Interview (Written): Anthony Jaswinski (“The Shallows”)

A WGA East interview with screenwriter Anthony Jaswinski whose newest movie The Shallows opens this weekend.

How did you break into the film industry as a screenwriter?

After I graduated from NYU, I was working retail. I started to enter the Academy’s Nicholl Fellowship for Screenwriting competition. After a few times, I finally won it. I sold a pitch to Warner Brothers on my Nicholl’s week out in Los Angeles and that ingratiated me to the business. With that and a couple of scripts under my belt, I was fortunate enough to work with directors like Brad Anderson on movies like VANISHING ON SEVENTH STREET.

To make a long story short, I’m always in the wilderness. I’m not huge on doing rewrites. I like adaptations, but for the most part I tend to be self-generating. I work from New York. I write specs. I’ve been doing that, professionally, since about ’98, ’99. I put KILLING TIME together myself in 2002. It was a coming of age story and was fortunate to get into Sundance. I tend to write thrillers bordering on horror or elite horror. I’ve been lucky enough to make a decent living in the business and do what I want to do.

Tell me about THE SHALLOWS. Was this written on spec?

Yes it was. I was trying to figure out what my next movie was going to be. I had written a vampire script previously because I felt that vampires were starting to get sidelined into comedy/romance. When you go back to SALEM’S LOT, NEAR DARK or even NOSFERATU, the vampire used to be this horrifying element.

I was watching SHARK WEEK, almost two years ago, and everything was about SHARKNADO and cartoon sharks and sharks getting punched in the face. I was asking myself, “When did the shark not become scary anymore? When did this beautiful, primal weapon of nature become this kind of laugh-in joke?” Then the next day, Spielberg’s DUEL was on. (An early film of his from Matheson that I absolutely adore). I started to get inspired by it. I’m thinking there must be a minimal approach for the shark movie to return to the days of JAWS and the days when there was something under the surface and you don’t know what it was? The highway mirage is the unknown lurking beneath. The windchimes on some shitty roadhouse porch is the crisp lap of late-day tide. There is something about the unsettling creak of water.

I got excited about making a very small movie about a person stranded on a rock island, where she can see the shoreline the entire film. The more I thought about a woman’s point of view, the more excited I got. It’s not because I tend to like to write women, but I think that a woman’s thought system is a lot different, more complex. The idea of this animal versus human survival story, with the Hitchcock-ian ticking clock feel, sounded really good to me. I also loved the idea of the shark being a battle-tested survivor, an old man still fighting. Young vs old. I started working on that, and maybe three and a half weeks later, I had a pretty durable first draft. Sometimes they take a while to write and sometimes they tend to, which is the cliché, write themselves. It feels that way when you have an idea that you’re really excited about. Keeps you up at night grinding your teeth.

That’s how that came to be. I gave it to my reps and I got a call at six in the morning the next day. Valerie Phillips and David Boxermbaum, my agents flipped for it. So we went out with it and sold it very quickly.

For the rest of the interview, go here.