Interview (Part 6): TJ Cimfel and David White (“Shut In”)

The horror movie Shut In has its world premiere this week at the Los Angeles Film Festival, screening on June 12 and June 17. Recently I had the opportunity to interview the film’s screenwriters TJ Cimfel and David White. It was a terrific conversation which I will be featuring over the course of this week.

Today in Part 6, TJ and David talk about their choice to pursue screenwriting while living in Chicago, not Los Angeles:

Scott: How do you go about developing your characters? Do you have specific tools that you find yourself using or you just go at it organically?

David: It’s a pretty organic process. It’s a combination of knowing what role the character’s going to have to play, plus trying to create somebody who’s real. For me, I’ll sit down, whether I even share it with TJ or not, I can’t start writing if I don’t know a whole lot about the characters I’m working with. I’ll sit down and write, just stream of consciousness, “This is who this character is. This is what they love. This is what they hate. This is where they came from.” Background. Backstory.

TJ: We did a lot on the history. For Shut In, we did one to two page write-ups for every single character. I even remember, Dave wrote the character write-up for JP. One of the things that he said was that JP’s mom was a Francophile. She named JP, Jean-Pierre. He, as a child, was embarrassed by this name and that’s why he shortened it to JP. That’s nothing that you actually ever pick up on in the script, but it’s all part of understanding who that character is and why they ultimately wound up where they are when the story begins, and why they react the way they do to the circumstances in the story.

Scott: Reminds me of that Tarantino quote where he says something like, “I need to know everything about the characters in the story world. The audience doesn’t need to know, but they need to know that I know.”

David: Right. Exactly.

Scott: What about dialogue? How do you go about finding your characters voices?

David: It’s just a natural extension of that process…

TJ: Once we’ve got those bios, once we know those characters, it’s very… I saw the quote recently. I’m not sure who said it, but somebody brilliant, maybe Tarantino or Woody Allen or somebody said, “I don’t write dialogue. I basically get my characters talking to each other”.

Something like that. Right? So, the point is: dialogue is secondary to character.

Scott: Right.

TJ: If you have the characters established, and you have them fully fleshed out in your mind, then when you put them in… It’s, basically, character plus situation. Right?

David: Yeah. Then, you put them in the situation. Then, I mean, it’s literally thinking, “Oh, what would they say?” And, then, just listening to what that character would say. If you know them well enough, it’s like imagining what your friend or your sister would say, if they were sitting right next to you. And you know them well enough that you know the answer. You know what they’re going to say. You know how they’re going to say it.

TJ: When we go through drafts, we’ll take the drafts, and we’ll split up the characters, and we’ll read them to each other. It’s amazing how quickly you can kind of turn up the bad dialogue when you read it out loud.

Scott: I know a lot of writers, myself included, who do that. In fact, I’ll even take all the sides from one character and read them back to back to back, so you get a sense of the flow and feel.

TJ: Yeah. That’s a great way to do consistency of voice. That’s often a great way to do dialogue passes on characters. Even, also, dialects and stuff like, “Oh, did I have this person speaking in this way in one scene, and then suddenly it’s different.” It’s really helpful to see those all together.

Scott: How about when you’re writing a scene? What are your goals?

David: To get through the scene. [laughter] I feel like surprise is a good goal. It’s, kind of, to give each scene its own beginning, middle, and end, so that it develops both organically but also surprisingly. So, to have the little moments of missteps and misstarts where it starts to go one way and then takes a turn. When I sit down to write an individual scene I’ll usually think in terms of beats. This has to happen. Then this happens. Then this happens. Then I usually go for a walk and I’ll just think, “OK. How can those beats happen in the most interesting way?”

TJ: I really like to try lots of different ways of getting from that beginning to the end. A lot of times it does involve giving that first line to a character and then seeing how somebody will react to it. Seeing where point A, how point A gets to point B. Then changing that first line and seeing how the entire dynamic of the scene changes as a result of that. I guess exploration.

Outlines and treatments, I don’t know how often… It’s great to do all that prep work, you’ve got to do it, but if you’re not discovering new things pretty much every single time you sit down to write, I don’t think you’re really being true. Because you’re following a thing you wrote a while ago.

Those things, they can hold up in maybe overall ways but, to me it’s much more exciting to see what happens in the moment each time you sit down.

David: Right. It’s got to have a real life to it in the moment-to-moment experience of it.

Scott: What’s that Ray Bradbury line? He says, “When you sit down to write, don’t think. Feel.”

David: Exactly.

TJ: Mm hmm.

Scott: I was struck Dave when you were talking because you start off saying, “Well, I was this novelist, basically just thinking about people standing around and their internal lives.” Then we’re talking about scenes, you’re saying, “Well, this happens, this happens, this happens.” You’ve really embraced that whole screenwriter world view.

David: Well, to be clear, I never actually wrote any of those novels! But yes, I’ve absolutely changed.

TJ: His first screenplay was 120 pages of somebody just standing there. [laughter] Then he was like “Nah, nah. This isn’t going to work.”

Scott: Let me ask you this because you’re doing something I think a lot of professional screenwriters in LA would say, “Well, don’t do that,” which is you’re living in Chicago and you’re somehow making this work.

This is a question I get a lot. Do I have to move to LA? Here you are in Chicago, how are you making that work? Do you think that maybe at some point you might move to LA?

TJ: I think that’s a great question. It’s one that I think about a lot. Dave and I have maybe slightly different answers on this.

David: In the story of us getting together for a drink and learning that we’re both screenwriters, the part that we didn’t mention is that, [laughs] on that first night, TJ walks in and says, “I might have to leave because my wife might be having a baby.” [laughter] He was starting his screenwriting adventure with a baby on the way. We both have pretty established lives here, and I feel like, it’s really, really hard if you’re there. And it’s really, really hard if you’re here. So far it’s working for us here.

We’re moving in the right direction from here. I’m not married with a child, so I would probably be more likely to be ready to move. But there hasn’t been a real specific, compelling reason to do so, so far.

We have Marc in LA, and he’s been amazing. Having never lived in LA, I don’t really have a sense of whether our journey would be faster if we were there. Maybe it would.

TJ: I suspect that it would, just out of sheer exposure to more people. It is really amazing when you consider the fractional amount of people that we’ve been able to meet, whether it be when we’ve gone to Los Angeles or over the phone. I’d say, we have a pretty high hit rate. That’s a testament to Marc, calibrating really well, who’s going to respond to us and to our material. That’s great work from him that we super appreciate.

David: I feel, it’s such a hard endeavor that you have to have a happy life, your own life going on, in addition to, to the screenwriting process. It’s going to take so long and involve so much work. If it’s all you have, I would have a hard time with it.

TJ: I think, more power to somebody who is throwing all in and going to Los Angeles and devoting everything to that.

David: Oh, absolutely. I don’t want to sound like I’m saying it’s a bad idea to move, because for most it’s probably the right decision. But for me specifically, I have a job here that allows me significant time to write, and that’s the most important thing. I don’t know if I could find that in LA.

TJ: Yeah. What it comes down to is, if you’re committed to making it work, you can make it work from anywhere. You just have to be prepared that there are going to be extra obstacles if you’re not in Los Angeles. As long as you make your peace with that, and you have somebody who’s working with you and for you, who has made their peace with that, that’s a wonderful thing.

From that standpoint, it’s funny because that’s probably one of the first questions when you do the small talk when you have a general meeting with somebody is, “So… You guys are from Chicago? How’s that work for you?”

Yet, they usually wind up finishing with, “Well, I guess you can write from anywhere.” That’s the truth. At the end of the day, that’s really the number one thing. That’s the value that we’re bringing to people is through our writing, not through our proximity.

Tomorrow in Part 7, the duo talks about their writing process and offers advice on how to go about breaking into the business.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, here.

Part 4, here.

Part 5, here.

If you have any questions for TJ or David, post in comments, and I will pass them along.

For ticket information about the upcoming Los Angeles Film Festival screenings for Shut In, go here.

TJ and David are repped by Marc Manus.

Twitter: @dkwite, @TeaJaySee.