Interview: Ehren Kruger
Today’s interview is with screenwriter Ehren Kruger. Winner of the Nicholl Fellowship in 1996, Kruger has written over 35 film projects including Arlington Road (1999), Scream 3 (2000), The Ring (2002), The Brothers Grimm (2005), Blood and Chocolate (2007), and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009).
Here are a few excerpts from the interview conducted by John Robert Marlow:
JRM: How did you break in, how did you come to be where you are now, and what role did the Nicholl Fellowships play in that?
Ehren Kruger: I started writing screenplays when I was in high school, I went to NYU undergraduate film school, then moved to Los Angeles to try to understand how the actual business worked. Because film school is great for giving you deadlines and getting you excited about a career in the arts, but it really is a separate animal from the business of getting films made.
So I ended up in Los Angeles, working as an assistant for an agent, and a producer, and a television network executive, and I spent my free time reading every script I could get my hands on. I was encouraged as much by the mediocre scripts as by the great ones. The great scripts are, “Wow, this is how the craft is done,” and that’s what inspires you.
The mediocre scripts tell you that it’s not an impossible dream. You look at those and you say to yourself, “This writer has an agent? I can at least do that.” So there’s inspiration to be found everywhere.
A friend at the small agency where I worked moved on to a larger agency and was willing to recommend one of my scripts — a monster movie project involving dragons — to a feature literary agent there. I ended up signing with that agent, who sent that script and another one out to producers and studios. The responses were polite: “Nice writing, but we’re not interested in buying.”
I’d entered three scripts in the Nicholl Fellowships that same year — this was 1996 — and one of those was Arlington Road, which went on to win a Fellowship. My agent had actually read Arlington and advised against sending it out right away, because at the time it was perceived as my least commercial screenplay.
Winning the Fellowship attracted quite a bit of interest, and we optioned it to a producer who attached director Mark Pellington within a year and set it up with financier Lakeshore Entertainment shortly after. And then it actually went into production. So I had a very, very fortuitous Nicholl Fellowship experience.
Of course the flipside of that is that the script I wrote during my Fellowship year [Nicholl Fellows are required to write a new script during their Fellowship Year] went absolutely nowhere, and pretty much never left my drawer. But the money from the Fellowship allowed me to quit my day job and write full time for that first year of my career.
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JRM: What do you wish you’d known when you started out?
Ehren Kruger: I wish I could have known better which stories not to write, which ones were not going to make it to fruition. That I’d had a better sense of which of those stories that I wanted to tell would have a chance of getting other people excited about them and getting made.
That, for example, I could have seen more clearly and said, “Well that’s a derivative premise,” before I wrote fifty pages of it. Or, “That’s just not a movie that studios are making this decade,” before writing ninety pages of it. Or, in the case of more specialized, art house ideas: “Much as I love this story, there’s just not a great role for an actor, and without a great role, this will never get financed.”
All of which is my way of saying that I wish I could have put a more objective, realistic business eye on some of the ideas and stories I started to tell — things that, in hindsight, I look at now and recognize “That one really never stood a chance.”
