Interview: Jay Eden — Part 1

For the last few weeks, I have turned attention to screenwriters, TV writers, and filmmakers who are on the front edge of making their mark in the business. Their insights, so recently on the outside looking in, reflect the excitement of breaking in, yet the challenges of attempting to carve out a career.

Today the last in this mini-series of interviews: U.K based screenwriter Jay Eden who set up his original spec script “Incinerator” with the Boies Schiller Film Group.

Here in Part 1, Jay describes how he found his way to screenwriting:

Scott: So before our call, I went back on my Gmail account for the blog. I’ve kept all these emails for years. Turns out we’ve had some interactions awhile back.

Jay: Yeah, we have. As one famous film quote says, I’ve been a long‑time listener, first‑time caller more than once. It’s one of these things which is what I love about the blog so much, having opportunities to hear other people who do it professionally give some advice free with the interviews, which I think is wonderful. The site’s brilliant. I love it. I look at it every day. It’s a great inspiration, one, for people who don’t live in Hollywood, and two, for people who are interested in screenwriting. I learn something every day from the blog.

It makes the world a smaller place. I’m a UK‑based writer. It’s a little taste of Hollywood for me every morning. Before this, I could read a magazine like “Total Film” in the UK. That’s pretty much as close as I’d get to the industry. Having working screenwriters take their time to help people learn the craft I think is wonderful. Kudos to you.

Scott: Thanks. I appreciate it. Let’s jump back a bit. How did you get into screenwriting in the first place?

Jay: I grew up as a John Hughes kid. We call them latchkey kids in England. Basically, I would bunk off school to watch films. I know it’s a cliché. I was obsessed. I remember when my dad first got a VHS recorder. He brought it home. It was an old Telly Savalas film. I can’t remember what it was called now. It was about diamond smugglers at the time, I think. Something clicked. It changed my world. Before then, I’d saved up money and gone to cinema.

I was real film geek as a kid. When I was young, films were real. I think that is the most magical feeling, that everything that you see on the screen is real. Sooner or later you do realize it’s not real, but your imagination never dies.

Somewhere along the line, I fell in love with films. I started bunking off school to watch them. I grew up on John Hughes films, which to this day I can still watch back to back. I could have on loop all the time. I could watch “The Breakfast Club” all day, every day and never get bored with it. That got my love of films firmly embedded.

For years and years and years, I didn’t even think that there was anything more to films than what you saw on the screen. There was no screenwriting. It wasn’t really much of an industry to speak of in the UK that someone like myself could get involved with. I didn’t study anything like this at school. I didn’t do creative writing or anything like that. I pretty much never even knew what a screenplay was.

I don’t know why, but I remember I sat down one day and wrote what I would class my first screenplay, probably about 12 years ago now. It was just basically a story that I dumped onto a Word spreadsheet, which is painful to read now, because it’s not a screenplay, it’s not formatted, there’s no narrative structure, there’s nothing there at all, but I still love the story. That’s how I got writing.

From there, I picked up a few books. I got a hold of Syd Field and I read that. I tried to teach myself about screenplays. I couldn’t get hold of them in those days, even 12 years ago. For someone living in England, there wasn’t really a database of online screenplays, so it was very much a case of trawling bookshops for a film and TV section.

I looked for anything that resembled some kind of screenwriting book info or any kind of format that resembled creative writing in a screenwriting world, and that’s pretty much how I got into it, really. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just wanted to write.

Scott: No formal training.

Jay: No, none at all.

Scott: You said it was 12 years ago you wrote your first screenplay. How many scripts do you think you’ve written at this point?

Jay: I’ve got four screenplays that I would show to the world now, including “Incinerator.” I’ve got two that I wouldn’t show to anyone else, and then I’ve got my first original, what I would still say is a screenplay, but it’s not really. It’s just a 70‑page splurge of a story I did.

Scott: You watched a lot of movies?

Jay: Yes.

Scott: You discovered some of these online screenplay sites and so you’d been reading scripts I assume, too?

Jay: Yes.

Scott: The reason I ask is because one thing I was struck with in “Incinerator” is it’s polished, not only in terms of screenplay style, but it feels quite cinematic. Where do you think that comes from? How do you think that cinematic sensibility evolved?

Jay: I very much start out with a narrative story that I put characters into rather than the other way around. I watched so many films as a kid, but I don’t necessarily remember all of the film. I generally remember bits that stick out in my mind, and for me, especially their visual elements. That was very hard for me, because when I first started writing I couldn’t visualize a scene in my head, and it took me a long, long time.

Most of my scenes in my early screenplays are very static, uncinematic, and staid. It took me a long time to realize that I had to get a hold of a scene and stick it into a visual world in my head. That took me years and years. That’s probably one of the things that I’ve been most proud of now.

Tomorrow in Part 2, Jay reveals how he came up with the idea for “Incinerator” and some of the key dynamics present in the script.

Twitter: @jayeden238.