Interview: Arash Amel — Part 2
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 2, Arash shares background on how he came to be involved in Grace of Monaco:
Scott: So, you write these 13 scripts and the script that became Erased, that was a spec script that sold?
Arash: Yes. It was in 2005. It was a period of time where I was in England and I’d become extremely disillusioned. My ‘American’ voice didn’t fit the UK and they didn’t want to make the sort of films I wanted to write. The UK film industry is a cottage industry which thinks very parochially, has no infrastructure, and offers very little opportunity to new voices. It’s the same five guys who make the same five movies and every once in a while they stumble on a Four Weddings and a Funeral, and they milk it until it’s run dry. I suppose, they would love to be Hollywood, but as a country can’t embrace the idealism and flashiness of Hollywood. If you didn’t want to tackle social issues or make romantic comedies with Hugh Grant, you were kind of screwed. Films like Shallow Grave for example were very rare. So, I was feeling really, really disillusioned.
At that time, I had written a script which I believe was my 11th screenplay. I managed to get it optioned for £10,000 to Ealing Studios … and then sent it to a couple of agents. One of the agents never wrote back. The other agent called me in for a meeting and said, “I want to represent you.” A great guy called Nick Harris who used to be at AP Watt in London. We spent a couple of years trying to sell stuff in the UK and get me jobs, but it wasn’t working. One day he called me and said, “I’m moving to Hollywood to be an agent there. You love American movies, and I think you could tell a good American story. Do you want to write something?”
So, I went away. I had this idea that I always wanted to write … I’ve always loved Three Days of the Condor. So, I went, OK, I’m going to write a screenplay that’s in that Three Days of the Condor mold. I had this idea, a father and daughter conspiracy thriller where the father is trying to save the daughter. But the daughter and the father are actually going through some life changing relationship, and the daughter ultimately ends up redeeming the father. It was a relationship drama within a conspiracy thriller. I think I pitched it as Paper Moon meets Three Days of the Condor.
I thought that I don’t have a clue as to whether or not this thing’s going to work or not. It was a drama in an action-thriller. So, I just wrote it. I wrote it, and it was May 2006 when the fourth draft was done. I had been working on it for about a year and a half. And when Nick got the script he said, “You know what? I think this is good. I’m going to send this out to a bunch of producers and see what they think.” And that script brought me 40 meetings in like 10 days and they said, “Get on a plane and come out to Hollywood.”
And so, I was nervous [laughs] but excited, 9 producers took it to 11 buyers… the most high profile producer was if I remember Di Bonaventura Pictures who took it to Paramount, which led to my first executive meetings at the studios. So after 20 years of basically kind of being the ugly duckling in one country, suddenly in one screenplay everybody in another country opened the doors and said welcome…it made me believe in the Hollywood dream. And I still remember the first time I stepped onto Paramount’s lot in 2006 — it was like stepping into a fairly tale. The script didn’t work out at Paramount for one reason or another, but Millennium Films picked it up on an 18‐month option. It wasn’t the big spec sale, but it was my first taste, and I kind of went back home to London. I said to my girlfriend at the time — now my wife — “Right. Pack your bags. I’ve seen the future. We’re moving to Hollywood.” It was a risk. But the risk was that if the Hollywood dream failed, if I ended up doing some crappy job living on the west coast, at least we’d get some sun.
Just as we moved, the option on the script ran out. Millennium tried to renew it for free, which I didn’t want to let happen. And then a very small producer, a lovely man called Harry Winer showed up … he directed “Space Camp” in ’85 and worked on JJ Abrams’ TV series directing … and he said, “Look, I really love this script. I think we can make an international co‐financed/produced movie with this on a budget. “ And in the end the budget was a little north of 10 million dollars. The option was about $2,000. And that went its merry way. So … it was May 2009 I’d moved out to the U.S. I was living in L.A., and Nick, who was my agent friend who had moved over here decided to become a manager at Jimmy Miller’s Mosaic. He said, “Look, you don’t have an agent anymore. I’m now your manager. I think we should get an agent.” And I suppose the second chapter of the journey which began with me writing “The Expatriate” closed I would want to say January 2010 when that script got me meeting three agencies CAA, UTA, and ICM. CAA were the most aggressive…actually they really blew me over. It was the classic kind of you walk in and there were four agents, and they’re all still my agents with the exception of one who just moved to Resolution, but they…it was kind of like, “Wow, OK.” So this is what the real movie business looks like on the inside.
Scott: That speaks to the power of a spec script, doesn’t it? I mean that whole process derived form that one script you wrote.
Arash: I couldn’t agree more. I think the spec script is the life’s blood of the screenwriter because the one thing…and it may sound like a cliché, but no other artist in the movie value chain can just go home and start working on something which they then sell. And what you find is that…and there’s this fallacy I think that sometimes the spec script is the last bastion of the guy that can’t get the assignment or can’t sell the pitch. That’s not true at all. Since “The Expatriate,” I’ve written two more specs. I’ve sold all three. There’s “Grace of Monaco”, and another spec which hasn’t been announced yet which I just sold to a studio with a big producer and an A‐list star attached. Two got made and the third is on its way, hopefully.
Scott: Wow.
Arash: And it’s simply a process of understanding that as a writer your capital is your screenplay. It’s the screenplay as a movie. And it’s such a commodity, now more than ever simply because the studios have hit a rocky patch. They have less development money now than ever before, and the pot is shrinking. The power is now much more in the hands of the writer than it’s ever been, because buyers need to make what they buy, which means they’re looking for stuff they can just go make. And that makes you a business partner to the studio or the buyer. If you can deliver material to them they can make, or be the guy who can help them get stuff made, it’s an entire business model. And if you write a good script off your own back that the agents are able to package with a a director, a star, you suddenly have a movie. And in the end, that’s what we’re writing — screenplays thats are movies. Not just well written screenplays. I couldn’t emphasize the power of the spec enough. If anything, “Grace of Monaco” taught me that lesson very strongly.
Scott: That’s a good segue. Let’s talk about your script, “Grace of Monaco.” I think you did a superb job with really challenging material. What drew you to the story? What was the original inspiration for it?
Arash: It actually has…it’s a funny journey, because everything I’d written up to, “Grace,” was a…was really genre material. It was thrillers, science-fiction and historical action movies. In 2011, I just finished my first studio assignment at Fox, and I’d just sold a time-travel thriller pitch to Summit called “The Infinity Principle”, which only just got announced actually with Basil Iwanyk producing … and I was about to start that and that was also within the science fiction realm. And I was like creatively I feel like I’m almost going to burn out if I don’t do something totally, totally different. And the idea of taking a very limited period of somebody’s life — a snapshot — and also a female character, something that I hadn’t actually explored before, was really interesting to me. There’s a long story behind why Princess Grace — but to cut it short, she was the first media princess before the concept had been invented and the last true fairytale princess, to a whole generation she was an icon and totally forgotten and such a great tragic story never really told.
And so I went off, and I literally read 10, 15 books on Grace, everything that I could get my hands on. And I went and looked at loads of archive searches, and a lot of magazines.
The story of Grace is really, really fascinating. Because she was the most famous, most successful actress at that point in time. She had just won an Oscar, and she suddenly decided to quit. She decided to get married to this guy — Prince Rainier III — who lived in this castle, in this run-down village on the coast of the South of France, with 5‐6,000 people with their peculiar ways that goes back 800 years. And who really wasn’t the best looking guy, wasn’t the most charismatic guy. And it always seemed really odd to me that when I looked from his side of the story, where he was this damaged guy who grew up in boarding school in England where he was bullied, and then became this playboy prince of a non‐state, being mentored by an Irish American Chaplain, Father Tucker, who became his Spiritual Adviser. And then was faced with the choice get married, have an heir, or the French were going to take his country because of some ancient law. He would end up identifying the most beautiful Oscar winning actress of the time and say “I want her.” [laughs]
The story was fascinating, and I said “Well, maybe this is a story. And maybe the story is he sees her, courts her, the classic fairy tale”. Then there’s her father … this fantastic character who was self‐made bricklayer from Philadelphia who became extremely wealthy, was desperate to legitimize himself to the point that he ended up paying a $2m dowry at that time, so that she would marry this guy so that they could get the Royal title. Then throw MGM into that and they said “OK. In return for releasing her from her contract and letting her get married, we get the rights to the wedding, we get to make the costumes and we get to create the wedding of the Century and we create the first Media Princess, and everyone’s a winner.”
But then … as I was reading the books, I would always get beyond this, and would get to six, seven years later in 1962, and they all had a moment which…and it’s interesting with any kind of biography…they are always written from a point of view with an agenda. There is no such thing, in my opinion, as an impartial biography. I don’t believe there is an absolute truth to history; it’s all a question of interpretation.
But yet regardless of what point of view they were looking at it from, there was always this one year in 1962 where Grace faced ultimately a question that faces, I believe, every woman, potentially every married woman, and not that few men either. It’s a question of your identity, being married, of having kids, of not being the person you once used to be, having the freedom you used to have, questioning your role in life for the rest of your life. Maybe having given up your career, maybe having given up a home, friends, a country or culture even. And suddenly, I didn’t see a biopic at all. I saw the chance to paint a portrait. Kind of like a dream in a way … in a Hitchockian way … examining a woman’s struggles for her self and her identity … thrown up against this lavish backdrop of the Mediterranean in a time of crisis — with a strong thriller element in there — but the ethereal story of a Princess trapped in a castle. That was when I thought “That’s the movie”. It’s an elegy. A dream. A real life fairytale.
Tomorrow in Part 3, Arash delves into the story and writing of Grace of Monaco.
For Part 1, go here.
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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