Interview: Roberto Bentivegna (2012 Black List) — Part 3

Roberto Bentivegna’s original screenplay “The Eel” landed the writer on the 2012 Black List. Combining elements of noir and dark humor, the script offers an entertaining tale featuring compelling characters in the quirky subculture of a town on the border of Texas and Mexico.

Roberto was kind enough to agree to an interview and we had a wide-ranging hour-long conversation in which we covered a lot of territory related to screenwriting and movies. I will be posting the whole interview over the course of this week.

Today in Part 3, Roberto discusses his working relationship with his agents and managers, what it meant to make the 2012 Black List, and how he comes up with story ideas

Scott: You’re at CAA and Madhouse Entertainment. Is that right?

Roberto: Yes.

Scott: How did that happen?

Roberto: I met my agent, Craig Brody, when I was at Columbia. I was a semi‑finalist in the Nicholl Fellowship, and I won a few other awards- the Sloan, the Columbia Screenwriting award. He was an assistant at the time, actually. He called me to discuss one of my scripts and we really hit it off. A few months later he was promoted and we’ve been working together since.

Then with Adam Kolbrenner and Chris Cook at Madhouse, that came about last year. They read a very early draft of “The Eel” and they responded positively to it. They decided they wanted to work on it with me, so I moved out to Los Angeles from New York really motivated by the fact that I wanted to physically be in LA while “The Eel” was taking shape.

Scott: What was that experience like for you, working with managers? They’re all different, obviously, but it sounds like you did do a fair amount of development with the script back and forth. How was that process for you?

Roberto: I think my experience has been excellent. Adam and Chris are great. Generally, it’s important to be open minded to different ideas but also know what you want. They have a very good barometer of what works and what doesn’t. “The Eel” was a little bit different though, because I wanted to direct it. We weren’t developing the script necessarily to sell it. But out of the development some new things popped up that I hadn’t thought of.

For example, the preacher thing. That was an idea that I developed with Madhouse and I actually think it’s one of my favorite sequences in the script.

Scott: Where were you, and what was your reaction when you discovered “The Eel” made the 2012 blacklist?

Roberto: I was at home, and I was looking at these Tweets and going completely mad. [laughs] Franklin Leonard is a sadist. I was tweet number 78 of 78. It was all out of order so I didn’t have any idea of what was next. All I knew was, I was checking boxes. I was keeping a tally on my computer. I had my station set up. I hadn’t slept because, obviously, I was very anxious about it. But I kept a tally. When you get to 30, 35 you’re thinking, “OK, now we’re at the half way mark.” Then when I got to 70 I was like, “Oh, that’s it,” but, no, 78 out of 78. I was very pleased. I had been on the Hit List and the Young and Hungry list as well, but this was the big kahuna and I really hoped to be on it.

I think it’s so hard to know when you do something right in any creative field. The fact that people like what you do is, in itself, a big achievement. People who hopefully know what they’re talking about and who have an influence. I think that’s really what I got out of it- the fact that I did something that people really responded to. That feels great. That’s why we do what you do.

Scott: The Black List happened in early December and the town basically shut down. But you’ll be following up with meetings I’m sure.

Roberto: The main thing for me is to get the movie going. That’s number one. To push through and get this film cast and financed.

Scott: You’re trying to put the package together to make it?

Roberto: That’s exactly right. I have a producer- Scott Aversano. I’ve met with a few actors. It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the next few months.

Scott: You mentioned you’ve written another spec that was a little different, one that you’re not planning on directing. Is it a similar genre or different?

Roberto: No, it’s different. It’s an adventure film.

A lot of the time if I come up with an idea, or if I read material that might make a good movie, the only criteria I have is to find movies in that genre that I really love. If you’re doing a romantic comedy, look at “The Apartment”, “Annie Hall”, “When Harry Met Sally” and say, “OK, those movies are amazing. I love those movies. I’m going to try and do something that…you know, hopefully lands in the same zip code.”

For this one I was looking at a lot of ’80s movies like “The Goonies”. It was really fun to look through those movies again.

Scott: There’s about 10 movies people in Hollywood will always throw out in meetings. “Man, if you could do something like ‘The Goonies’…”

Roberto: I’ve definitely heard that.

Scott: I’d like to switch gears and ask you some craft questions. First, how do you come up with story ideas?

Roberto: I read a lot. I read as much as I can, whether it’s novels, stuff on the Internet, newspaper articles, or whatever I can get my hands on. Obviously I watch a lot of movies. Some people go to museums. I love museums, but I don’t really find that paintings inspire a story, at least not to me. They inspire me visually. I think if you’re directing, then you can definitely take stuff from paintings.

The biggest things for me are theme and genre. It’s about trying to do something different with those things, so marrying different genres together or exploring different characters that might have come out of a news story, for example. There’s always these amazing news stories, these weird crime stories. So many great movies have used real crime stories- and a lot of time we forget it because the movies exist as separate realities. Movies like “Badlands” and “Psycho”, or “Dog Day Afternoon”. All based on true crime.

I think you assimilate as much as you can. Then see what sticks, what moves you, what makes you want to watch the movie you’d be writing. That’s a big one, right? What movie would you watch? What movie would you totally love to see?

Scott: It’s important to think about the market and track what’s selling, but I tell people at the end of the day, you’d better make damn sure that you are really passionate about your story because that’s not only going to be what gets your ass back in the chair to actually write it, but that’s what lifts the words up off the page to come alive in the mind of the reader. It’s your passion for the story that empowers that dynamic.

Roberto Absolutely, and you can tell. You can read through the lines. You can tell when something has been written with passion as opposed to intellectualism or commercialism or whatever it is. When you manage to do both, when you manage to do something with passion that’s also successful commercially… I think when that happens, then you have found the golden unicorn. And I don’t think you can plan for it, or break it down. I really don’t. Who could have predicted that Pulp Fiction was going to be an enormous hit? Nobody, it was such an unexpected situation. On the other hand, when Hollywood puts out these humongous films that flop, there’s no reason why they should flop. They check all the boxes. But then they fail. That’s proof that you can’t rely on arithmetic and algorithms. Human beings are way more complex than that.

You’ve got to believe you can connect with people. Whether the story is inspiring, or whether it’s dark. Look at the “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” The novel’s success was just amazing. That was a really dark thing. Or even the “Fifty Shades of Grey.” phenomenon. I think those novels prove that sometimes people want to escape into darkness. They want to read about stuff they don’t necessarily want to do, but maybe fantasize about doing. Darkness can be very cathartic.

Scott: Like the author Roald Dahl. Critics would complain about, “Why do you have all these terrifying characters in these children’s stories.” His point was, where else are children going to learn how to deal with and prepare for the scary things in life? That’s one of the functions of story, it’s a safe place for us to go to experience the full range of emotions.

Roberto: If you look at fairy tales…The Grimm stories, the original Pinocchio- those are so, so dark. I think there’s ways to move people in so many different ways and in different genres. Really it’s about doing something that people are going to respond to. That’s the magic of any art form. You can’t calculate it. It is what it is.

Tomorrow in Part 4, Roberto delves into his approach to the craft.

Please stop by comments to thank Roberto for taking the time for the interview and post any follow-up questions you may have.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, go here.

Roberto is repped by CAA and Madhouse Entertainment.

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