Interview: Brian Duffield

Scott Myers
Go Into The Story
Published in
6 min readOct 10, 2020

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A revealing first-person essay from the writer-director of the movie Spontaneous.

Here is an overview of the new movie Spontaneous:

When students in their high school begin inexplicably exploding (literally…), seniors Mara (Katherine Langford) and Dylan (Charlie Plummer) struggle to survive in a world where each moment may be their last. As an unexpected romance blossoms between them, Mara and Dylan discover that when tomorrow is no longer promised, they can finally start living for today.

If that doesn’t arouse your interest, how about this from the Chicago Sun Times review by Richard Roper:

Funnier, smarter than the average exploding-teen movie

Dark but astute, the twisted high school romance is full of clever touches and ends on a surprisingly wise note.

Writer-director Brian Duffield is a longtime friend of Go Into The Story which is enough reason to shine a spotlight on his latest film Spontaneous. Obviously, the story’s central conceit is, too. But the story behind the story makes this first person essay Brian wrote for Talkhouse a must-read for any filmmaker and screenwriter. Here is an excerpt from that essay.

I am extremely tired.

Making a movie is like running a marathon, except to be honest I don’t even know how that analogy works because I’m too lazy to run a marathon. But it sounds right, as all clichés do. I remember picking friends up after they ran marathons and how they’d basically look like E.T. dying in the river (spoiler: E.T. really just ran a marathon before Michael found him) and think to myself, This is why I will not be a running a marathon. I just made a movie and instead of it lasting for an annoying afternoon, it lasted for almost three years.

So yeah, I am extremely tired. But I’m also ready to go again as soon as possible.

My movie Spontaneous is, at its most reductive, the exploding kids movie. But it’s about how we deal with things that we have no control over, when there’s no bad guy to blame, and how we have to accept that’s just part of life. So of course, that also turned out to be the lesson I took from making the movie.

Did you know that you should not shoot scenes that take place in the summer in a snowstorm? While I don’t recall this being taught to me in film school, I believe I knew this information before filming. But sometimes you get dealt the snowy hand, and even though we re-arranged our schedule to try and avoid the snowstorms as much as possible, it still found us on our one entirely exterior day. We were just a couple days from wrapping our 21-day shoot and the biggest chunk of the day was, naturally, the longest scene in the movie. Without being too spoilery, it’s in the third act and is one of those scenes that the movie just doesn’t work without.

So, naturally, it was the day we got slammed with the most snow and we were barely able to shoot any of it. It was a bad day. So bad that my wrap gift from my assistant Max was some art he had made of me on that day, stomping away to figure out how exactly we could finish the movie without, ya know, the end of the movie.

Writer-director Brian Duffield on location with ‘Spontaneous’ stars Charlie Plummer and Katherine Langford

In the end, I figured it out not by myself, but the help of a cast that didn’t (publicly) mind that they probably almost got pneumonia for no reason, and a crew that worked their ass off. And so the scene, which takes place entirely in a graveyard one summer’s night, was shot in three different locations on three different days, predominately on a warehouse floor covered in fake grass. Filming wrapped, with a few seemingly fixable holes to fill. I flew home from Vancouver on Saturday and went straight into editing on Monday. It was March 2018.

Film school also did not prepare me for what would happen if the studio that financed your movie sold to a conglomerate and laid off most of their staff (including your producer). The unfinished movie was put into a lull because, to put it bluntly, no one was quite sure who owned what we had just shot and edited. But now, with an incomplete movie and a now pregnant wife, I was again left with the question, How the hell do I finish this movie?

Brian (on the left): “My assistant-turn-producer Max treating me with the respect I deserve.”

Spontaneous is not the first time one of Brian’s movies endured a circuitous path to distribution. There is the saga of Jane Got a Gun, indeed, his career, which has led to him becoming an in-demand screenwriter (his scripts have made the annual Black List three times), has had all sorts of twists and turns. At this rate, by the time he hits his sixties, I figure Brian will have a hell of a Hollywood memoir on his hands.

Brian Duffield is one of the most in demand screenwriters working today. His writing credits include The Divergent Series: Insurgent, Jane Got a Gun, The Babysitter, Underwater and the upcoming Monster Problems. Brian’s directorial debut Spontaneous starring Katherine Langford and Charlie Plummer is currently playing in select drive-ins and will be available on VOD October 6, and he is in pre-production on an untitled bear horror comedy he is producing with Lord Miller for Universal Studios.

I emailed Brian three questions. Here they are along with his answers.

Scott: Almost everyone I talk with about your scripts makes this observation: “It is a good read.” Beyond character, plot, and all the rest which makes for a strong script, there is your distinctive writer’s voice, most prominently in evidence in your scene description which consistently is enjoyable to read. What advice would you give about conveying voice in a screenplay?

Brian: I think my big advice about the tone of the script read is that it should be in the tone of your main character. When I write things that are more poppy, every element of the script, from the staging to scene headings, should convey what the movie could feel like. For the darker dramas I’ve written, the voice of the script is much quieter and restrained. For me, you have 90 pages (or so) to show a reader what the movie will look like in their head, so utilize that page as much as you can.

Scott: What screenwriting lessons have you learned from your experience as a movie director?

Brian: Directing probably made me a sharper writer, not so much in that we cut extraneous scenes, but as I’ve talked about elsewhere, we had a bit of a nightmare shoot with weather and studio stuff. It became a bit of a Sophie’s Choice a lot, where you could spend either 10 minutes or two scenes or twenty minutes shooting one scene really well. So it became a constant discussion of, what’s the barest minimum of this idea we can convey while filming. A lot got cut while we were shooting. I don’t know if it made it a better movie necessarily, but I know we finished the movie, which was touch and go for a bit.

Scott: Finally, which is more challenging: Writing a screenplay … directing a movie … or being the father of a toddler?

Brian: People mostly respect you as a director, toddler’s kinda respect you because you feed them, nobody respects you as a writer. :)

Here is a trailer for Spontaneous:

You can rent or buy the movie here.

For the rest of the Talkhouse article penned by Brian Duffield, go here.

For my 2014 Go Into The Story interview with Brian, go here.

For 100s more interviews with screenwriters and filmmakers, go here.

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