Interview (Part 3): 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 3, Jon discusses other key characters in his script “Free Byrd”:

Scott: Let’s jump to that character, Cole Cash. How would you describe him?

Jon: Cole is modern times. He’s like young people now. They all have this perspective of nothing is impossible, “I’m just going to do it.” but it’s also like he gotten lost in it. I see him as this character that, let’s use NBA basketball as an example:

There’s guys like Allen Iverson, or these guys that came out of these rough neighborhoods, and they saw basketball as an escape. I kind of thought Cole was something of that. He was escaping a shitty relationship with a father who was never there for him, and he found something that he was good at, and he just dove in. It was his escape.

That became his passion and then it turned into a career. I’ve seen it from my background in action sports. What starts as a passion, a way of life. You slowly become a product. Or a brand. That’s what happened to Cole. Instead of this leader in a sport that he loves, he became a product…

Scott: A commodity.

Jon: Exactly, he’s a commodity. He’s a commodity for the people that are around him, he’s a commodity for himself. It’s all about merchandise and its branding. It was sort of my poke at the way the world is now. Everything’s about branding. When did we lose that moment of passion for life? That inception of just wanting to do something because we had to do it?

Scott: Is it fair to say that Cole is on the edge of feeling, using psychological language , like he’s in an inauthentic existence. Then he sees Billy, who represents an authentic individual?

Jon: Exactly. It’s that authenticity that is lost. Like you said, he’s become the monster that we’ve all created. It’s just, “How much stuff can you sell? How many endorsements can you get?” You just become a billboard.

Scott: Not so great.

Jon: No. I was going to say that was something that was very personal for me because, when I was ending my snowboarding career, I was kind of sick of that. I loved traveling around the world, and being around friends, and meeting new people, and experiencing these incredible adventures.

Then, when it started becoming a job, I got a strong distaste for it in my mouth. I didn’t like the whole billboard aspect. Probably naively on my part because I [laughs] probably could have made a whole lot of money, but it just didn’t sit well with me. I just wasn’t that guy.

There are guys that just feed off of that, and they just want to become superstars. Everything’s a deal. I really wanted to have that moment with Cole where, through the relationship with Billy, he starts seeing what it’s all about again, and what matters. At the same time, Billy learned something from him. Like his lost youth. His zest for life again.

Scott: You mentioned earlier a father/son type of relationship, and it certainly does feel like that. Here’s Cole who had essentially been cut off from his own biological father, and Billy who’s never had a son. Yet, at one point, Billy says to Cole, “I see myself in you, a lot of who I used to be that did something.”

Does he see in Cole someone a more innocent or younger version of himself, or someone with the potential to do something?

Jon: I think so. I think it’s along the lines of that he sees that fire that’s in the kid’s belly. But also that it’s being lost. It’s being clouded by all the glitz that’s surrounding him. That started happening to Billy, as well. It’s along the lines of even Evel Knievel. If you remember, he started off as this young, handsome guy who captivated the world by doing something no one else had ever done. It was just insane the things that he did, but then it slowly became a monster. And then he was the monster.

He just became the monster that he created. It was like he crumbled underneath the weight of fame and notoriety, for the things that he did. He just had to one-up himself every single time, and it was killing him.

I think that he sees that in Cole. He just sees that he’s getting lost in this world of economics versus, “Why are you doing this?” Like, “Why do you do something that could possibly kill you?”

Scott: Yeah, it has a feel of almost like…It’s like a Western, the old gunslinger…

Jon: I love that you just said that because I just wanted it to have that feel of the Americana. It’s something that seems to be lost in today’s modern world.

Scott: …strapping it on one last time, and he meets the young kid who idolized him. Right?

Jon: Yeah. It’s funny because I’ve always wanted to write, a form of a western. I love Westerns. It’s something with my father that we shared together, and my dad loved old gunslinger movies. He was like an old cowboy. I wanted it to have that feel. Like “Shane.” That lone guy that comes out, and does something, and he’s enigmatic. I just love that about Westerns. You don’t find that in too many movies these days.

Scott: He has a moment where he says something after he starts getting back into the racing thing. He makes this public proclamation. He says, “Hello, my name is Billy Bird, and I’m a motorcycle stunt man. I believe that we were put on this good earth for a reason, and mine is to soar in the sun, living life to the fullest, the life God gave us.”

It’s a very interesting observation because you could say to him, “Well, you know, you had this accident and it stopped you from participating in the motorcycle activities. Would you believe that God did that to you?” I think he probably believes it was unfairly taken from him, and that his truly God given life is somebody doing the motorcycle stunts. Is that a fair assessment?

Jon: Yeah, I think so. I’m not a religious person, but I like the idea of who he was. He had this strong faith in what he believed in, and what he believed he did, and why he did it. Where we meet him, he’s at the stage of life now where after he’s been beat down and he hasn’t been doing anything that he did in his earlier life. He feels robbed. It’s like this whole story is his unfinished business.

That’s where his saltiness comes from, I think. He feels like he was let down by something that he truly believed in, that he truly lived by. It was like a code that he lived by, and it was taken from him.

That’s the thing. Nobody likes to be handed their hat. Everybody wants to leave the party on their own accord, and he never got to do that.

Scott: He’s put together kind of a parallel life with this girlfriend, Maggie, more of a domestic kind of a thing. Could you describe what Maggie her character, what she represents in the story?

Jon: It’s funny because that is currently evolving. It’s something, even where it sits right now, I’ve always wanted her to be that sense of future with Billy and what he should be having at this stage in his life. But, because he has unfinished business, he can’t see it.

At the same time, I struggled with this because I wanted her to be this strong character that was more than just like this, “I want a baby. I want a baby,” and it probably just comes across a little bit like that in the current draft which I want to address, but it was more than that. She wants to create something with Billy, but he just can’t see that at this moment.

I just wanted her to be this character that it’s right in front of him the whole time. We have this thing in snowboarding, and it comes from surfing, called chasing rhinos. It comes from big wave surfing. We’re chasing that thing that we don’t really know sometimes that it’s right in front of us, and in doing so, it can destroy you.

There’s all sorts of different metaphorical things that you can look at, but I just thought that she needed to stand for a new beginning, and a fresh start, and moving forward. Because he can’t see it yet, it’s kind of a little stagnant and there’s a bit of tension there.

Tomorrow in Part 4, Jon shares what it was like to have his script make the 2013 Black List.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, here.

Jon is repped by WME and Zero Gravity Management.

Twitter: @jonboyer.