Interview: Terrance Mulloy — Part 2

For the next week or so, I turn attention to screenwriters, TV writers, and filmmakers who are on the front edge of making their mark in the business. Their insights, so recently on the outside looking in, reflect the excitement of breaking in, yet the challenges of attempting to carve out a career. Today: screenwriter Terrance Mulloy.

Terrance Mulloy is an up and coming Australian screenwriter based in Brisbane, who is becoming increasingly known around the industry for his action writing chops. His first spec sale, Priority Run, was acquired late last year by Arclight Films and is currently prepping.

I managed to pull Terrance aside from his busy schedule to ask him some questions about how he managed to break into Hollywood without actually being there.

In Part 2, Terrance discusses his spec script “Priority Run” which sold to Arclight Films.

Scott: Here’s the logline of “Priority Run” per IMDB: The story centers on a small group of correctional officers and inmates who must band together to fend off a mysterious attack when their prison bus is sabotaged on a remote stretch of highway. Arclight Films acquired it in November 2012. How did you come up with the idea?

Terrance: I’ve always been a fan of contained thrillers and one day while watching a documentary on National Geographic about America’s prison system, there was this segment which showed a guard talking about what it was like to drive a prison bus every day. It can be quite a harrowing job, especially on the long hauls interstate.

The guard also spoke about a terrifying moment in his career when they broke down in the middle of nowhere. There were over a dozen hardcore inmates on the bus, and only three guards — and only one who was armed. They were literally stuck in the middle of nowhere, so if anyone came to break the inmates out, the guards would have easily been overpowered. Fortunately they managed to call a Sheriff from a nearby county, who provided back up until they got the bus working again.

Upon watching that my brain immediately started thinking about the possibilities of a cool movie. The inherent mechanics of this guard’s dilemma was just begging to be exploited cinematically, so I started asking questions, like what would happen if that Sheriff never turned up and those inmates did decide to seize the opportunity?

Scott: Were there any movies that inspired you or informed your creative process in writing “Priority Run”, like Assault on Precinct 13?

Terrance: John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (including the 2005 remake) were a huge inspiration for sure. So were films like Con-Air, Aliens, and The Hills Have Eyes.

Scott: Was there an original draft set in Alaska and the bad guys were militia types? If so, why the changes?

Terrance: Yeah, the original premise was set in Alaska and had these backwoods militia guys who attacked the bus, so it was this crazy horror/action type hybrid. For a while I did struggle with what the actual tone was — was it a horror movie or an action movie? My agent and manager slipped the script to a few places around town, and while it got a positive reaction, most people felt it read like two different movies. It hadn’t ‘officially’ gone out as a spec yet, so I jumped on a plane to LA and spent three weeks sitting down with various production companies, discussing potential ideas.

One of those companies was Platinum Dunes. They were very excited about the script and suggested I concentrate more on the ‘action’, which I really liked. So over the course of the next several months I began that development process with them and it eventually became this gritty action/thriller, set in the New Mexico desert.

Ultimately it never came together for reasons beyond our control, but various elements of what we had developed remain intact to this day. So it was a great learning experience for me, working with real producers, and getting a taste of the frontlines while seeing how that part of the industry works. I still remain in contact with them, so hopefully we’ll find something to work on again in the future.

Scott: You create a realistic world — prison, prisoners, guards. What type of research did you do to achieve that sense of realism?

Terrance: One of the most important things for me was making this feel authentic. The story is pretty crazy in terms of what the character’s are eventually forced to endure, so I knew that the day-to-day aspects of what it’s like being a correctional officer had to be shown in order to balance that out. However this needed to be portrayed in a way that was interesting and kept the story moving forward, without overloading scenes with too much procedure. I also spent a lot of time watching prison documentaries and reading any reference material or articles. Using the same type of prison slang and gang lingo the inmates and guards use was also essential to creating that sense of authenticity. In other words, nobody could sound Australian.

Scott: The Protagonist is a correctional officer named Anna Wilson. How did you end up with this character as your story’s central figure?

Terrance: During the course of writing the first draft I originally had the Protagonist as a male prison guard, but I eventually came across another prison documentary on TV which highlighted women working in the U.S. corrections industry. After watching that I immediately knew it would be a lot more interesting to have a female guard as the main Protagonist. I was just amazed at how these brave women get up each morning, send their kids off to school, kiss their spouses goodbye, then go risk their lives working in such a harsh and dangerous environment. As you can imagine, it can be an extremely demanding job. So you have to ask what kind of person would do this for a living? And while it is a fulltime career for many women, some do the job because it’s a jumping stone to another career in law enforcement. Some do it simply because it’s the only steady work around, particularly in rural areas. So Anna needed to fit that dynamic. She needed to be real. She’s not a superhero. There’s no special powers or anything. She’s just a single mom living in Albuquerque, who also happens to do this extremely tough job for a living.

Scott: At the center of the story is this interesting dynamic: A contained environment with two very distinct sets of people, convicts and their handlers. Reminiscent of that scenario toward the end in The Dark Knight, one boat with regular people, one with convicts. What appealed to you about that idea?

Terrance: Prison is basically just two opposing forces trying to gain control over a very limited environment. The guards are there to enforce the law and keep inmates in check, while the inmates are trying to control their own surroundings, many of whom will test the guards and see how far they can push them. Unfortunately that can also turn deadly. It’s quite common for female guards to be violently attacked when the opportunity presents itself. Inmates are opportunists, always looking for a way to exploit their confines for their own benefit. That cat and mouse aspect I wanted to (pardon the pun) transport over to a prison bus, where the guards and inmates, despite their differences and mistrust, are forced to work together in order to survive this external threat. I find those types of stories interesting, where you take a group of mismatched people and basically drop them into a pressure cooker.

Scott: Let’s talk about one of the prisoners, McBride. How did his character evolve?

Terrance: In earlier drafts McBride was basically your reluctant Riddick type anti-hero. He stayed that way for quite a while until we hit upon an interesting back-story for him. As we started to flesh him out more, we began to realize that McBride may have been wrongly imprisoned all those years ago. Yet it’s kind of too late for him now. He’s a product of the system. He’s been institutionalized for most of his life and believes in nothing anymore. He’s what you get when you take a man and treat him like a caged animal — eventually he becomes a product of that environment. He’s not necessarily bad, but the terrible things he’s done inside prison have been for the purpose of survival. He’s the complete opposite to Anna. He represents everything she despises. However he ends up becoming her only hope for getting out alive.

Scott: How soon in the process did you know he and Anna would be forced to work together against a common enemy?

Terrance: Pretty much straight away. I knew that their relationship was the glue to the story.

Scott: Is it fair to say that in “Priority Run,” you create a morally complicated universe? If so, what was your thinking in that regard?

Terrance: While it was never my intention to delve too deeply into corruption within the U.S. prison system, I wanted to at least touch on it. The fact is there’s a lot of it. Over the last decade the American prison industry has become more and more privatized and monetized. There’s been an influx of these shady security companies building these sprawling complexes out in the middle of nowhere and filling them up with people.

Some information has leaked out about how it’s basically a factory line, where Judges and Wardens are suspected of getting kick-backs based on how many felons they incarcerate. We’ve also heard about prison guards cutting deals with connected inmates and allowing the flow of drugs to run freely inside both state and federal facilities right across the country. So I took all that and pushed it a little bit further.

As a corrections officer, Anna is extremely cut and dry. She believes the inmates all deserve to be there. There really is no grey area for her. It’s all about justice and punishment. She’s actually quite militant in her beliefs. So when she does finally come to the harsh realization that the system she swore to uphold is corrupt and has put her in this situation, understandably she has a very hard time dealing with that.

Tomorrow in Part 3, Terrance provides insight into how he landed representation and details behind the sale of “Priority Run”.

For Part 1, go here.

Terrance is repped by UTA and BenderSpink.

Twitter: @TerranceMulloy.