Interview (Part 1): Eric Heisserer (2012, 2014 Black List)

2012 was a big year for Eric Heisserer as he not only directed his first feature length film (Hours), based on his original screenplay, but also made the Black List for “Story Of Your Life.” This follows up on other writing credits: A Nightmare on Elm Street, Final Destination 5, and The Thing.

I recently spoke with Eric about his background, some of his writing projects and the screenwriting craft. Today in Part 1, Eric discusses his early interest in movies and how he used an original story conveyed on the web to break into Hollywood:

Scott: What are some of the movies that most influenced you when you were growing up?

Eric: I was a child of the ’80s, so I was addicted to movies like Aliens and The Hunt for Red October and early [John] Carpenter movies like The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China. That was my candy.

Scott: And when did you discover that there were these people known as screenwriters who actually wrote the stories?

Eric: Probably much later than I should have. It was along about the time that I got addicted to some of the later works of [James] Cameron. I discovered I could get a hold of the screenplays of his movies. I was curious to see the early thought processes of Jim Cameron and how he related to the world he was going to film before he filmed it.

Scott: How did you go about learning the craft?

Eric: I’m a bit of an autodidact, so I picked up Final Draft software and a couple of screenplays that I purchased through bookstores. I had an idea of what a script was supposed to look like, and I started writing.

Scott: Any formal training?

Eric: No.

Scott: I believe your big break was a spec script called “Dionaea House.”

Eric: Yes, that was my breakthrough.

Scott: Warner Brothers bought that.

Eric: Yeah.

Scott: What was that project about and what happened with it?

Eric: That was an interesting story of a project. Before that, I had gotten a couple of other options through independent financiers, enough where I had some money to move from Houston out to L.A. I got out here and immediately started hemorrhaging money and both the movies stalled, so I had no future income. I was trying to make it work, living out here alone in L.A., and visited a friend in Burbank. I got lost on the way there and drove past a house that looked exactly like a house I used to drive by all the time in my commute in Houston. That just stuck with me. That was odd, even down to the roof damage. I thought, “Why would somebody have the same looking house?”

Stories tend to work for me like mitosis. I have to have three or four disparate ideas that sort of converge and then I get the idea what the actual movie is. “Dionaea House” didn’t solidify for me until a couple weeks later, when I was up late at night, in a bout of insomnia, watching Discovery Channel and learning all about carnivorous plants. In particular the Venus Flytrap, which is called the Dionaea Muscipula.

The narrator was describing the flytrap, which looks actually very different from my initial idea of what the plant looks like. I had sort of like the “Little Shop of Horrors” picture in my head. In reality it’s this massive coffee table size plant full of tiny, little pod‑like mouths…hundreds of them. They’re all identical. They all look like each other.

The narrator said something like, “disguised as shelter for insects” That phrase then stuck in my brain and made me think, “Wait, what if those aren’t houses? What if we’re the insects here?” That led to sort of a Lovecraftian horror story that I wrote as a script.

Oddly enough, my rep at the time, when I called him I said, “Hey, I’ve got a new script I’m working on. It’s an original horror story.” He was very discouraging. He said, “Well, original material just isn’t being bought anymore these days and by the way, I’m leaving the business.” [laughs]

I was bit disappointed by that, but I’m also stubborn when I get an idea in my head. I said, I’m going to create my own source material. And using money I really didn’t have, I bought a domain, and created an epistolary story online through a series of websites and blogs and chat logs.

And it was all a work of fiction, but it was supposed to create some sort of narrative that I could point people to and say, “Here’s what’s the script is based on.” I guess I was about two‑thirds of the way through completing the online portion when the site was discovered, and it went viral. I mean, I spent one night with 26 hits, and that was all me just making sure that links worked, and the next night I had four million hits.

So, the response was interesting. I had a few hundred emails hitting me in the first couple of days, about 20 percent of them said that they thought it was an interesting story, or that it was terrible. There’s always the contingent of the Internet that says you suck, your writing sucks. And so, [laughs] I got plenty of those.

The vast majority of people who responded to the story thought it was true, to the point that they were telling me that they had gone to school with one of my fictional characters, or they lived down the street from them, or they knew them personally somehow.

And then I began to get contacted by professional paranormal investigators asking to take the case on, I had a private detective call my unlisted number at one point. I had some religious leaders, including a pastor from Louisiana, who emailed me, saying he understood the evil I was facing, et cetera, et cetera. It was a strange time. But I think all of that really helped to then market and sell the script to Warner Brothers.

At one point we had a director, Peter Cornwell, and we were just a few weeks from shooting from principal photography, when Warner Brothers pulled the plug on us. Because I think our budget was right at the same amount as the budget of some other move that had come out and bombed. And that’s how we almost made that movie.

Scott: The story behind the story. So when you did that online, you didn’t have a manager at that point. How did you get to Warner Brothers?

Eric: I used all of the attention that I got from the readers of the source material, online, to then shop myself around here in L.A. to a new manager, and that’s how I met Julie Bloom, who has been my manager ever since 2004.

Scott: Is the site still up, or did you take it down?

Eric: It’s been up for all this time.

Scott: Do you ever check it out?

Eric: Just to check on it and make sure it’s there? Yeah. Now and then.

Scott: Just to see if there’s any site traffic?

Eric: No, I don’t really pay attention to the site traffic on it that much anymore. I think it dwindled down to a certain level a few years ago, and I think that’s about all I get. I’m still happy that it’s available, and people can go read it.

Tomorrow in Part 2, Eric discusses Nightmare on Elm Street, Final Destination 5, The Thing, and his newest movie Hours.

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

Eric is repped by UTA and Art/Work Entertainment.

Twitter: @HIGHzurrer.

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