Interview (Part 6): 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 6, Gary offers advice on the single best way to learn the craft of screenwriting:

Scott: What do you think about when you’re writing a scene? Do you have specific goals in mind?

Gary: It’s good to know your basic input and output. What do you have coming into the scene and what do you want to come out of it with? What do you want the scene to achieve? Sometimes it’s about servicing a single idea. Often, when I’m in the very, very beginning of the story process, I’ll write a little note, a little idea. It could be a specific line or a moment or a scene or a twist. I don’t even where or how it’s going to fit into the story, but I know I want it in there somewhere. With Abomination, there’s a moment like that, an idea I had very early on that I knew I wanted in the story no matter what. And I was lucky to be able to keep it in there because often the development process doesn’t allow it. Sometimes, you have an idea like that for years, that little moment or line or idea that you really want in the story. When you finally get to the point where you’ve developed the story enough to write it, you realize the greater demands of the story don’t allow you to have that moment anymore. It’s got to be sacrificed.

Scott: You say you tend to write long, maybe even a 180‑paged script. So you finish the draft. Now you’re facing the rewrite. Do you have a rewrite process?

Gary: The first draft is what I’ve come to know as the vomit draft or a dump draft because it feels like it comes out of me so quickly… well, you get the idea. It used to be with me that I’d start each writing day by reviewing the previous day’s pages. But that would usually wind up with me, spending the whole rest of that day rewriting them and I’d not get any new pages down. I’ve since learned not to do that. Never look in the rear view mirror. Keep writing, keep moving forward. So I don’t review the previous day’s work anymore. Vomit out that draft, let it sit for a bit, and then come back and take a look and see where you are. Then you can start the process of initially trying to get it down to some length.

I tend to write my first drafts very, very long, throwing in everything, and I’ll take a saw to it later. A scene that might start as 12 pages of dialogue might end up back down to two or three pages, or even no dialogue at all, or maybe I’ll just cut the whole scene. It’s surprisingly satisfying to write a bunch of stuff and then realize later that the script’s better off without any of it and just kill it.

Scott: This isn’t so much a craft question, but it’s one I get asked a lot by aspiring screenwriters, which is, “Do I have to move to LA?” You live in San Francisco. That doesn’t seem to inhibit your ability to work in Hollywood. I’m interested what your thoughts would be on that whole “You have to live in LA” thing.

Gary: I personally don’t think that being in LA is necessary to break in as a writer, but it certainly can’t hurt. I would hesitate to advise anyone to just quit their job and throw everything into a U-Haul and drive off to LA on a wing and a prayer. There are too many sad stories that began that way. If you want to be an actor, then you do need to be in LA, because you are the product. You have to go to auditions. You have to do that stuff. But you can write a decent script from anywhere. The difficulty begins once people start to get interested in your script. At that point you are going to have to go LA to go to meetings and for development.

Scott: You’re very active on Twitter. What is it for you that works about Twitter?

Gary: Part of it is because I work from home, as many writers do, and it’s a very solitary experience. I used to work in a collaborative office. When I edited magazines for a living, I was surrounded by 10 or 12 other very creative people, and we used to goof off and mess around and chat while we were working. Once I moved away from that and sat in a little private office on my own, just me and the screen, I started to realize how much you rely on having other creative people around you to feed your own creativity, to keep the motor running. When you sit in a vacuum and you’re staring at a cursor blinking on a blank page, it can be much harder to start that engine.

Even though it can be a tremendous tool for procrastination and distraction, I became quite active on both Twitter and Facebook because that is my way to supplement what I no longer have, which is other voices around me when I’m working, to stimulate my creativity. And it really has become a very legitimate networking and business tool. I’ve met and become quite friendly with a lot of other writers and filmmakers and people in this business that I never would have met otherwise. I’ve had several legitimate work opportunities that have come up purely through the contacts I’ve made on social media that absolutely would not have happened otherwise.

Scott: I would certainly recommend people to follow you on Twitter (@garywhitta) because you post some really interesting things and get into some good conversations.

Gary: It’s mostly stupid stuff about cake, but every now and again there’s something in there that might be worth reading.

Scott: Or darts. You did this thing when you were over in the UK recently, and you were obsessing about watching darts on TV.

Gary: Oh, you’ve reminded me. I’ve got to find a way to try and find a way to get darts on American television. It’s going to be a struggle.

Scott: We started off the interview with all these things you’ve done in your life, and now you’ve added novelist. What’s next for Gary Whitta? TV? Directing? Poetry?

Gary: [laughs] I have a comic book that’s coming out next year. Again, talking about projects having a second shot at life, the very first thing that I wrote even before Reaper, the thing that first got me into the business, was post‑apocalyptic Oliver Twist story called Oliver. I mentioned before the frustration of when you write a spec script and you put a lot of work into it, and it’s something that’s just not destined to ever really be seen by people. But with Oliver I was determined to tell that story in one form or another, so years later I revisited the script and reverse‑engineered as a comic book story. I found a very talented artist by the name of Darick Robertson, who is now the co‑creator of this with me. I’m writing it, and he’s drawing it. That’s going to be coming out from Image Comics early next year. I’m glad I will finally get to scratch that particular itch because there’s nothing worse for a writer than an untold story.

Scott: One last question, Gary. It’s the obvious one. I’m sure you get hit up with it all the time, which is what advice can you offer aspiring screenwriters, TV writers, comic book writers whatever about learning the craft and breaking into the business?

Gary: I just tell people to read really great scripts. I do think there are some books that are worth reading. I’m not aggressively against the how-to books, but I think you can get too caught up in the world of screenwriting gurus and people that profess to have the secrets to writing a blockbuster movie. Mostly those people are full of shit. There’s one book I really like called “How Not to Write a Screenplay” by Denny Martin Flinn, who wrote Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and that was one of the few that I read that I felt like had really good, practical advice. It wasn’t necessarily telling you what to do, but was making you aware of various pitfalls and how to avoid things that aspiring, newbie writers very easily fall into. I thought that’s one of the few screenwriting books I ever read that made an impression on me. And if a writer is trying to give me advice, I’m always looking at their qualification to give that advice. Denny Martin Flinn wrote one of the best Star Trek films, so I’m much more likely to listen to him than the guy who’s got no writing credits but apparently holds the secret keys to Hollywood success. I always find that very strange.

I’m quite envious of writers starting off nowadays. They’ve got this vast resource through the Internet of great, great screenplays that they can go read and learn from. And I encourage people not just to read scripts of great movies that they’ve seen. It can be very instructive to look at a movie that you love and then read the original script and see how what was on the page was translated into the screen and what changed and what didn’t. But when you’re reading a script for a film that you’ve seen, your memory of the film is always there informing what you’re reading on the page. So I think it can be much more instructive to read great scripts for films that haven’t been made, or that you haven’t seen. Read those because the objective of a screenwriter, of a screenplay, is to communicate and paint a picture of what the movie is going to look and sound and feel like and the emotions it’s going to evoke in your mind purely through words on a page. And it’s a very, very difficult job to do, but when it works well, when you’ve read a great screenplay, you feel like you’ve seen the movie.

Jon Spaihts’ Passengers is a script that I point a lot of people to. Just a tremendous, tremendous script. I read that script, and it felt like I had seen the movie. That’s one example, but there are many others. Look at the Black List every year and read those scripts. Read The Imitation Game. Even without seeing the movie, that’s a fantastic script. So that’s my advice, devour really good scripts from really good writers and learn from them. By all means read the books, learn about formatting, learn about three‑act structure and that stuff, but don’t feel beholden to it. Allow yourself to experiment, to bend and break the rules you’ve learned. The more that you try to adhere to some kind of screenwriting formula, the more likely you are to end up with a formulaic screenplay, and who wants that?

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, here.

Part 4, here.

Part 5, 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.