Interview: Aaron Guzikowski

One of the best movies of 2013 was Prisoners, written by Aaron Guzikowski, directed by Denis Villeneuve, and starring Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal. So I was thrilled to have the opportunity to have an hour-long conversation with Aaron about his background as a writer, his work on Prisoners, his involvement in the new Sundance Channel TV series “The Red Road” and his thoughts on the craft of screenwriting.

Here are links to the six installments of the entire interview:

Part 1: “I sent a query letter to three management companies in LA that I randomly pulled out of the Hollywood Creative Directory and one of those responded. The guy is Adam Kolbrenner who is my manager today.”

Part 2: “I wrote a lot of drafts. The basic story always kind of remained the same, but I think it was just trying to find the best way to maximize all the elements and figure out who and what to focus on and when.”

Part 3: “I’m not a practicing Catholic, but I often make connections to Catholic iconography or Bible stories, and things like that. It’s an attractive thing to layer into certain types of stories.”

Part 4: “I think any pressure that actually causes people to change and behave in ways that are totally different than how they would normally. It’s always interesting inside of a movie like this or any movie.”

Part 5: “I like movies where certain things, even though you can infer what’s going to happen, are left slightly ambiguous. The movie ends and you’re still thinking about what happens next is always something I’ve enjoyed in movies.”

Part 6: “I think it’s all just finding ways to trick your mind into not knowing that you’re rewriting, that you’re not working on the same material endlessly.”

Aaron is repped by Verve and Madhouse Entertainment.

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