Interview: Daniel Turkewitz — Part 2

It’s always interesting to interview “first-timers,” writers who break into the business by selling a spec script. Such is the case of Daniel Turkewitz, a proverbial overnight success who spent years of hard work before writing “Tranquility Base” which 20th Century Fox acquired in June 2013 for a reported mid-six figures.

Recently I had a wide-ranging conversation with Daniel about his background, “Tranquility Base,” screenwriting, and what it’s like to finally get that phone call: “They want your script.”

Today in Part 2, Daniel discusses the origins of his script “Tranquility Base”:

Scott: Let’s talk about “Tranquility Base”. Here’s a logline: “When a global disaster strikes Earth, fifteen astronauts fight to secure a spot in a moon base designed to support only six.” What was the genesis of this idea?

Daniel: It started out with a visual from another movie. There was a film in 2005 called The Day After Tomorrow. Do you remember that one?

Scott: Yes.

Daniel: Global warming takes over in the span of a day or two. Most of it, of course, is down on Earth as Jake Gyllenhaal is running from monster waves while trying to hook up with Emmy Rossum. Every once in a while, they would cut to a scene from the space station. You would see these astronauts looking out the little porthole down at Earth and these massive clouds covering all of North America. At first, when I saw it in the theater, it was just a cool visual. Nothing came from it. But maybe a year later, I was in the Virgin Megastore in New York. They have all these little video booths where they’re trying to sell DVDs. I stood there watching some of The Day After Tomorrow, and I saw that scene again.

All of a sudden, that just flipped the switch. I saw the astronauts looking out the window, and I thought, What happens to them? The whole story, the whole movie focuses on the people on Earth, but what happens to these guys? How do they get home? What if they can’t get home? What if they’re stuck there?

Within a minute or two of standing there watching, the whole plot for “Tranquility Base” came to me. It was just a matter of getting home, start typing, and get it down.

Scott: Always amazing that moment of inspiration. When I read your script, I was reminded of the 1944 movie Lifeboat.

Daniel: Ah, yes. Hitchcock. That is, in fact, one of the movies…I watched several movies while writing this just to get that feeling. People in confined spaces, personalities clashing. How do they react?

That’s one of the ones I watched. 12 Angry Men is another one. Of course, 2001. That was definitely one of the inspirations.

Scott: You introduced fifteen characters in the story in the first ten pages. That’s important because you’ve got to set up that central first scene ‑‑ fifteen people trying to survive in the space. It’s hard enough to introduce characters, but fifteen in ten pages, that quite a challenge.

Daniel: [laughs] Oh, yeah.

Scott: I’m curious. How many times did you have to rewrite that opening to get all that done?

Daniel: I have a group of friends, fellow screenwriters and filmmakers. We all help each other out. We review each other’s work. “This is great. This is good. This is OK. This sucks.” In the very first draft, when all I had was a treatment, I had 21 astronauts because I just wanted more people to kill. I wanted to kill groups of people at once. The universal feedback I got from everyone was, “No. No good. It’s just too many. You’ll never create that many characters. We’re never going to care about that many characters.” When I made the jump from treatment to script, it was down to fifteen. The fifteen is actually the smaller number, and it was the right move to make. There’s no question about it.

Scott: The international composition of the crew. You’ve got people from the United States, Canada, Germany, Japan, Russia. I was wondering, how much of that came to you naturally because there’s the International Space Station involved and so, obviously, there are people from many countries? Or were you thinking like a producer, “The international market is growing so big now for movies. This will be a benefit to the story to have characters from different countries.”

Daniel: It was a little of each. I’ve read plenty of stories. I read Deadline Hollywood. I’ve seen articles that have said the foreign market is now actually bigger than the domestic market. But the thing that really drove it was that this is the reality of space today. The International Space Station is built by a whole lot of different countries. At any one time, there are always going to be different nationalities up there. There’s always an American. There’s always a Russian. There are always different people.

The one astronaut who just made headlines, who was in the press, was the guy who was singing the David Bowie song. I believe he’s Canadian. There’s always a variety of nationalities up there. I really did want to try and mimic that. As fate would have it, that also helps with the marketing of the script, but it really is what’s going on.

Scott: It would also help, too, because you were able to draw on some of those tensions that exist between countries, particularly the Russians in relation to the rest, and in microcosm here with these characters.

Daniel: I tried. I have the older character, who has a more historical ‑‑ “The Russians are the bad guys. They can’t do anything.” The key, for me, was to try and make someone out to be a bad guy. Nobody is overly awful. If they were truly an evil person, they wouldn’t have been sent to space. They wouldn’t have gotten picked for the program. It’s easy, as you read through the whole script, to see the Russians as bad guys. In reality, they’re just trying to save themselves, and they’ve got family back home they want to see, just like everybody else. That’s the tricky part, to try and make a bad guy without the person actually being bad.

Scott: That is a really interesting choice you made: There’s not really one protagonist in the script. You can look at each one of the fifteen characters as their own protagonist because they’re each trying to survive. How did you go about developing and writing those characters? Did you think about each of them as a protagonist? At any point, did you think about maybe featuring one of them as a single protagonist?

Daniel: When I started out, I really wanted to have an ensemble piece. This is one of the pieces of feedback I got from my friends as well. You have to elevate somebody to the lead. I tried to. The base commander, the space shuttle captain, they got more lines. They have more importance in the plot. But I really did want to have a group effort where you didn’t see one or two guys who…You saw them, but they never spoke, and they’re just there to fill the screen. One film that I’ve always loved, and that really was an example for this, is The Great Escape. It’s filled with stars. They all have their moment in the sun. They all have their lines. They all have their importance to the story. That really was a big inspiration as well.

Tomorrow in Part 3, Daniel shares more about the creative decision-making that went into writing “Tranquility Base.”

For Part 1, go here.

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

Daniel is repped by Energy Entertainment.