Interview (Part 4): Gary Whitta

A few months back, I had the opportunity to interview screenwriter Gary Whitta whose movie credits include The Book of Eli (2010), After Earth (2013), and the upcoming Star Wars: Rogue One (2016). Having recently seen his first novel “Abomination” published, Gary and I had a wide-ranging conversation touching on a host of subjects which I think readers will find quite interesting.

Today in Part 4, Gary and I discuss “Abomination” and why he chose to write this particular story as a novel and not a screenplay:

Scott: Let’s get to your novel “Abomination,” which you can get right now from Amazon. Here’s some background on the story setting:

“After the fall of the Roman Empire, chaos and bloodshed swept across the remains of Western civilization like a plague. Consumed by fuel of warfare, you’re pledged into a century’s long era of illiteracy and cultural desolation from which few historical records survive.

Some believe that the true history of this Dark Age was deliberately concealed by its surviving scholars, too incredible to be believed, too terrible to be retold until now.”

My first question for you is why a novel? Why not a screenplay?

Gary: Screenwriting is my first language, that’s what I’m most competent and experienced at doing. I understand the cadence and the rhythms and the craft to screenwriting better than I do any other form, so when a new idea comes along, I usually look at it as a movie first. But after working in the trenches of Hollywood screenwriting now for 15 years, I think I’ve become quite good at anticipating all the reasons why a studio or a producer might say no to a project. And there are a lot of reasons, especially with original pieces. Eli was a small miracle in that it was a very out of left-field spec script, not all that cheap to produce, with a lot of controversial, potentially non‑commercial subject matter. So to see it made and certainly see it made at the level that it was, with people like Denzel Washington, was insane. That hardly ever, ever happens. We live in a world now where almost everything is a franchise. Hollywood has become very risk averse. It’s essentially now in the business of adapting properties that have already proven themselves to have an audience, whether it be Hunger Games or Star Trek or whatever. I enjoy those movies as much as anyone, but their dominance has made it very, very difficult for people to break through with original ideas. People often forget, Star Wars started as a spec script. Every big franchise started with an original piece of material.

That’s a long way of saying when I thought of the idea for Abomination, I went through the checklist of what a movie executive might say in terms of rejecting this as a spec script. With Eli, it was really my naivety that got me through this process. The fact that I was not quite seasoned enough back then to recognize that it was really unlikely to be made meant that I was able to write it. I don’t know if I would write it today.

With Abomination, I had a similar feeling of not knowing if I could sell it as a movie, but I really wanted to tell the story and I didn’t want the work to go to waste. Often times you write a spec script and if a handful of people in Hollywood don’t respond to it, that’s pretty much it, it’s done. It will sit on a shelf and that story will never find an audience because the screenplay itself is not the finished product. It’s the foundation for what you hope will one day become a finished film. The idea of putting all this work into an idea that I was really attracted to only to then see it probably not get made… I didn’t want to go through that again. Like every writer, I’ve had unsold specs and it’s really disheartening every time.

I thought maybe there’s another way to tell the story where I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to put it in front of an audience. Write it as a novel and I could either find a publisher for it, which again, is not terribly easy to do. I knew that even if publishers rejected, I could always go to Amazon and publish it myself via their Kindle system and it would find an audience. There’s no one in that process between me and the audience. We’ve come a long way from the days of vanity publishing where there was a stigma attached to publishing your own book. We’ve had some really great pathfinders, people like Hugh Howey and Andy Weir. The Martian, which Andy wrote and initially put up for free on his website, has gone on to be a New York Times bestseller and is being made into a movie by Ridley Scott. We’re seeing more and more of these legitimate success stories that have bypassed the traditional route to getting a creative work into the market and in front of an audience.

Scott: What does it mean to tell a story in prose? What are some of the things that would allow a writer to do that where it might not be quite so easy in a screenplay?

Gary: There’s a fair amount of back story in Abomination, which in a film is often hard to manage. The characters spent a lot of time on their own because it’s a very solitary world. It’s very much an intimate character piece, so I wanted to be able to spend time inside the heads of the characters. Again, in film, that can be tricky to do but it’s the perfect kind of story for an intimate form like a novel.

Scott: I’ve read where one of your original inspirations, perhaps, the original story for Abomination was to write a story featuring monsters. Could you unpack that a bit?

Gary: I grew up watching a lot of pulp, popcorn entertainment so all my ideas start with some of that DNA in it, I think. There’s initially always a schlocky, pulpy idea at the root of it, which is good because it means there’s probably a commercial idea there, something that might have broad appeal.

With Eli, as I mentioned, it was the idea of wanting to do The Man With No Name, do my version of a classic pulp lone hero. But I know that there has to be more to it than that than just pure pulp, I don’t want to be in the business of creating stuff that you can enjoy for a couple of hours then you’ve forgotten about it the next day. There has to be some thematic foundation, something that resonates. Something a little bit more substantial or creatively nutritious to make you feel like you saw something worthwhile.

With Eli, that came through the religious subtext. With Abomination, I started out wanting to like a really gnarly, old-fashioned monster story. I grew up with the Universal monster films… Wolfman, Frankenstein, Dracula and Creature from the Black Lagoon, all that great stuff. John Carpenter’s The Thing was also a hugely influential film for me. So my initial thinking was, how can I come up with an idea that would allow me to create the most horrific, gnarly, sickening, disgusting, horrible monsters you can imagine? Then, beyond that, again, I try to find a story that’s a little more substantial than that, the real, relatable, human story underneath.

Scott: The story starts off feeling like it’s going to be this big war epic. You’ve got Alfred the Great, the church, monsters, magic and the English versus marauding Viking warriors. Then, as it goes along, it evolves into something much more personal involving two rather tragic hero characters who eventually intersect.

You started off with this idea of wanting to do a monster movie, but you knew you wanted to elevate the material. I’m guessing that it was these characters that drew you in that direction.

Gary: Yeah. It’s very much a character piece which, again, is why creatively I wanted to write it in prose because it gave me that ability to write interior monologue and spend a whole chapter what will probably be five or ten minutes of film without ever hearing that character speak but living inside their heads. We actually did that in the first then minutes of Eli, those opening scenes are very quiet with no dialog and you’re just following Denzel, getting a sense of what it’s like to live in this desolate world. But it’s very difficult to do extended portions of a movie that way.

And yeah, as you say, the book kind of does the opposite of a typical movie structure, which tends to escalate in scope and scale. All the big battle stuff is in the first third, and then the story contracts to just be about these two particular characters. Again, anticipating the movie development version of that story, I can see the guy across the table saying, “The movie needs to get bigger as it goes along, not smaller.” And if we were ever to do a film adaptation of it, it’s entirely possible that we might move elements of the story around to try and make it fit more of a typical cinematic structure. For the time being, I had this story that I wanted to tell and I didn’t want it to necessarily have to fit in a Hollywood movie shaped box.

Scott: That dynamic — part monster, part man type of an aspect of one of the characters — it poses a question we see in a lot of stories whereby key characters are confronted by this question, “Who are you?” That issue of self‑identity, you said selflessness earlier, that issue of self‑identity that’s a pretty key component to both of these two characters, but particularly the one.

Gary: Absolutely. I mean, all the really good monster stories whether it be Jekyll and Hyde or Frankenstein or The Incredible Hulk. Somebody mentioned The Fly to me the other day. It’s another good example. They’re all stories about identity and the monster within.

One of the characters in Abomination speaks to that theme quite directly. If there’s one idea that says, “This is the theme of the story”, with Abomination it is the idea that we all have monstrous parts of our personality deep down inside. It’s a constant daily battle, to live the better version of ourselves and defeat our inner demons and be a good person when often times our lesser angels and the circumstance of the world around us are taking us in another direction.

That is a constant fight that all of us have every day. A monster story like Abomination allows me to you externalize that and there literally is a monster that our hero is struggling to control. All good science fiction, all good fantasy is supposed to do this. You take something that resonates us in the real world and you find an extraordinary way to illustrate that idea. There’s a great quote that I wish I could take credit for — “Science fiction is not an escape from it reality, it’s a way to understand it.” And I think that’s what all the greats have done. If you look at Bradbury, at Asimov, at Vonnegut or Ballard, all the great science fiction authors have found ways to speak to the human condition and what’s happening in our society by taking those everyday themes and exploding them out into these very imaginative, outlandish explorations of those ideas that put them into sharp relief.

Tomorrow in Part 5, we delve more deeply into “Abomination,” the experience Gary had writing a novel in contrast to a screenplay, and some questions about the craft of writing.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, here.

To learn more about Gary’s 400 page historical fantasy novel “Abomination,” go here.

To purchase “Abomination,” go here and here.

Gary has graciously agreed to answer reader questions, so if you have any, please post in comments.

Gary is repped by UTA and Circle of Confusion.

Twitter: @garywhitta.