Interview: Ivan Raimi
Our featured interview today is with Ivan Raimi. If the last name sounds familiar, it should: Ivan is the brother of writer-director Sam Raimi. Ivan has co-written several movies with Sam including Darkman, Army of Darkness, Spider-Man 3, and the newly released Drag Me to Hell.
As Denis Faye describes in this WGA.org interview, Ivan’s work as a screenwriter is only one of his gigs:
As the writing partner of his somewhat successful director younger sibling Sam, Raimi’s credits include Darkman, Army of Darkness, Spiderman 3 and Drag Me to Hell, a stripped-down horror thriller arriving in theaters this week. But when he’s not “making up stories” with his brother, he spends his time as a doctor of osteopathic medicine, a career in which making up stories can be every bit as important.
“In medicine, especially emergency medicine, you have very little time to really understand what’s going on with somebody,” explains Raimi. “The story about what lead them to this is what I look at. There’s a beginning, middle and end. It’s much more revealing and will often tell you more than tests will. The tests are just there to confirm it.”
Here are a few excerpts from the interview:
As a writing team, what’s your creative process?
Sam likes to believe that he’s in control of me. He likes to control how many pieces of candy I eat, how much milk I’ll put in my coffee, and I like to give him that sense of control. If I want to torture him, I’ll sit in his seat.
We usually write side-by-side. Of course, he makes me sit on the left. We often write for long stretches of time per day for 2–3 days, and then we’ll come back to it, whether it’s the next week or the next two weeks, a month.
When we write, we’ll have a project that’s assigned to us, or Sam and I will come up with some very basic concept that we try to turn into a couple pages, then together we’ll work it into a five-page story, then we’ll maybe make it into a ten-page story. Then we roughly outline it as well as our limited brains can, then give it a three act structure. But we’re not super structure guys.
Occasionally, he’ll write a little bit on his own, or I’ll write a little bit on my own, but when we write together, it’s sort of an extension of playing. It’s like being a kid when you’re making up stories. That’s the advantage of working with your brother.
You’re a medical doctor and a horror screenwriter. How do those two things mix?
I try to keep those two worlds really separate. At work, I don’t talk about movies and in the writing world, nobody’s really interested in medicine. For example, in Darkman, there’s a burned creature and Sam kept trying to write in, “and then he sprays himself with Bactine.” I was all, “Why are you doing that, Sam?” He’d say, “Well, that’s what happens to burned people.” I’d say, “No, we’re beyond that. Get that out of your head.” But he kept trying to sneak it in, as if that were some medical treatment.
And then he said, “What kind of machine would you have where the burned guy would be suspended upside down and twirled around with IVs going into him?” and I’d go, “That’s not a burn treatment, Sam.” He’d go, “Okay.” Then he’d write it in anyway. In the end, Hollywood wants this kind of look, so damn the facts.
Check out the rest of the interview here.
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