Interview: Christopher Borrelli (2009 Black List)

One of the best ways to learn the craft is read what professional screenwriters have to say about it. To that end for the next few weeks, I will be featuring interviews I have conducted with Black List screenwriters.

Today: My June 2013 interview with Chris Borrelli. Chris 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. In 2012, Chris adapted Joe Hill’s “Twittering from the Circus of the Dead” for Mandalay Pictures. His movie The Vatican Tapes was released in 2015.

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

Part 1: “I’m always trying to think about, am I communicating, am I doing the job of communicating the emotions on the page that the person is gong to be reading it? Trying to almost look in the future, imagine that person opening my script. They’re seeing it all for the first time.”

Part 2: “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.”

Part 3: “I like to layer in different kinds of imagery and different kinds of symbolism just to build it out and make it feel rich and it makes me happy.”

Part 4: “So many of my scripts really do take place over two or three days or one or two or three days. I do like to do that. Of course, I’ve written a couple the other way, but it fits well into action genre tension and it keeps things simple and clean.”

Part 5: “It’s something you should always be doing, in my opinion. You should always be open to ideas and stories. I have an idea file. I look back over it and it’s 400 pages long of different ideas.”

Part 6: “Get really good at screenwriting. It’s so simple, and so basic, and it’s not an easy thing to accomplish. But if you have a talent for this, if you have a gift for this, and a love for this, then work really hard to be as good as possible at it, and that break will come, and you will have something to show for it, you will have the talent and the skill.”

Chris is repped by APA and DMG Entertainment.