Interview: Erik Linthorst

Published in

Go Into The Story

14 min readFeb 11, 2020

A conversation with the screenwriter of the upcoming comedic road movie Come As You Are.

In the past, I have championed small independent movies I felt deserved whatever little boost my blog could give them including interviews with Destin Daniel Cretton for his movie Short Term 12, Matt Manfredi and Phil Hay for the movie they wrote The Invitation, and Rob Meyer and Luke Matheny for their movie A Birder’s Guide to Everything.

This week, I am featuring a series of interviews with some of the filmmakers behind a wonderful indie comedy Come As You Are which opens February 14.

Plot Summary: Three young men with disabilities hit the road with a jaded nurse driver to a brothel in Montreal catering to people with special needs. Remake of the acclaimed Belgian film Hasta La Vista.

Here is my interview with the movie’s screenwriter Erik Linthorst.

Scott Myers: First of all, congratulations on the movie. It’s just a terrific little film. I really enjoyed watching it.

Erik Linthorst: Thanks.

Scott: You have an interesting background as a writer, a producer, a director, documentary filmmaker. Could you talk a bit about how your career has evolved to this point?

Erik: Sure. I think of myself as a writer first. That’s what I came to the business doing. When I showed up, many moons ago, I got a job as a PA. I was trying to size up, how do you get involved in the higher levels of being a filmmaker?

It just seemed like screenwriting was the best door in, because it’s something that I could go off and do alone in a room and fail privately as much as was required. If I never succeeded, nobody had to know that I had spent 10 years in a room alone failing. That fit, I guess, my fear pattern.

I felt like if you wrote a really good script, then it didn’t matter what your connections were. It didn’t matter what your past was. It was the great equalizer. Anybody who could write a great script could have a role in Hollywood.

I started taking night classes at UCLA in screenwriting, and learning the craft, and then just writing at night, and on weekends, and what have you. I got super lucky and sold the first thing that I wrote, which turned out not to be so lucky. I dumped the day job a little early, and then I didn’t sell the next bunch of things I wrote.

I had some rough years. I got an agent out of that and was doing the full‑time screenwriter hustle, but I had some pretty lean years. It was out of that leanness that I realized that I had to have more than just writing as a skill set. I had to be able to have skills that were marketable and could make money in the meantime.

I learned about a little camera, and learned how to edit and shoot, and started making little documentary type of things.

I had a personal experience. When my son was really young, he was diagnosed on the autism spectrum, but he was a kid who didn’t really fit that. We doubted the diagnosis, but at the same time, it was an urgent situation to get help for him. I just felt like if I’m going through this, other families must be going through this.

Because I had my camera, I knew how to edit, I thought, “I’m going to make a documentary about this.” That’s what launched me into documentary filmmaking, is I wound up making a very personal, very small documentary called Autistic‑Like: Graham’s Story, that was the story of trying to find answers to my son’s confusing diagnosis.

Anyway, it worked out that I’d work a little bit in documentaries, and then I’d get an opportunity on the writing side and write. That would get quiet, and I’d get another opportunity on the documentary side. I split my time doing both those things.

Scott: You just found out that a new documentary you’ve done, Autism Goes to College, that’s going into South by Southwest.

Erik: South by Southwest EDU. We premiered it at the Newport Beach Film Festival last year. It’s been doing a college campus tour to bring stakeholders together to talk about this growing concern issue that college campuses are facing, which is mainly that in growing numbers, kids on the autism spectrum are applying and getting in, which is a great testament to early intervention therapies.

It’s ultimately a very good thing, but it presents considerable challenges to unsuspecting professors, and roommates, and disability staff, and campuses that are not equipped to handle a surge in this neurodiversity, so they’re playing catch up.

One of the ways that we’re hoping to shorten their collective learning curve is through this film, telling the story of five students on the autism spectrum, who are making college work.

Scott: That’s interesting that you have that background on neurodiversity, because the movie Come as You Are that you wrote the screenplay for, is also about diversity, in this case, three young men with disabilities. How did you get involved as a screenwriter in that project?

Erik: I had written this stoner comedy called High School. It was my only credit as a screenwriter. It was great in the sense that I got a movie made, it premiered at Sundance, I got paid a lot of money. It was great, but I wasn’t happy. They rewrote my script. It was ultimately a movie I didn’t really care for. I did it because it was an opportunity.

I got treated horribly, and it was a miserable experience in a lot of ways. Ultimately, the piece of art was vapid, in my opinion, and I was frustrated with that. I go and I make this very, very personal documentary that wound up screening in 30 countries, and without a distributor wound up being seen by a lot of people.

We had it on PBS, 85 million US households, and it was this incredibly fulfilling experience. I traveled for two years with the film, meeting families who were going through the same thing, ultimately was able to help hundreds, if not thousands, of families going through the same situation.

I was professionally flummoxed. I’m like, on the one hand, I loved this fulfilling experience making this documentary, but it’s a terrible way to make a living. On the other hand, I had this “I want to be a screenwriter, but I don’t want to repeat the experience of writing High School. If only there was a way for these two worlds to collide.”

Along came an independent producer, who I got introduced to through our mutual connection to autism. He had a half‑brother with autism. We got introduced, and then it turned out he produced indie comedies. He was one of the original producers on Come as You Are when they picked up the US remake rights to that project.

He knew me as a guy who wrote comedy, but had a special place in his heart for disability. They were looking for somebody who could make a movie, a story with three characters with disabilities funny without being offensive, and so they called me in to meet the director.

I didn’t really pitch for the job. I basically had one suggestion when we had breakfast with the producers and the director, and it was based on this Belgian property. There’s already this IP that was the framework. It was three guys who run away from home to go to a brothel. The road trip, part of it, in the Belgian film wasn’t really exploited in the way that I felt it could be.

That’s what they were looking for is, what’s the road trip? I remember I just said, “Well, what if the guys have to drive the van?” They all paused and looked, and then you saw these big smiles cross their face. They were like, “Oh. All right. When can you start?” [laughter] Then I had the job. That was how that came together.

Scott: In adapting the original film, you mentioned, to exploit the road trip component. Were there some other key points of focus that you brought to taking the original source material, and bringing the story to the United States and Canada?

Erik: The mandate I was given was…because they had shopped the U.S. remake rights around to everybody in town, and they got turned down. Everybody said, “Well, in order for this to work in the US, it has to be laugh out loud funny. It has to be like Little Miss Sunshine. I don’t know how you do that with disability.”

They came to me and they were like, “How do we make this really funny without offending people?” I said, “Oh, no problem.” To me, the offensive notion is that you can’t have a comedy with characters with disability. Why? You’re so worried about what you’re going to say about this population, that you can’t say anything? It just seemed like an absurd notion.

I was clear from day one that I was with the guys. I know these guys because I know guys, and the fact that they have disabilities doesn’t make them different in that way. I felt very confident going in there, and making it irreverent, and writing it the way you’d write a road‑trip comedy of guys who are like the guys that I went to college with, or what have you.

That was my main focus. Looking at the Belgian film, I thought they did a really good job with the first act of the Belgian film. I feel like the third act is there because they’re going to show up at the brothel, and then what happens? What the real challenge was, and where the Belgian film had some gaps, and where really what I heard my mandate was, was to make the road trip work.

I approached it from the model that I had in my head. I didn’t tell anybody. I didn’t pitch anybody. I just sounded like the comp that I had in my head was The Wizard of Oz. What you had in that film was these characters that thought they were missing something and thought that there was a wizard at the end of the yellow brick road, who could give them, grant them that thing.

They go on this journey, and along the way, they meet these challenges, through which they prove that they already have the thing that they think they’re missing. When they get to the wizard, he turns out to be a phony and wasn’t ever capable of bestowing the thing that they thought they needed. They didn’t need them anyway.

In the case of Come as You Are, it’s these three guys who think they’re missing their manhood because they’ve never gotten laid. They think that the prostitute at the end of the yellow brick road is going to magically bestow their manhood, by doing this sex act with them.

Along the way, they encounter these challenges, which forced them to show that they are men, and they can do for themselves and do for each other. By the time they show up at the brothel, the journey’s done. They’ve demonstrated to themselves and each other that they have that quality they thought they were missing.

That was my benchmark against which I checked myself as I wrote it. I took kernels of things that were in the Belgian film and just made them more hilarious, frankly. One of the things that irked me about the Belgian film was they had this nurse driver with them the whole way, who basically did everything for them.

I’m like, “We got to get rid of her.” These guys got to learn to do for themselves. Very quickly in the second act, I invented a reason to get her out of the scene. She has a medical crisis and disappears. That’s when these guys have to do for themselves, and they have to drive the van, and they have to step up to the plate a little bit.

I felt like that was a missed opportunity in the Belgian film. They go camping, and she sets up a tent, and cooks them dinner, and helps them change their pants. It’s like, “No, no, no. We’re getting rid of her and they’re going to figure it out on their own.”

Scott: Your reference to The Wizard of Oz brings to mind a quote I often bring up with my students, which is Joel Coen of the Coen brothers, saying that every movie is an attempt to remake The Wizard of Oz.

Erik: Totally.

Scott: Your comment there about, they get to the end and the prostitute is a wizard, and they realize, “Wait a minute,” they’ve had this manhood all along. It’s just like Glinda the Good Witch says, “Dorothy, you’ve had the power to go home all along.” Right?

Erik: Right.

Ravi Patel, Grant Rosenmeyer, and Hayden Szeto in ‘Come As You Are’

Scott: I want to jump to the end point because you brought it up. It’s an interesting choice that you’ve made narratively that the actual goal of these guys having sex in Montreal is really played down. It’s almost to the point like the hookups are kind of a MacGuffin. You’ve already explained that. Maybe go into that a little bit more.

Erik: Yeah. I feel like I was sensitive to that from the get‑go. The idea of prostitution, how we treated the women, how we show the women. One of the things that the Belgian film…I understood their choice, but I felt like they basically dodged the issue by just showing the women basically in silhouette.

I felt I needed one bit to understand that these are real people, and that they have reasons why they’re doing what they’re doing, and that they’re not blind victims of circumstance, and that they feel like human beings.

For example, the woman that’s with Matt, that she says that she has a brother in a wheelchair, and for that reason, she understands. You get a sense of, “Oh, OK. That makes sense. I think I know who she is now.”

For me, the brothel, I wanted to be careful. It was more of a choice for Rich [Wong, the director]. I left it up to him. We talked at the end about, “How much do you want to show about them actually, once things get real in the brothel?”

He’s like, “I don’t want to show any of it.” I was like, “OK. Good. Let’s not show any of it.” Then we decided, ultimately, we need a bit here and a bit there of them, beginning the process. Ultimately, that wasn’t what it was about to me. Again, the movie was about the journey, not the destination.

Obviously, we’ve traveled an hour and a half to get there. I can’t not show that. That’s a different type of movie, that whatever the sessions or something, where it’s really about the sex. This was about something else.

Scott: I thought it worked really well. You had that little moment with Scotty, where he says to one of the sex workers, “Tell me something about yourself.”

Erik: Right. He wanted to know something to make her human to him, versus just like, “Hey, go down there.” You know what I mean?

Scott: Yeah. Could you talk about Asta Philpot and his connection to the story?

Erik: Interestingly, I was not allowed to talk to Asta when I was writing this. I was pretty grumpy about that, but I was powerless, and I wanted to respect those wishes. There was a different director attached at that time. Ultimately, I don’t know why he didn’t want me to talk to him, but that’s a whole ‘nother situation.

I was at a loss, to really talk to him. My research was less based on his story. I watched the BBC documentary, obviously. I had seen the interviews he had done, and I had obviously seen the Belgian film.

Beyond that, I just really spent time in forums of quadriplegic, paraplegic forums, trying to hear out real people with these conditions, what do they talk about, especially as it pertains to sex, just to get a feel for where they were at, and what they felt, and their opinions, and the tone, and the mood.

That was really my research. I did a little bit of research on arthrogryposis, which is the condition that he has, that I gave to Scotty. We played around a little bit with the other characters and their disabilities.

That was really it. Honestly, I rewrote this script from 2013, the better part of two or three years, and then I got kicked off the project. It’s a crazy story of how my script got resurrected. I didn’t even talk to Asta, other than a little bit of social media back and forth, until we were at South by Southwest. I had to fly blind on that.

Scott: Let’s talk about South by Southwest. The movie was an official selection of the 2019 Festival. You attended that. What was that like?

Erik: Amazing. That’s the best part. You’ve done all this hard work, the film is done, it turned out pretty good, and now you get to go have fun. That’s the best part. This one took seven years to get there. My previous one took nine years. [laughs] It’s like you’re given decades of your life to get one through the door. If you can’t enjoy the film festival, there’s nothing to enjoy.

Scott: The movie has currently got an 8.2 rating and IMDb, a 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, nine critics. That must make you feel good. The movie is being released in select theaters and digital platforms on Valentine’s Day, February 14th. Let me close here by asking you, you had this journey, seven years this thing took you. I’m curious. What lessons have you learned as a storyteller, as a screenwriter?

Erik: That I’m only really interested in stories now that means something to me beyond just getting a laugh, or something like that, because it’s such an enormous time investment. If you divide what I made selling this script over the amount of rewrites and stuff, I’d be financially better off getting a job at Starbucks.

My heart was broken more than once in the process, really broken to the point where I almost left the business when I got kicked off the project for a spill. Given all of that, if I’m going to put my blood, sweat, and tears, it’s got to be a story that really moves me in some way, and I’ll go to the mat for.

I used to write a whole bunch of stuff that are studio comedy. It’s like “School of Rock,” but with blah, blah, blah. Anymore, it’s like, “No, no, no.” I’m really interested in true stories. I’m really interested in more adaptation work. I’m really interested in whether it’s disability‑related, or something that bites off a little bit more about the bigger questions in life, something like that.

It’s just not worth it, for something that I don’t really care about.

Here is a trailer for Come As You Are:

The movie opens this Friday, February 14 in select theaters including:

Los Angeles
Laemmle Glendale

New York
Cinema Village

Boston
Apple Cinemas

Chicago
Gene Siskel

Cleveland
Tower City Cinema

Columbus
Gateway Film Center

Dallas
Harkins Southlake

Denver
Harkins Northfield

Fort Wayne
Fort Wayne Cinema Center