Interview: Chris Sparling

Variety recently named Chris Sparling as one of their 10 Screenwriters to Watch. With good reason. Chris made his first splash in the business with his script for the movie Buried, starring Ryan Reynolds and followed that up with another contained thriller ATM. He has multiple projects in development and two movies slated for release: The Sea of Trees, starring Matthew McConaughey, Naomi Watts and Ken Wattanabe, directed by Gus Van Sant, and The Atticus Institute, written and directed by Chris.

Here are links to the six installments of the entire interview:

Part 1: “I spent my first college year writing my screenplay, saying to myself, ‘All right. By the last day of school, I will finish this.’ And I did. It’s funny, I still have it — I still have that script. I’ve never actually looked at it since, but I remember it was atrocious.”

Part 2: “He asked me, ‘What are you doing with the script? I loved it.’ I was like, ‘Well, I was planning on making it about a month from now.’ He asked, ‘Would you be willing to not direct it and instead go out with it as a spec?’ And of course I said, ‘Absolutely. I’m dying here, for 10 years, trying to catch a break!’”

Part 3: “I always had that idea in mind, the idea of the government stepping in if there really was a possessed person, and then asking myself, ‘What would they do?’ What would they do if they just ‘stepped in’? What does that even mean?”

Part 4: “It’s easy to write “They fight.” But there’s a lot of people involved with “They fight.” It takes me two seconds to write “They fight,” but it could take two days to actually shoot, if not a hell of a lot more.

Part 5: “It’s weird to know that, unlike features, where things can have a life elsewhere, generally, with TV, that’s not the case. When it’s dead it’s dead, so you move on.”

Part 6: “Screenwriters need to read screenplays. You have to, have to, have to. It’s a free education and it’s arguably just as good as any other form of education you could get in this field.”

For my four part December 2011 Q&A with Chris about his movie Buried, go here.

Chris is repped by UTA and Kaplan / Perrone Entertainment.

Twitter: @chrissparling.