Interview: Arash Amel — Part 1

Arash Amel is one of the bright new talents among Hollywood screenwriters, having penned the 2011 Black List script Grace of Monaco which has been produced starring Nicole Kidman and will be released later this year, as well as set up several high profile projects including “Seducing Ingrid Bergman” and “The Infinity Principle”.

Recently I caught up with Arash for an extended interview in which we covered a whole host of subjects.

Today in Part 1, we talk about how Arash wound his way into screenwriting:

Scott: Where did you grow up and how did you find your way into writing?

Arash: My background is a little varied. I was actually born in a small coastal town called Aberystwyth in Wales, but ended up growing up in Iran during the Iranian Revolution, before moving back to England when I was around seven. It was definitely a very formative childhood.

My father was a producer for Iranian television. Some of my earliest memories were actually when I was four or five being with him on these documentary location shoots in the deserts, with the revolutionary guards. I can quite vividly remember it still.

But when we moved back to England, he didn’t pursue that career. He’d left television all together. I think, for me, it was in the blood. I actually started writing when I was about 14. I was a real product of the ’80s, initially, in terms of the movies that inspired me. I was this little kid that was growing up in London. I would see big American movies, and then that expanded to Hollywood movies from the 60s and 70s. It was always a comfort of familiarity, especially when you’ve been moving from one country back to the next.

I’ve now grown up being a shameless populist at heart and it goes back to that, to the beginnings, and those formative years watching Hollywood. They were more the classics in the ’80s. They were all mixed up in there somehow. Even K‐9, you wrote that right?

Scott: Yes.

Arash: I love that movie. There was a real style of filmmaking in the ’80s, which was before Hollywood became corporate in the ’90s and onwards. There was an innocence and naivety to making high-concept movies, a purity to the way genre movies got made.

That really influenced me, the joy that I got as a kid, from these movies. It was just the nature of commercial filmmaking in Hollywood at that time.

I was living in London, so I was 14 or 15, when I started writing scripts. I bought three books. I bought “Screenwriter’s Workbook”, “Screenplay” [both by Syd Field] and I bought Robert McKee’s “Story”. I taught myself. And I wrote my first ever feature length script when I was 16. It was awful. It was derivative of everything I’d ever seen. Then when I was 17, an agent, who I only heard about again recently, like a few months ago, called Valerie Hoskins, who I believe was the agent that sold “Fifty Shades of Grey,” she took me, when I was 17, and didn’t really rep me but said she was repping me, for a year. She was interning me.

I would drop by the agency once a week, this little boutique London agency, and I would read the screenplays from guys like…who would I read? They weren’t the biggest of writers or directors, but I remember there was a guy called Ben Ross who made a movie called “The Young Poisoner’s Handbook” at that time and then went on to direct the John Logan spec “RKO 281” — back before anyone knew who John Logan was. I’d look at Hollywood and it seemed like this place that was a million light‐years away.

Then when I was 18, I went to college and I studied law. I didn’t see Valerie again after that. I went to college. I moved on. I just kept writing. I kept writing and fast forward, 13 screenplays later — all not quite right. Then in 2005, I wrote a screenplay that was called “Nation State,” which became The Expatriate, which was made into a movie retitled Erased in the US, and became my first movie. I lost track of it a couple of years ago, so it’s an out of body experience to see it out there now as a motion picture.

It was 13 scripts of executing everything that I’ve learned through Syd Field, everything that I’ve learned through Robert McKee, over, and over, and over, and over again. I’m a big fan of screenwriting books and I’m a big fan of screenwriting theory. It’s something that I feel is really important because I’m completely self‐taught. There was “The Writer’s Journey” and all of those books, all the way through to even now, to a couple of years ago, before I got my first studio job, it was all going back to even “Save the Cat!” and stuff like that. In a nutshell, that was my journey, from London to my first Hollywood script that got made.

Scott: Do you think there are some advantages about going the non-film school approach as opposed to getting a classical education in screenwriting?

Arash: I’m sure there was a quicker version than the 20‐year journey that I took [laughs]. I’m a great believer in breaking rules, and I’m a great believer in one size doesn’t fit everybody. We’re not lawyers. We’re not accountants. There is no right way of learning how to write a screenplay.

I’m still amazed, and I will forever be a student this of how you see two writers come on board a project at a studio, and they will execute completely different drafts purely from the experience of who they are as people, how they see the world, how they process and analyze information. I think so much of life is about analysis and then how you execute that and the emotions of who you are as a human being and your personal values.

Maybe when I was younger and I didn’t realize I know as little as I do today, [laughs] I would have said, “Oh, absolutely my way was the best.” But I don’t think that’s the case. I think the liberating element of being a screenwriter is that there is no wrong way to do something or to get to a result. The benchmark is do you think it’s good, does your audience like it.

Scott: It’s like if you go to a school and they have an approach that can benefit you perhaps in helping you focus and find your footing. On the other hand if you’re self‐taught and you take a longer course of action learning the craft, there is a way in which you probably do feel a little freer to try things, just experiment, and not feel bound in by any rules.

Arash: Yeah…there was one phrase, I think it’s in McKee’s book, “The artist masters the form.” I think you have to learn the rules in order to be able to break them, but breaking the rules is part of finding your voice as a writer. the psychological and craft approach to screenwriting is really no different to learning a sport. It’s a process of learning the habits, learning the patterns, and probably understanding what the rules are before you then start trying to break them.

Whether or not being a classically trained screenwriter from a school with a teacher is any better than actually learning it yourself at home is entirely down to how willing you are to disobey your teacher when you think that your teacher may be wrong because ultimately they’ll have their own way of doing it and it’s not the same as yours.

Tomorrow in Part 2, Arash shares background on how he came to be involved in Grace of Monaco.

Please stop by comments to thank Arash and ask any questions you may have.

Arash is repped by CAA.

Twitter: @arashamel.

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