Interview (Part 1): Jon Boyer

A conversation with writer whose script made the 2013 Black List.

From professional snowboarder to commercial director to Hollywood screenwriter, Jon Boyer has had an interesting journey taking him from Canada to Los Angeles. Recently I had the opportunity to talk with Jon about his background, his script “Free Byrd” which landed on the 2013 Black List, and his approach to the craft of screenwriting.

Today in Part 1: Jon discusses how he got into snowboarding which started his circuitous route toward Hollywood:

Scott Myers: You’re originally from Canada.

Jon Boyer: Born and raised. I lived in Vancouver, and Calgary, and a little bit on the East Coast.

Scott: That’s great to know because if things go all pearshaped here politically in the United States, we can all just move up there with you.

Jon: Exactly. My wife and I call it our escape route. If everything goes south, we go north. [laughs]

Scott: That’s a bumper sticker waiting to happen! Talk about snowboarding. When did you get involved with that?

Jon: I came from a pretty athletic family. Like any typical Canadian kid, I grew up playing hockey and was a little junior ski racer. When snowboarding really first started gaining momentum, I saw this guy doing it at my local mountain. I just was blown away.

I was a little skater kid and I just thought, “Oh, my God. I want to do that.” My parents thought it was just a fad and wouldn’t get me a board, so I made one in wood shop in school. I learned on the hills in Calgary on this shitty home made board but I kept at it.

When my parents saw that I was really into it, they got me one for my birthday the following season. I just fell in love with it. It just came very naturally to me. It wasn’t long before I got sponsored, and I turned pro at a very young age. It took off from there and I traveled the world from the time I was about 17 till I was in my early 20s. I went all over the world as a pro snowboarder, competing, and filming snowboarding films.

Serendipitously, it was snowboarding that led me into becoming a film maker.

Scott: I read an interview where you said, “Hey, I could film these guys.”

Jon: Yeah. I was being filmed once. You know Warren Miller?

Scott: Sure.

Jon: I was being filmed by a crew like that and saw them using these cool 16mm Arriflex cameras. It was a deep powder day and the cameraman, he was on skis, he was having a little trouble following us boarders because we could go so fast in powder. I said, “Well, let me do it,” They handed me the camera and I did a few follow tracking shots it and I just fell in love with it.

I immediately thought “Oh, my God, I wanna do this. I wanna make films.” I just thought it was so cool and that was that. So shortly after that I got myself a camera and started to make snowboarding films.

I’m honestly surprised I lived through some of the stuff that I did, going to Alaska and Europe. Riding big mountains and in the back country. I’ve been buried in avalanches. I’ve lost friends in avalanches. It was just time. I thought, [laughs] “You know, I think I’m going to go stand behind a camera for a while. It’s safer.” It sort of took off from there.

After making snowboard films for a couple years, I started directing commercials for Burton Snowboards and for the surf clothing company, Quiksilver. From there, it sort of took me into mainstream advertising. I thought it was going to be really creative and exciting but as it turned out, I didn’t like it much at all.

I didn’t like that it was all about selling stuff. I came from this lifestyle, I came from this whole sport that was based on this way of life and this passion for just living life. Advertising wasn’t for me. Not to mention that the economy had just tanked and there was no work all of a sudden. I needed to make something happen and so I figured I’d do what I had always done. I’d just make a movie.

So I started writing. I had no idea what I was doing and had absolutely no concept of how to write a script. I wrote like three or four really shitty scripts. I mean really shitty scripts. [laughs] But I was reading as many scripts as I could get my hands on. I eventually landed on the idea of “Free Byrd,” and that’s the one that I was like, “Oh. I get it now. You’re supposed to write something that you’re really passionate about.” [laughs]

Scott: Let’s step back a bit. I’m assuming you were a movie fan when you grew up, too?

Jon: Definitely. I remember when we were young, we would go to this lake house and the small town had a drive-in theater. My sister used to sneak me into the movies I was too young to see.

I remember just being so affected by them. I remember one year they were replaying “Jaws” or something like that. I was a kid and she says, “We’re gonna go see that.” It scared the hell out of me, but that memory stuck with me forever. How something up on a screen can affect you so viscerally is amazing. Growing up seeing films like Star Wars, Raiders of the Los Arc. It was such an escape. Being so captivated by these characters.

There’s nothing else like movies that makes you want to be somebody else. You know what I mean? You want to emulate these characters. You want to be them. At least I did when I was a kid. It just affects you unlike any other medium in art, as far as I’m concerned.

Scott: Yet you went the writing direction as opposed to directing.

Jon: Yeah, I just figured the economy was collapsing and the jobs that were coming in in advertising were very thin. People weren’t spending money. I’m sitting there going, “Geez, man. I gotta make a living.” I always wanted to make a film. I always wanted to make my own, but, again, I never went to film school. I didn’t know how to do this stuff. I just learned flying by the seat of my pants.

I was struggling with that, but I just figured, “I’m gonna write and direct some small indie feature myself.” I went through a number of scripts that just were awful everybody goes through their first scripts, they are just horrible and meandered all over the place. I didn’t really know what I was doing.

I was always kind of the joker among my friends so I naturally gravitated towards comedy, but I quickly learned how difficult writing comedy is. It’s really hard, and I always ended up gearing toward darker subject matter. I would always end up writing some character crying in the bottom of a shower drinking from a whiskey bottle after having a wank. [laughs] You know, real funny stuff.

But during this process I was really falling in love with the craft of writing. It’s amazing how difficult it was, but how you could just keep getting better, and better, and better. It was sort of an extension of directing for me, because I would just see everything in my head so vividly of what I wanted to write. I just needed to keep writing until my skills caught up to my imagination.

Tomorrow in Part 2, Jon and I delve into his Black List script “Free Byrd”.

Jon is repped by WME and Zero Gravity Management.

Twitter: @jonboyer.