Meet the Most Famous Hollywood Writer You’ve Never Heard Of

Michael Green has credits on four major movies this year.

A Hollywood Reporter feature on screenwriter Michael Green who is on a hot streak with writing credits on four movies this year: Logan, Alien: Covenant, Blade Runner 2049, and Murder on the Orient Express.

Some excerpts:

When Michael Green first started out as a screenwriter, he read every script he could get his hands on. When he finished a screenplay, he’d toss it into one of two piles. There was a pile for scripts he thought were better than what he himself was writing and another for scripts he believed were worse. “I thought I could start to tell where I ranked as a writer,” he recalls. “But back then, the ‘better than me’ stack was a lot higher than the ‘worse than me’ stack.”

Twenty years later, there’s a third stack — his own produced screenplays — and it’s getting taller all the time.

After graduating from Stanford University and beginning his career writing for such TV series as Sex and the Single Girl, Smallville, Everwood, Green turned his attention to movies:

He began to think more ambitiously, writing a script for an action movie based on the story of Moses (those years of religious training finally paying off). The film never got made, but his script did perform one miracle: It got noticed by Steven Spielberg, who hired Green to take over Robopocalypse after Drew Goddard left to make The Martian. Working with his hero was intimidating at first. “I saw E.T. five times. You go to his office and there’s the original Rosebud right behind you and you can’t speak.” He quickly realized he had to put the fanboy aside. “There’s a strange point in meetings with people who are as legendary as Spielberg where you have to get over the fact that their name is Steven Spielberg. As a writer, you’re hired for your opinions, and your opinion can’t be “no” — no one wants a dick — but you’re hired to talk to them like they’re a person, so that you can get to your common goal. You have to find a way to build and bring ideas and bring your enthusiasms, and often just help them translate something that’s in their head that they haven’t seen yet. He doesn’t want a movie that’s just dictated.”

Green spent six months meeting nearly daily with the director in what turned out to be the master class of a lifetime. To him, the fact that the film never got made is all but incidental. “I came out of that with a new skill set,” says Green. “I now knew how to write a movie.”

Along with his “master class” with Spielberg, there was his stint with another influential director:

Working with [Ridley] Scott and original screenwriter Hampton Fancher to translate their “beautiful, lyrical, epic poem tone piece” of a treatment into a screenplay [for Blade Runner 2049] was another formative experience for Green. “If he can’t see something, visually see it, he can’t engage it,” he recalls about working with Scott. “Once he does see it, something amazing happens that I’ve never seen before: He starts sketching the scene on a notepad and those go to his art department for the scenery and storyboard artists.” (Well except for a couple that Green cops to having kept as souvenirs).

Many takeaways from the article. Here are three:

• Referring to Ridley Scott, Green said, “If he can’t see something, visually see it, he can’t engage it.” In the writer-director relationship, it’s incumbent upon the writer to understand the way the director sees things, how they find their way into a story, how they relate to characters and plot. Movies are fundamentally a director’s medium, so this is a critical skill-set to learn.
• In reference to his time working with Steven Spielberg, Green said, “You have to find a way to build and bring ideas and bring your enthusiasms, and often just help them translate something that’s in their head that they haven’t seen yet.” Similarly the writer has to be able to help the director “translate” what they are imagining into words on page, the script. In both situations, it’s best to observe the admonition: “God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason.” Listen. Get curious about the way the director thinks, the way they organize their thoughts, the way they understand story. You are much more likely to get on the same page as them creatively if you grasp their creative world view.
• “When Michael Green first started out as a screenwriter, he read every script he could get his hands on.” Read scripts. Read more scripts. Read scripts until your eyes bleed (metaphorically). Absolutely essential for learning the craft.

For the rest of the Hollywood Reporter article, go here.

Twitter: @andmichaelgreen.