Interview (Part 5): Brad Ingelsby (2012 Black List)

[The movie Run All Night rolls out in theaters on Friday, March 13, reason enough to reprise my March 2013 interview with the movie’s screenwriter Brad Ingelsby.]

Brad Ingelsby is one busy writer with at least six projects in various states of development and production including Hold on to Me and Run All Night [both on the 2012 Black List] and The Raid. Plus in a nice bit of synergy for us, he sold a high-profile pitch “Merry Men” just last week to DreamWorks.

Brad was kind enough to do an interview and we had an excellent conversation. Today in Part 5, Brad talks more about the craft of screenwriting:

Scott: How about dialogue. Do you think this is a talent writers are born with or is it a skill that can be developed?

Brad: I’m sure there are some that are born with it. I know I wasn’t. It’s taken me a long time to get to a place where I feel comfortable writing OK dialogue. I don’t think I’m quite at the place I want to be, but one of the lessons I learned, especially at AFI and later working with producers and directors, is to get rid of all the boring stuff. Everyone knows the rule that a scene has to be moving the story forward or it has to be in some way developing a character. If you can look at all of your scenes and say, “A) You’re moving the story forward in some way or B) It’s developing a character, then it’s worthy to stay in the script. If it’s not then you need to get rid of it.”

The same with the dialogue. Is the dialogue moving the story forward or is it revealing something about the character? Also, what is it revealing? Why is it important to reveal this? What does it tell us about the character’s journey or the character’s flaw or what the character wants?

One thing Len Schrader said to me sticks out, ‘Every story needs to be about life or death.’ Every story. That doesn’t necessarily mean a physical death, but it needs to be that the hero wants something so desperately that it’s life or death for him or her.

That has to come out in the dialogue as well. What does this character want and more importantly why do they want it? Those are the things that I tend to look at as I’m writing my dialogue. If I’m not hitting one of those at the moment — moving a story forward or revealing character — then I’ll try to get rid of it.

Scott: What is your understanding of theme and does that play much in the way you think about and develop your stories?

Brad: I think it does. I think it sort of has to. I wish I had the best way to define what theme is. I know what it means to me, I guess. If you look at the main character, what is the story really about to that person? Why are we going on this journey with them? I don’t like to go into a script saying, “I want to write a story about forgiveness,” and then try to fit forgiveness into every single scene. That feels maudlin and a bit silly to try to imbue every scene with a theme. It feels like a homework assignment and it doesn’t allow for much discovery or revelation. After all, you’ve already told yourself what the movie is about. You’ve limited yourself.

What I prefer to do is say, here’s a character. I like this character and I know the journey I’d like him or her to go on. And then I write that journey, that arc, and then I let the audience or reader decide what the theme is. Let them take what they want from the story. If you say a movie is about forgiveness, then an audience or a reader is only looking for that theme in the material and there’s no discovery. But if you present them with a character on a journey, they’re able to take away from that character and that journey what they want. It’s less limiting, I think. Stories mean different things to different people.

Scott: When you finish a first draft and you’re faced with the inevitable rewriting process, are there some keys you have or approaches you use to bring that script home?

Brad: I think it really varies with each script. With “Run All Night” we actually didn’t do a lot of rewriting at all. I felt the script was in a good place and my manager, Brooklyn, and my agent, Mike, agreed. We got Roy Lee involved. He was a great advocate and believer and he submitted it to Warner Brothers.

With “Hold on to Me” that was a much larger revision. The initial draft was 150 pages long. It was a real ‘Boogie Nights’ style epic that took place over a number of decades. In earlier drafts we showed a lot Nancy growing up, as a young girl and then as a teenager, in an attempt to introduce the audience to her world, her stage mother, her absent father. We wanted the audience to understand why Nancy wanted so desperately to break away. Because the movie gets dark and Nancy’s desire to break away leads her down a really really dark path, we had to understand her and sympathize with her. So when she finally does go down that dark path the audience doesn’t lose her. They remember that pageant girl getting her hair done inside a shitty bathroom by her mother. They remember the girl everyone called a slut at the country club. Without those scenes the audience loses sympathy and then the movie’s over. Everyone’s walking out of the theater because they think she’s a monster. So those scenes of Nancy as a youngster were incredibly important, but we had to pick and choose the ones that were most important. And James Marsh was particularly great at picking the gems.

I think it varies, really. I don’t have a method of going back in and looking at stuff. It’s just dealing with, “What’s this story about?” and if a scene or a character or a sequence isn’t aiding us in that character’s journey then we need to get rid of it.

Scott: What’s your actual writing process like?

Brad: It’s changed a bit because I have a daughter now. That throws things off a little bit. I’m at home and I have a little one running around and when she comes up and pulls at my shirt and wants me to push her around on a bike, I can’t resist. I usually get up around 6:30. I’ll write until about 10:00, maybe. I’ll go for a run. I’ll maybe do a little work in the afternoon, and then I usually start back up at night. I’m sort of an early‑morning writer and a late‑at‑night writer. If the writing’s going good I could start at 8:00 or 9:00 and go until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning. Those are usually the hours that I like to write, early morning, late at night.

Tomorrow in Part 6, Brad talks working with his managers and agents.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, here.

Part 4, here.

Brad is repped by WME and Energy Entertainment.