Interview (Written): Steve Conrad

A WGA.org interview with Steve Conrad, writer of the comedy Unfinished Business.

“It’s better to burn out than to fade away,” Neil Young warbled contemplatively some 35 years ago, distilling the existential angst of every wunderkind who’s ever lived. In 1988, at the age of 19, a Northwestern University dropout from Boca Raton sold his first screenplay, Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, which was turned into a feature film starring Richard Harris, Robert Duvall, and Shirley MacLaine, directed by critically acclaimed Randa Haines. When the modestly budgeted film failed to galvanize audiences, its screenwriter, Steve Conrad, found himself suddenly at a crossroads Neil Young could appreciate. “I went from being a ‘player’ at 20 or 21 to not being a player for 10 years,” laughs Conrad, whose latest film, Unfinished Business, is currently in theaters.

“I went very quickly from being just another aspiring writer to being the luckiest writer in the world with that cast and that director and having a rush of success that gave me a few good career options to all of a sudden have no options again and having to claw my way back into a place where I might have some decent options.” It’s a journey or character arc familiar to many artists, and also to audiences who have enjoyed other Conrad-penned films, The Weatherman, The Pursuit of Happyness, and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. As a writer, Conrad believes there’s always some “unfinished business,” so to speak, that it’s never really a question of burning out or fading away, but of simply keeping on.

What did you learn from the Ernest Hemingway experience?

That really, I had just been incredibly lucky first time around. Randa was at a point in her career where she could push through a small movie that she was passionate about, and we had actors who loved the script who could get a movie of that shape and size produced. If any of those things hadn’t clicked, and there’s never a reason why they do or should, the movie wouldn’t have happened. So what I learned is: it’s never going to be that easy again. The only response to that realization I could come up with was to write even more. You have to write in multiples of three and four if you ever want to see another film produced. You grind out four screenplays, make them the very best they can be, do your best to make them equally strong, and then the rest of it’s never up to you.

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With Unfinished Business, you’ve retired the urge to merge genres and written a broad, sharp, pratfalls and zingers comedy. What was the impulse for you?

Here’s the thing about screenwriting, at least for me: writers need to discover a unique setting in a very strict circumstance that hasn’t been mined to death in films before, a setting that allows and encourages a fresh look at familiar tensions. There have been only a few films set during big business trips — maybe Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, though that film is more about the journey home than about closing the deal — and I was in the middle of going back and forth between Iceland and New York on Walter Mitty and I’d watch these guys on the planes spend three or four hours at a time on these spreadsheets and I couldn’t make heads or tails out of what they were actually doing. They were truly applying themselves, undivided attention, a full effort given to what probably amounts to a pretty thankless job — except, at the end of the day, you can say, “I got my job done.” Which is something a lot of writers probably aspire to!

So I began to get a feeling for who those people are, who find value in their lives not from notoriety or celebrity, but from simply getting done what must be done. That’s their whole lives. Comedy felt like the right approach to that, and it was something I really wanted to try. Making people laugh was a clear defining goal on this script. Most peoples’ lives are a high-wire act of chainsaw juggling and you can’t afford to drop a chainsaw or it’s all over. That felt like a very basic cornerstone to comedy for me.

For the rest of the interview, go here.