Interview: Chris Borrelli (2009 Black List) — Part 2

Christopher Borrelli, who wrote the 2007 Universal / Gold Circle horror thriller Whisper and co-wrote the 2009 Fox / WWE action film The Marine 2, sold the spec scripts “The Vatican Tapes” [Black List] to Lionsgate and Lakeshore in 2009, “Wake” to Hammer Films / Exclusive Media Group in 2010, and “Sad Jack” to Code Entertainment in 2011. In addition he has worked on the remake of Bad Influence for MGM, an adaptation of the French horror film ILS (“Them”) for Gold Circle, a live-action series “Necessary Evil” at the Cartoon Network with partners Jonathan Davis and Max Burnett, and has a blind deal at Focus / Rogue. Also “Twittering from the Circus of the Dead” with Todd Lincoln attached to direct.

In April “The Vatican Tapes” was greenlit for production with a July 15th start date. In May, Chris agreed to terms on the sale of another spec, the announcement is forthcoming.

Today in Part 2, Chris discusses his script “Sad Jack”:

Scott: Let’s turn to the project “Sad Jack.” It’s a spec script you wrote that sold in December of 2011 to Code Entertainment. Here’s a logline from Variety:

“‘Sad Jack’ tells the story of a hired assassin who’s challenged by his paranoid schizophrenia to distinguish real threats from those conceived in his imagination.”

First off, would you call this an action thriller, or an action movie?

Chris: Very much, I’d call it an action thriller, and there are hints of romance in there. It’s essentially what I’ve been wanting to do for several years or longer, was an action version of Beauty and the Beast. As funny as that sounds, and I realize how that sounds. In it, essentially you have a person living on the fringe of society. Essentially he’s looking at an ugly soul. He’s dark, he’s broody, he’s all these things. This woman comes into his life, and for once he’s going to try to protect somebody, so you’ve got a little bit of irony at the beginning. From there it’s a movement of a woman essentially making a man a better person. I think men, we get better as we get older, and in this film the woman changes the man.

The problem with this is him being a paranoid schizophrenic he’s able to keep her alive for the first half of the movie from the people who want to kill her. His paranoia actually works to do some good. But as she changes him he relaxes. He’s becoming a more normal person and his paranoia is slipping away.

That’s where there is that sad yin and yang of it and what’s going to happen. It’s a gothic to me, a romance, and I don’t care that it has a big shootout action sequence. It still to me is something as ‑‑ I think it’s an action thriller, but there are obviously romantic elements to it.

Scott: How did you come up with the story concept for “Sad Jack?”

Chris: I honestly don’t know. I was looking at fairy tales, and I did think about Beauty and the Beast. That was at the beginning. From there, I honestly don’t know. It didn’t take that long to write, and it was an intense period when I put it together, but I just let it talk to me. I know what that must sound like, but I just listened. I sat and I generated pages, and went back. I didn’t even do an extraordinary amount of rewriting in it. It was something that just somewhat think and flow.

I’m always looking for the next idea and sometimes they come in a way you’re not expecting. Sometimes it’s when you’re not searching for them that they knock on the door, and you listen. I would probably say the jumping off point was “Beauty and the Beast,” and then I went from there. How could I do that as an action movie or hit man movie, something like that? That was essentially the genesis.

Scott: In a way, you were doing a bit of genre‑bending, taking a fantasy story and turning it into an action story.

Chris: Very much, but to me it’s more that when they write those fairy tales, or a little Shakespeare, or when you go back to the Roman myths, that he based some of his stories on…to me, and the Romans stole their myths from other cultures, to me it’s those basic stories we all love. They didn’t necessarily have action movies back then, but we can take some of these classic stories, and classic themes, and we can do anything with them. For me it was this kind of idea of…and I also have a theme about most of my work, which is that no one is irredeemable.

I truly believe that. Usually my main characters are…it can be a bit dark, it can be a bit hard to love at first, but over the course of the film they grow in that way. I’m a big believer in that, that no one should be written off necessarily. Except my bad guys, they always get it.

Scott: What intrigued you most about delving into a protagonist character who has to deal with paranoid schizophrenia?

Chris: There’s a lot of freedom in it. I was concerned at first that I would be limited by what paranoid schizophrenia is, and I talked to a friend of mine, a psychologist, and he works with people like that every single day, every single work day. He said the thing about the human mind, he told me, is you can do almost anything. The people he deals with, they don’t follow one set of rules, it’s the human mind. It’s just like imagination, I guess in a sense the darker side of it. I enjoyed that freedom going into it. I enjoyed the irony of someone who is paranoid, of it actually being a good thing in an extreme situation. And from there it really wasn’t a hard write. You know, it took several months, and so on and so forth, like all this stuff can take, or longer. But it wasn’t torturous because it was fun. It was fun to write, it was fun to create, and it was fun to put this character, who’s very, very smart, but who doesn’t seem to be on the surface, into situations.

A second part, and I don’t really do a whole lot of research, but when I did a little bit, I came across a story of a man, who when he turned 18, 19, or so…this was onset, he had a condition, and his family, essentially, disowned him.

He wrote, if I had gotten cancer, or another disease, my family would have rallied around me. But what I have is so strange, and I can’t control it, that they all turned their back on me…essentially what he put.

That called out to me too, I really felt for that. That affected me too, and I wanted to tell the story of someone who might be dealing with a similar condition.

Scott: It seems to me one of the big challenges for you in writing “Sad Jack” was how to convey visually the internal experience of Jack’s psychological state. How did you go about developing ways to express that on the page?

Chris: Well, to me the movie should…there’s a blue collar aspect to the movie, and a big crime element, so the movie isn’t supposed to be overly trippy, so to speak, or psychedelic…anything like that. There were times where I put in a couple of visions, and even those I scaled back. There’s a scene in the middle of the movie where he goes on a date with the girl, and it’s potentially a confessional date scene.

As they talk, he tells her that he believes people are watching him. We realize, hopefully as an audience, without us breaking that extra wall, we realize that he’s talking about us.

He believes he’s in a movie, he thinks there could be cameras on him right now, and in a fun way he’s right. So there are ways I could do it visually. I did experiment with some more over the top ways, where he was going to see characters in mirrors. Where he would see a car crash, and he would, in his mind, imagine a stunt performer getting out of it.

But it went a little too far for me, and I scaled it back. I erred on the more realistic side, and I knew that I could eventually put that in when the director came on board, if he wanted it. But I erred on the side of caution because it was a spec.

Tomorrow in Part 2, we continue our exploration of “Sad Jack”.

For Part 1, go here.

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

Chris is repped by WME and DMG Entertainment.