Interview: Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci
Alex Billington from FirstShowing.net emailed the other day with a heads-up about a two-part interview he did with screenwriter-producers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. Here is Part One and here is Part Two.
The interview with Kurtzman and Orci, whose credits include the TV series “Alias” and movies such as the upcoming Star Trek and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, covers a lot of ground. The first comment that caught my eye is this:
That’s actually what I was going to ask about next — how you guys got into producing and what made you want to go in that direction.
Orci: Because we started in television, which was our first writing job, where the writers actually become producers automatically, we really got to see and get an appetite for being involved in all aspects of production from writing it to being in the editing room to casting. So when we made the transition to features, that was kind of already in our vocabulary. Even on the movies that we are not credited as producers, we try to act like producers. If you act like a producer for a while, eventually people call you producer [emphasis added].
Kurtzman: We perceived that there was this kind of a weird disconnect between writers and the studio for a long time in that often people felt like “well, we’ll just hire another writer when we have a problem with a script,” as opposed to having a producer who is also a writer who can talk to other writers in a language that is their own [emphasis added]. We always like to think of it as when you’re working with a writer, knowing what size nail you’re going to need and what size screwdriver you’re going to need, what kind of screwdriver you’re going to need. It is a very specific language that writers share so it felt like since we can speak studio language and we can speak writer language, why not try and meld the two.
The first thing I emphasized reminds me of something I heard somewhere along the line: “A producer is a dog with a script in its mouth.” [The quote is attributed to producer Art Linson, but I’m not sure he just picked it up as part of Hwood’s ‘oral tradition.’] Producer John Davis is famous for giving hungry young producer-wannabes office space in Davis’ complex with the understanding that what they end up setting up and producing, Davis also produces. One example is Andrew Licht and Jeffrey Mueller whose 1988 movie License to Drive is also produced by Davis. Basically the theory is like Orci says: If you act like a producer, pretty soon you’ll be accepted as a producer.
Kurtzman makes a more important point, at least as far as screenwriting is concerned: It behooves a screenwriter to understand how producers think. The ability to understand the complexities of what’s involved in crafting a screenplay varies from producer to producer, so a screenwriter can not expect producers to grasp the nuances where the screenwriter is coming from creatively. If, however, the screenwriter can see the world through the eyes of the producer, that can enhance the dialogue between both sides, and increase the chance the screenwriter will be able to stay on the project.
Then how about this from the second part of the interview, where Kurtzman and Orci describe how they wrote Transformers:
What was the timeline in connection with the writers’ strike? Were you guys brought on before the writers’ strike?
Orci: It was insane. We literally started breaking stories two weeks before the strike. In two weeks, we generated an outline. It was pens down the minute the strike hit. We didn’t deal with Michael at all during the strike.
Kurtzman: They prepped the movie off of the outline.
Orci: Yeah, but we had to come up with set pieces and sort of the basic thrusts of the movie and Michael prepped a lot of it. And the second the strike ended, it was like two months — I’m not exaggerating — two months between starting to write and day one of direction. So it was a crazy, crazy race to get it done.
This raises another point: Oftentimes it’s not about the screenwriter’s ability to write, but rather their ability to handle the exigencies of development, pre-production and production, anything from trying to sort through story problems raised by the director or dealing with a work stoppage. In other words, a screenwriter needs to know how to be creative — about being creative.
Kurtzman and Orci sound like a couple of smart young guys with a lot of talent, good business savvy, and a love for storytelling. Little wonder they’re successful.
Read the whole interview with FirstShowing.net’s Alex Billington.
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