Interview (Part 2): 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 2, we dig into the inspiration for the movie Shut In and how the pair went about the process of writing the script:

Scott: That’s a perfect segue to talking about your movie Shut In. The script won top honors at the 2011 Shriekfest and was on the 2012 Blood List, which is what represents Hollywood’s top unproduced horror screenplays. It’s now been produced as a movie starring Martin Starr, Beth Riesgraf, and Rory Culkin and directed by Adam Schindler. It makes its debut in June in the Los Angeles Film Festival.

Let’s talk about that story. Anna suffers from agoraphobia so crippling that when a trio of criminals breaks into her house, she cannot bring herself to flee. What the intruders don’t realize is that agoraphobia is not her only psychosis. What was the inspiration for Shut In?

TJ: OK. Well first of all, can I just say when you read all of that stuff together, it sounds really awesome.

[laughs]

Scott: I gave it my best DJ voice.

TJ: It’s amazing. That’s what, four years ago, and we’d written it for about a year prior to that. Looking back after five years and hearing all that together, yeah, it’s awesome. It feels awesome. Anyway, just had to throw in that little sidebar.

In terms of the inspiration, it’s funny. After I wrote my first full feature screenplay, which is better left undiscussed, I started to actually get pretty calculated in terms of what types of movies I wanted to write. At that point, I was writing with Dave, but I was also writing on my own. I just was, OK, first and foremost I’m not writing just to have a 100-page document sitting in a drawer somewhere. I want to get this made. I want to get movies made. And so I just started to calculate first and foremost.

Now, I’ve always been a huge horror buff, so that’s where my head naturally goes. Additionally, horror just happens to be something that can quite often be produced at a very low budget. I would start from that place. I would sit and brainstorm and try to come up with these contained in time and space stories. In this particular instance, I remember I was thinking about phobias, and how it’d be nice to set up a nice tension and irony through the logline alone.

This notion of agoraphobia was a very quick click for me, in terms of thinking about a woman who was more terrified of leaving her own home than any threat that could possibly be found inside of it. So I went through a few different things.

I was thinking at one point, because I really love supernatural stories, ghost stories, and at first I was going through that kind of thing. What if she’s in a haunted house, and she can’t leave? Then I just came upon this really simple notion of this grounded story that related to these guys that break in.

I thought it through maybe to the extent of a one sheet, a page of thinking, and then I pitched it to Dave. He responded enthusiastically, and had a few thoughts for it. The next day I had an email from him saying, “Hey, what do you think about making Shut In a Cimfel-White venture?”

David: We were working on a script at that point, and it was a comedy, which has since been forgotten. Probably for the best.

TJ: A lot of forgotten pages.

David: Yup. We were kind of throwing ideas back and forth, brainstorming concepts, and I heard that one, and the idea of that main character, that woman who can’t leave the house, it instantly came to life in my head.

I come at story from who the characters are, and I could see that character the instant he started talking about the concept. I couldn’t get it out of my head, so then I wrote that email, “Let’s do this one.”

Scott: It was an influential email in your lives.

David: Yes, it was.

TJ: Agreed. I think about it from that standpoint, and I know we’re not necessarily into the craft portion, but it’s something I’ve always felt, that Dave and I are really good foils for each other. A lot of times I think in terms of the broader, bigger story, commercial aspects, and Dave’s always the one who’s really helping me keep this sense of the most dimensional, interesting characters, and what kinds of dynamics those bring to the story. Those two things match up really well together.

Scott: You have this concept of a woman with agoraphobia. How soon did you come up with the idea of the home invasion?

TJ: Pretty much the same night. The woman, and the character is interesting, but I was initially just thinking even in terms of loglines, it was, “What’s the worst thing that I can have this woman have to face?” What’s that moment where she wants to flee, and gets stuck at the threshold of her door leading to the outdoors, and everybody who’s watching the movie should be screaming at her, “Run out!”

Ultimately, if we’ve done our job in setting up her story, and her plight, we’ll understand why she can’t.

Scott: I thought that was pretty clever. It’s like, “OK, you’re doing a contained thriller, so you’ve got the home invasion aspect.” What better way to make it a really contained thriller than by having a character who can’t leave even when she would have the opportunity to. She’s literally imprisoned in the house.

TJ: Yeah. We often would say, “This is like Panic Room. Only instead of physical walls keeping our character inside, it’s her mind.”

David: Right.

Scott: You mentioned Panic Room. Some other associations come to mind. Wait Until Dark. Audrey Hepburn playing a blind woman.

TJ: Oh, yeah.

Scott: Rear Window. Even A Clockwork Orange, specifically the home invasion by the Droogs. I was curious what movies may have inspired you as you went along in developing this story?

David: That’s great. We’ll say, “All the ones you just mentioned.” [laughter]

TJ: I was going to say. Thanks for keeping those in the same conversation with Shut In. That’s fantastic.

David: We definitely got together and watched Panic Room before we started writing to get a sense of the parameters of a home invasion movie.

TJ: It’s interesting, because there’s a certain point. I don’t know, Dave, I feel with that one it was very purposeful. We wanted to understand Panic Room from a structural level.

David: The way that movie is structured, it’s a very straight, linear story. Like boom, boom, boom. This happens, this happens, this happens. The pacing and everything, we wanted to get some of that. Keep that pacing in mind as we were going through and working out the beats in our story.

TJ: One of the other things is, I don’t know, maybe it’s a positive and a negative. There’s a certain point where I want to stop thinking about outward influences in other movies, because it worries me that it’s going to somehow color the way that I’ve written, and more importantly, the choices that I make when writing.

It was almost like we looked at that, analyzed that, talked about it. Then after that, it was off to the races. You almost don’t even think about anything else.

Scott: In writing the story, I’m curious whether you thought about agoraphobia from a metaphorical standpoint. For instance, Anna is imprisoned by her psychological condition, but she’s also, as it turns out, imprisoned by some key event in the past.

Then the three thieves show up, and this other character. They end up becoming imprisoned. Then there’s even a bird in a birdcage. Were you thinking about the larger symbolic, thematic ramifications, or implications, or possibilities of agoraphobia, characters being or becoming trapped?

David: Yeah, we absolutely were. As we developed the characters, we tried specifically to set up every character so that they are in some way stuck in whatever situation they’re in.

TJ: We built these pretty elaborate character write ups for them that influence how you write the script, but you never see even glimpses… I shouldn’t say glimpses, but you don’t get even a tip of the iceberg of what they actually have in terms of their lives, and the backstories that we built for them.

We were always looking for what it is about this person’s life that they’re stuck in, and that they want to free themselves from. That goes for every character in the story.

Scott: Interesting you mention that because there’s a big plot twist in the story, which the summaries that I read before kind of tip off, that basically these thieves have no idea the type of individual they’re messing with. In the end, Anna’s story, unlike Panic Room, which is more about survival, this is as much about redemption in a way, isn’t it, by the end of the story?

David: It is. I feel like once we dug into the story, what we realized is that the story we were writing was basically the story of whether or not Anna would be able to overcome her agoraphobia.

TJ: And everything in terms of her past that kind of led to that condition. I would also say that we didn’t… Without the twist, without getting into it in detail, without it we still had a story. We had a complete movie, but we didn’t want to just write a survival movie, and that’s what ultimately made us so interested in telling the story, is that we were talking about more than survival.

We were not just hopefully creating an experience of disorientation for the audience at certain moments in the movie, but also creating a sense that this is so much more than a standard home invasion movie.

Tomorrow in Part 3, David and TJ discuss using the house as a character.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

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.