Interview (Part 6): Rachael Prior — Big Talk Productions
One of the delights about spending time on Twitter is having met and gotten to know Rachael Prior. Whip smart and passionate about movies and storytelling, Rachael is the Head of Film at Big Talk Pictures, a U.K.-based film company overseeing movies such as Attack the Block, Cuban Fury, and the excellent romantic comedy Man Up (2015), written by Tess Morris, directed by Ben Palmer, and starring Lake Bell and Simon Pegg. Previously Rachael worked in development at Working Title where she was involved numerous movies including Edgar Wright’s ‘Blood & Ice-Cream Trilogy’ — Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End.
Recently I had a wide-ranging hour-long transatlantic conversation with Rachael. Today in Part 6, Rachael offers advice encouraging writers to write from a place of passion for their stories:
Scott: You mentioned treatments and outlines. Has that changed over time, where you work with writers much more at those formative stages before they go to draft?
Rachael: In the UK, an outline or a treatment is often a way that an agent is introducing you to an idea, especially if a writer is known to you or known to the industry. You expect to be able to take a gamble on whether you think they can write it or not.
My complaint is really more with traditional treatments that are 15, 20 plus pages long that I find completely reductive and a pointless exercise. I’d rather work on a beat sheet with a writer in preparation for first draft than a prose-led document.
A good outline, a four or five page outline, is a great way to sell a movie. We’re lucky in the UK. I think the ratio of writer to development money is probably a little healthier that it is in the US. We have access to government funding for development in the UK, so it’s not the toughest thing in the world, if you’ve got a great idea and a track record, to get paid to write it from outline to script. Whereas, and this is only me gathering consensus from being on Twitter and being amongst a community of writers that are working both in the US and UK, it seems to me like the US is, I don’t know if you would have a better idea than me, but it seems like essentially you have to write a script to sell something, unless you are working at a reasonably high level.
Scott: That’s been a sea change since when I first started in the business in 1987. Specs were basically just something a writer took on to break in. Once you did, you lived off assignments and pitches, but with the shrinkage in development money, many established writers will routinely write at least one spec a year.
Rachael: It is a big change, and I do worry how it will keep out writers that just can’t afford to be in the places that they need to be, geographically, to become a screenwriter.
When you essentially have to do, at a minimum for a spec… Let’s say the fastest writer in the world writes a spec that is ready to be seen by the industry in two months. The reality is longer, right? It takes longer, especially to polish one, from scratch.
The economics of being a screenwriter, particularly starting out in Hollywood right now, are challenging, to say the least. I do think we’re slightly luckier in the UK, in terms of access to development money and it being easier to live outside of the capital and travel in for meetings, etc. The flip side of that is that we make far less films, and it’s a much less buoyant industry here.
Scott: Rachael, let’s jump to Big Talk because it’s quite an audacious slate of things you’ve got going on here. Edgar Wright’s “Baby Driver,” the Black List script, “Section Six,” “Off Season,” “Kidnapped by the Kids”.
The first thing that strikes me is, it’s a wide variety of things going on there. Can you talk a bit about what the Big Talk’s about, in terms of the development?
Rachael: It’s an eclectic slate, and I love everything we’ve put on it. It isn’t all comedy or out and out genre. We’re doing an adaptation of James Lasdun’s ‘The Horned Man’, for example, which is a fucked-up psycho-sexual thriller. It’s is not the type of movie we are associated with, but it’s the type of movie we want to do more of, alongside the stuff we are better known for. It’s a slow process, building out from the core content we love and are known for, but we all want to do that, and keep things moving forward.
As producers and longtime collaborators, Nira, Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, our tastes are wide ranging and always evolving. What I like about what we are able to do at Big Talk, and this all stems really from Nira and her amazing work ethic, is that we continue to take risks and do work that satisfies us professionally, first and foremost. I love that about the company that I work for. When I say ‘work for’, it just feels weird, because it’s the company that I’m part of, that’s what it feels like. It’s a family.
What we do on the whole is make authored, commercial films. That’s the best way I can describe it. We get the chance to work with new writers and new directors on lower budget things, and then we work with the world’s best… Joe Cornish, Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg… That’s what’s so phenomenal about my job, that I am sitting in a room with those guys, really just being schooled most of the time, then two hours later, helping a writer on their first commissioned feature script.
I’m being a little bit mean to myself, because a big part of the reason I came to Big Talk was because we all got on so well working on “Shaun of the Dead”, “Hot Fuzz” and “Paul” together. I was their Creative Exec at Working Title on those films and we were just simpatico, I guess.
Scott: Maybe you could take over Hollywood, that would be great. What you’re talking about are exactly the kind of movies I’d like to see.
Rachael: [laughs] If you want to spend two years of your life on a broad action movie that you find hateful and soulless, the financial rewards can be huge, but maybe your life is going to be pretty miserable.
At Big Talk, we’re always going to love what we’re working on. So when it’s horrible, and painful, and we’re up until 3:00 am fighting for whatever we have to fight for as you inevitably do on every movie that comes along, we are motivated because we believe creatively in what we’re fighting for. It’s always going to be for something that we love and believe in. I feel very lucky, and I have to credit Nira with fostering that approach to producing, and creating that kind of creative environment at her company.
Scott: Maybe we could end with that, drawing some relatability to perhaps advice you would give to screenwriters. I’m imagining this to be the case, where you would say you’re passionate about these projects, but that a writer should have that equal amount of passion about a story. That they’ve got to have an emotional resonance with the story in order to have it come alive.
Rachael: Absolutely. I think there is a really good quote from Richard Curtis on this, I should look it up, but it’s something like, “Writing a spec is like committing to a girlfriend. You’d better love it, because you need to love it as much when it’s giving birth to your third kid as you did when you first met.”
It’s a long‑term relationship you’re going to have with this material, and you’re going to be given notes on certain scenes so many times you’re going to want to throw it out of the window. If you don’t particularly care for it, or you’re ambivalent towards it, then your life is going to be pretty miserable.
Everybody is different. Some people are actually, I don’t mean this in a bad way, but some people are really driven by financial success. That is what makes them happy, that’s what gets them up in the morning. That’s fine, if that’s driving you, because you will presumably find the energy and the commitment to keep going at that script — although if you’re getting into screenwriting for the money, you are definitely in the wrong game.
Key to getting the balance right is writing material you are connected to, that you believe in, that it’s resonating on some level for you. Because if not, you’re going to get really, really cross, annoyed, and bored, and frustrated with it. You won’t do good work, and that, ultimately, is self‑defeating.
Scott: To flip it, it’s more likely if you’re emotionally invested in it, that the words will lift up off the pages and it’ll actually come to life, right?
Rachael: Completely. It seems like an obvious thing to say, but it’s absolutely the case. That said, I don’t know a single writer that I admire, and is successful, that doesn’t have their moments of really hating it. You hit those moments, in the writing process — you hit walls. You question the sanity of doing this for a living.
It can be frustrating and enraging. I don’t even know how that would feel, if you didn’t really like or care about the end goal of what you were trying to create. In my career, I’ve certainly had to work on projects that I didn’t particularly like. If I think about the attitude I had going into those script meetings, or doing my many hours of prep work in advance of those script meetings, versus how I come in to meetings on projects I believe in, then yeah, I certainly know the difference in what I can bring in those two scenarios. I imagine that that’s probably amplified a great deal if you’re the writer of that script.
For Part 1 of the interview, go here.
Part 2, here.
Part 3, here.
Part 4, here.
Pare 5, here.
Twitter: @ORachaelO.
For the Big Talk Pictures website, go here.