the same trades, as aspiring writers or working writers. We see the big spec sales. There’s something really great to, “Wow. I wrote this thing. Here’s a big check. I’m going to go out and celebrate. That’s going to be my life.” But the reality is that, not even 9 out of 10…You know the stats better than me. I’d say it’s probably like 95 out of 100 specs, they don’t sell. That doesn’t mean that there were 95 out of 100 specs where people’s time was wasted. Everything is about the process. There are scripts that I’ve written that I’ve never shown anyone. Because I just feel like, “Yeah, this is fun and I wanted to try this, but you know what? I can’t do this genre, this genre doesn’t work for me. But I’m so glad I tried it, because now I know where that limitation is, and I’m just going to set it aside and move on with my life.” It’s so important to write for yourself. It’s not just about creating a chance to sell something. It’s about finding something in yourself what you didn’t know you could write before.
Scott: Out of the mix of all these projects, there’s another one I’d like to talk about, which is significantly different, it seems like. Come Sundown, which is an indie action thriller. I think Elgin James is attached to direct. It’s described as a road trip that takes a dark and violent turn when a family is taken hostage and a doctor must match wits with a dangerous criminal, in order to save his wife and daughter. Was that a spec script?
Justin: Yes, I wrote it just before Voltron. It was the first personal movie I ever wrote. And it’s evolved significantly with Elgin. When I first wrote it, I was just coming off of a really bad break‑up and living with a friend in Park La Brea, as two single guys, trying to figure out their way into world. In Park LaBrea, you meet all these young families moving to the city. And there was such a tension, between these families who had everything, and me, an assistant at the time with no career or girlfriend, who had nothing. So I decided to write a relationship story between a doctor who has everything… a wife and a kid, and really everything to lose, and this criminal who had nothing, and nothing to lose. In their own universes, these two would be indestructible, but when you put them together they will destroy each other’s lives.
Scott: What’s been your experience trafficking in the whole indie film world?
Justin: [laughs] You need a great producer. Fortunately, we have one. Jamie Patricof, who produced Half Nelson, Blue Valentine, A Place Beyond the Pines, has great taste and great energy. Which you need, because Jamie and I have been working on Come Sundown for years. I’m almost ashamed to admit how long we’ve been working on it. But that’s what happens with indie movies. They have to be good enough to stay with you. I remember him talking about Blue Valentine. I think it took them eight years to get that movie made. The stories have to stand the test of time, but so do the relationships with the people you work with. It’s equally infuriating as the studio game. But you’re peddling a different material. The rewards can be really great if you manage to make it in the right way.
Scott: One last project, a TV project that you did for SyFy “Rewind”. It’s described as, it revolves around a team of military field operatives and civilian scientists who must use untested technology to travel back in time to alter past events, in order to change the future and avoid a devastating terrorist attack.
Justin: That’s the description they released. Isn’t that the most generic description you could ever imagine? [laughs] It so doesn’t capture what was two and a half years of my life, trying to get that show on the air. [laughs]
Scott: What was the genesis of that project?
Justin: I’d always been really interested in time travel, as any writer has been. I had some very specific ideas for how it could be done in a non‑paradoxical universe. Lloyd Braun, who is a great producer, great editor, used to run ABC. Now he has his own company, with Gail Berman. Lloyd also wanted to do time travel and had this very specific hook into the world. I said, “This is the perfect opportunity to marry my vision of time travel.” We did. We sold it to SyFy. It was a long process to get the pilot green lit. We went and shot it with the great Jack Bender last year.
For me, I had a movie produced and I’ve done some, what do they call it? It’s such an old‑fashioned term, but “script doctoring” on movies that have been made that don’t have my name on them. But I’d never really gotten to be part of TV, where the writer gets a seat right next to the director, because you’re the executive producer. You actually have to answer questions, which is such a strange thing. Normally, it’s the director’s show and you’re just there to see that everything makes sense and that the script is being protected. Or the story is being protected. But in the case of TV, you’re making money decisions, and casting decisions, and design decisions.
That process also taught me another valuable lesson as a writer, which is that every scene has to pass the get-up-at-5-am test. Production is exhausting. Getting up before the sun rises and working all day, it’s brutal. So the scene you’re writing, the one that’s going to be shot that day, it has to be worth the trip. It has to be worth bringing 200 people out of bed, and into the Canadian winter to create something. It’s hard to envision that when you’re at your desk, so far removed. You just write off a scene and say, oh well, it’s a dry, necessary scene. But shooting that dry, necessary scene for 16 hours in the winter… it’s awful. You have to be excited to shoot it. Because if you’re not, and you wrote it, then certainly no director, or cast, or 200 crew members are going to be excited about showing up.
Scott: Are you still interested in TV?
Justin: Very much so. I’m in fact doing two television projects [laughs] as we speak. I really like TV. I think it’s great for writers, because it’s not just about the writer being king. It’s also about learning the responsibility and accountability that comes with being king. I’ll never forget, there was a character I wanted to keep in the “Rewind” pilot and we didn’t have the money for it. I said, “Well, what do we do?” They said, “You have to go find the money.” I sat down with the 1st AD, and we looked through the script, and we found the money.
Scott: Some questions. How do you come up with story ideas?
Justin: I have a moleskin notebook. I just date them and stack them up on my desk. Every day I carry it around, and if I have an idea I jot it down. Sometimes I put it away for three years and then it just pops back into my head.
Scott: How important do you think the story concept is to the overall strength and commercial viability of a screenplay, specifically a spec script?
Justin: There is a great writer of spec scripts who happens to be managed by the same manager as me. David Guggenheim, who does a fantastic job, especially when it comes to concept. He’s so good at seeing the trailer and being able to reflect it on the page. If you can’t cut a trailer in your own head for how your spec script would look, then it’s probably not a good spec script to be writing right now. At least, if you want to sell it. It’s incredibly important. It’s everything, next to character.
Scott: It’s interesting, this next question, given your background when you were studying architecture. How much time do you spend in prep writing and which of the aspects of prep do you tend to devote the most time to?
Justin: I’m a huge proponent of outlining and note cards. I use Scrivener to pull together story structure, and annotate it, if there’s research. Eventually, I’ll resort to hard note cards that I can post on a bulletin board. I also use a Dry Erase board to gather thoughts. Organizationally, it really just depends on the project. There have also been scripts where I just dive right in, and I just actually try to write a couple scenes, knowing full well that I shouldn’t be doing it. Then, eventually I pull myself out, and I go to the outline.
The short answer to that question of how long it takes me to plan before I write, it can be anywhere from a few weeks to a few years before I really decide to write something. But of course, that’s if I’m on my own dime. If I’m on a studio’s dime then [laughs] I’ve got to work a little faster than that. It’s more like a few weeks of outlining and then ten weeks to write the script.
Scott: How do you go about developing your characters? Do you have specific things you find yourself doing over and over again to find them?
Justin: Yeah, I really love to write a character bio. I think it’s important to do that kind of thing because you find all kinds of contradictions in characters, and that’s what makes them feel alive. Like, you can write a character who’s a neat freak. We’ve all seen neat freaks on screen. But then you write a neat freak, but who also has a really messy personal life, or a really messy bedroom. There are contradictions to it. That’s what makes people feel real. The more contradictions that you can find in your characters, the better off you are.
Scott: How about the dialogue? How do you go about finding your characters’ voices?
Justin: I wish dialogue were easier. I think if you don’t know what the scene is supposed to achieve, you can’t even start writing dialogue for it. But sometimes I do find it helpful to just spend a few pages, like four or five pages, just writing around ideas until you start to create nuggets that resonate. Then you just take that five pages and start over, and distill that into a half page scene.
Scott: You mentioned something interesting about Earth Prime, and I think I understand this correctly. That the theme is really important to you, in fact it’s something that is more an upfront part of the process for you than say, a lot of writers where they don’t really grab onto the story’s theme until the end. Could you describe what your thoughts are on theme and how do you deal with that in terms of your writing?
Justin: I think theme comes very late in outlining. I don’t think it comes immediately at the beginning. I think at the beginning it’s a character that you really like, or it’s a hook that you want to figure out. I don’t think it becomes a movie, though, until you find that theme. Until it centers on some idea that is not specific to the plot.
I think you need to know theme before you start writing dialogue. I think you need to know theme before you start writing scene work. Look at how Chris Nolan writes. Everything is written to theme. Everything comes back to that. That’s what makes the “Batman” movies so great is that they’re always about theme. Every scene is about guiding itself towards theme. When you don’t know what a scene is supposed to be about, the answer is theme.
Scott: That’s one thing I hear from writers is that one of the important aspects of finding that theme is that it does create this touch point for you, this thing that you can always go back to, to remind you what the story is about. Do you find that with your writing as well?
Justin: Yeah. I think if you’re getting away from it, that’s when you ask, why doesn’t this scene feel right? Or, why doesn’t this sequence feel right? Or, why does the third act feel right? Oh yeah, because it has nothing to do with my theme. It has nothing to do with what I wanted this story to be about in the first place. If a script starts to meander beyond theme, I think you lose your reader. Because they start to wonder, “Why am I reading this? What am I getting from this story?” You’re getting theme. If you don’t get it, you’re not going to read it.
Scott: What do you think about when you’re writing a scene? Do you have specific goals in mind?
Justin: [laughs] To get through it as quickly as possible. Writing first drafts is so ugly. It’s such an ugly, ugly part of the process. If anyone ever saw how ugly it is, they’d never think a good thought about a screenwriter, ever again. Sometimes I try to write longhand on a legal pad while I’m sitting in my backyard. Sometimes I try to email myself on my iPhone while I’m sitting on a train. Just actually write out all the dialogue for the scene. But to me, the most important thing is to get some awful version of that scene on that page so that you can go back on it 100 times and make it better. You can’t improve on nothing. I’m a firm believer in the vomit draft.
Scott: Let’s pick up on that. You finish your vomit draft and now you’re faced with the inevitable rewriting process. What are some of the keys for you for rewriting your scripts?
Justin: Time is important. You’ve got to give that script time. Put it away for a few days and then come back to it. You need to be able to read your own work as if you’ve never read it before. Once you do, and you start to see your scripts in the cold, harsh light of day, you immediately see the flaws. I think every writer is innately a better rewriter than they are a writer. I think it’s easier to rewrite someone else’s words than it is to create something for your own. [Laughs] I think the Writer’s Guild would agree with me, if you look at credit arbitration. It’s far easier to improve on what’s already been written then to do it from a blank page.
There’s something about printing the hard copy too. I love paper, because the words are so non‑negotiable on the page. You have to judge them for what they are, and not for what you want them to be.
Scott: What do think of when you write scene description?
Justin: I think it’s all about style. I know certain writers disagree about this, but I really believe it. When you’re in production, and you’re on turquoise pages, and you’re trying to just get the scene out for tomorrow, then style disappears. You’re just writing like a workman. But until then, you’re writing a sales tool, so every scene description has to be entertaining to whoever is reading it.
Of course, it’s more important to do that in the first 10, 20 pages than it is in the rest of the script. At a certain point, a script will feel overwritten if you start to give a lot of asides. But you have to rope people into your world. If I read the first few pages of my script and it feels very dry, I’m doing something wrong.
Scott: You mentioned your writing process. You take the dog out for a walk, you come back inspired. Are there more specifics of your writing process?
Justin: I used to be crazy about it, and I used to write at all hours of the day. Now I write in the morning. That’s it. I get up early. I’m not a breakfast eater. I have coffee on an empty stomach and sit there at my desk. By 2:00, 2:30 PM, that’s the end of my day, unless I have some crazy deadline. I eat lunch at 2:30 and then do meetings and phone calls for the rest of the day. The pretentious way of explaining why I write in the morning, is that I like moving from dream state into writing state with as little interference as possible. That’s how I describe it to my wife when she’s asking me to do something. That’s how I get out of my responsibilities as a husband.
Scott: That’s funny, I remember reading an interview with Robert Rodriguez who used to be a real night owl with his writing. At some point he discovered that as soon as he would wake up, he’d grab his laptop and just start writing. That really opened up…you talk about this moving from dream state into writing. I think that was a similar experience for him. He felt that he was more in touch with the right part of his brain or whatever. He started writing immediately in the morning in bed. It made him a much more efficient and better writer.
Justin: Yeah, it’s hilarious to hear him say that because it’s totally true. It’s like if I speak to someone before I start writing, I ruin my process. I just want to have my own voice in my own head. Obviously I’ll speak to my wife and I speak out loud to my dogs a lot. But I just can’t get involved in other things until after I’m done writing. Writing is, by nature, a self‑indulgent process. Sleep is a very self‑indulgent process. You’re just giving your body what it needs.
Scott: OK. Here’s one. What’s your single best excuse not to write?
Justin: You don’t need one. My excuse is, “I’m not in the mood.” One of the things that I’ve given myself as an older writer is a break. If I’m in a bad mood, I don’t let myself write. Because you know what? I’ve never written myself out of a bad mood. I refuse to sit there and write, just because it’s my job. That’s one of the best perks of the profession. If you don’t feel like writing, you actually don’t have to. I’ve run the risk of burning out in my last eight years, when deadlines have gotten really bad. I’ve learned the hard way that it’s not about grinding pages. No one ever succeeds that way. Not in the end.
Scott: Conversely, what do you love most about writing?
Justin: I don’t know how to do anything else. I really don’t. I was always just daydreaming as a kid. The best part about being able to write for a living is the fact that I’m entitled to doing that all day long. Sometimes it feels like a total scam, and it is. My father was a lawyer. His father was a lawyer. He put on a suit every day and went to work. Some days I’m lucky if I put on pants before I show up at the desk. Yet the bills are being paid. The lights are staying on, so I’m doing something right.
Scott: Finally, what advice can you offer to aspiring screenwriters about learning the craft and breaking into Hollywood?
Justin: Gosh, something so broad. [laughs] In terms of breaking in, the best advice that any writer can ever give is just, there is no reason why one person succeeds and another person fails. There is no reason why one script succeeds and another fails. There really isn’t. You can say, “It’s better than that script.” But you’ll find encounters where everyone loves something you wrote, that you just despise. Then no one will embrace this one thing you wrote and you just can’t understand why. The reason is because, so much of the time, succeeding in this business is pure, dumb luck. The only way you can overcome dumb luck is with persistence, is with continuing to show up at that table. It’s like playing roulette. My greatest strength is my willingness to just continue working. I’m never going to quit on a script. I may put it down for a couple days. But I’m always going to finish it. I’m never going to quit on my career. But if you stick around long enough, if you continue doing it long enough, everyone succeeds, 100 percent.
Justin is repped by CAA and Madhouse Entertainment.
Twitter: @Justin_Marks_
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