Interview (Part 1): TJ Cimfel and David White (“Shut In”)
The horror movie Shut In has its world premiere this week at the Los Angeles Film Festival, screening on June 12 and June 17. Recently I had the opportunity to interview the film’s screenwriters TJ Cimfel and David White. It was a terrific conversation which I will be featuring over the course of this week.
Today in Part 1, David and TJ discuss their respective backgrounds and how they ended up together as a writing duo:
Scott Myers: Let’s jump into it here. I gather you were schoolmates at Illinois Wesleyan University, is that right?
David White: Correct.
Scott: Did you meet each other there?
David: Yep. We knew each other well, but then we kind of lost touch for a while after college, for a couple of years.
Scott: What did each of you study?
David: I was an English major.
TJ Cimfel: I got my BFA in Acting, and had an English Lit minor.
Scott: When did you all develop an interest in movies?
TJ: I wanted to be an actor forever, from when I was a kid. I used to dream about being in movies, all the amazing movies that I grew up with in the Amblin days. It was something that interested me for a while. I got out of school, and I was trying to make money acting on stage in Chicago. It wasn’t exactly the most lucrative thing. Of course, I didn’t have the most lucrative degrees either. The whole movie thing suddenly became real when I shifted to writing.
Scott: How about you, Dave?
David: I came at it more from a general love of reading. That led me to want to be a writer. I always thought I was going to get out of school and struggle along, trying to write novels. But I found that I couldn’t write plot. All my stories were about people standing around somewhere. [laughter] It was all interior. I wanted to try to learn how to write story, so I started looking into screenwriting, thinking, “OK, this is nothing but what happens. What you see and what you hear.” And I just never really looked back. I always loved movies, and once I got into screenwriting, I found that it’s what I really love to do. I ended up going to the Vancouver Film School for their screenwriting program.
Scott: I’ve talked to several writers who’ve attended that school. I think Seth Lochhead, who wrote Hanna, did if I’m not mistaken.
David: Yeah. I think he did.
Scott: I imagine you weren’t sustaining yourself writing interior-focused novels. How were you making a living before you got into screenwriting?
David: It was a long line of temp jobs, and then I was editing press releases for a while. I did a lot of freelance educational publishing work, and then was in-house at a couple of educational publishing companies. Recently I’ve gone back to freelancing. It’s been a good match. The last few years I’ve been mostly writing video scripts for educational publishing companies.
Scott: That sounds like a lot of writing.
David: It’s a lot of writing. It is.
Scott: TJ, if I understand correctly, you found your way into an ad agency type thing.
TJ: Yeah. That was an accidental, nice, serendipitous thing for me. Again, coming out of college with a degree in Acting and a minor in Literature is not the most marketable piece of paper. I temped out of school, and like I said, was doing a little bit of the stage acting thing at night. I wanted to try and get a full time job, something that was a little more stable, and just lucked my way into a really entry level position in an ad agency. I have not changed jobs since.
I started on the account side for maybe six months. Then, I got a chance to take a whack at the whole copywriting thing. Got in there, and now I’ve been a Creative Director for several years. That’s been really nice in terms of scratching the creative itch. It’s nice to be able to blend art and commerce. The screenwriting thing is obviously a totally different animal and has scratched the itch in a much more satisfying way, I’ll say.
Scott: Am I right in assuming that you two independently decided you wanted to begin screenwriting?
David: Yeah, that’s right. We hadn’t talked in a while. I think we got together over a beer because TJ had read Gravity’s Rainbow. We just started talking from there, and learned at that point that we were both independently working on screenplays. We traded writing. For a while, we were just reading each other’s stuff and giving each other notes, and then just decided it would be more fun to do it together.
TJ: Yeah. For me, there were many, many years of stumbling from one extracurricular creative effort after another, trying to find something that really satisfied me, and that I felt I was truly good at. With screenwriting, when you’re just doing it on your own and you’re not in LA and you’ve got a full time job, this thing that you’re doing, it feels very unreal. “Well, I’m writing a screenplay. This is going to go into a drawer. I have no contacts. I have nothing.” At the same time, seeing it come to life on the page was really exciting.
I remember when Dave and I went out for that drink. We’d seen each other in passing in the city for a few years before that, but when we went out, I remember being really excited that he was screenwriting. He sent me his script and I thought, “This is really, really good.” I was like, “I can do this too.” I’d been doing it but I’d never really been considering, “Can this be real?” Even just meeting with him, talking about it, seeing that he was doing it, made me feel like, “You know what, why not?”
David: I’d been fooling myself all along into thinking that this could be real.
[laughter]
TJ: Between the two of us, we’re still suspended in this semi-reality.
Scott: The script you wrote, Dave, that TJ read, was that after you had gone to the school in Vancouver?
David: I believe the one I gave him was after, yeah.
Scott: Was Vancouver a good experience for you?
David: Vancouver was a great experience. It was a really intense program. At that point, it was just a four-month program, but it was really intense four months. I think it’s expanded into a year now. It was a good experience. I feel like you can get the same education without going to school, but it’s really encouraging to be around people who are trying to do the same thing that you’re doing, and that are doing it, for at least those four months, full time. For that short period of time, it was amazing.
Scott: TJ, how did you go about learning the craft?
TJ: All I had to go on at that point was screenwriting software, screenwriting books and screenplays. There’s no doubt that reading screenplays felt more helpful. I started by trying to just learn the basics and just write. Creativity to me is a lot about not being afraid to fail. That was it. In the beginning, it was just me failing over and over on my own, not even sharing those with anyone. Just getting that stuff out of my system. That was how I dug into it.
Scott: You wrote a script which did very well in the Nicholl. That’s how you got a manager, correct?
TJ: Yes, that’s correct. It started with a script that I wrote that was a horror movie. And it’s funny: when I wrote it, it was called The Beneath, and it’s a contained horror thriller that takes place in a coalmine, and very, very strangely, it’s so ridiculous, it’s hard to believe, a movie came out a couple of years ago called Beneath, that is a contained horror movie that takes place in a coalmine. That just goes to show how hard it is to come up with anything truly unique.
But yeah, that script did very well. It was a semifinalist in the Nicholl and I remember being really thrilled about that. Then, Marc Manus, who’s now our manager, he reached out to me and we had a couple of good talks and he asked me if I had anything else.
I said, well I’ve got this writing partner that I’ve been working with for a couple years and we’ve got this script called Shut In. And I described it to him and he said, yeah, I’ll take a look at it. Then he got back to us right away, and between those two scripts, was very enthusiastic about making a partnership. And so that’s how we got Marc.
Tomorrow in Part 2, we dig into the inspiration for the movie Shut In and how the pair went about the process of writing the script.
If you have any questions for TJ or David, post in comments, and I will pass them along.
For ticket information about the upcoming Los Angeles Film Festival screenings for Shut In, go here.
TJ and David are repped by Marc Manus.
Twitter: @dkwite, @TeaJaySee.