Q&A: Kyle Killen (“The Beaver”), Part 1

Back in the good ol’ days when screenplays could float around the Web freely without legal threats from ginormous corporate entities, I posted a detailed analysis and glowing review of a script called “The Beaver.” Ever since that time, I have followed the career of its writer Kyle Killen. “The Beaver” is a terrific script, especially in this day and age where every other movie seems to be a sequel, prequel, remake, or reboot. It is a wholly original story, witness the logline per IMDB:

A troubled husband and executive adopts a beaver hand-puppet as his sole means of communicating.

Next Kyle ventured into TV with the late lamented “Lone Star” and now has recently been involved in the shoot of a pilot for — hopefully — his new series “REM,” one of the best TV pilot scripts I’ve read in years, breathing new life into the cop procedural formula.

Kyle kindly agreed to do a Q&A for the GITS community, especially generous given how busy he has been with “REM.” Today in Part 1, we focus on The Beaver which has just debuted this weekend and is rolling out into more theaters this week. Tomorrow: “Lone Star” and “REM.”

Okay, let’s start at the beginning. Your writing has appeared in Mcsweeney’s, Salon.com, The Mid-American Review, The Berkley Fiction Review, among others. You won the John Steinbeck Award for a short story called “Johnson’s March.” You had a blog in which you wrote letters to your gestating twins, then started another blog in which you talked about, among other things, being the father of said twins. You went to the University of Southern California Cinema Television Program. You wrote the spec script “The Beaver,” the basis of a movie which debuted this weekend. You created the Fox TV series “Lone Star” and now have an NBC TV pilot “REM” in production which you also wrote. I’m a bit slow, but even I can figure this out: You are a writer. How did that happen? What about writing appeals to you? If you weren’t a writer, how would you be making a living?

I think I’m a writer not so much because I’ve ever been successful at it, but because I’ve been so unsuccessful at giving it up. I’ve worked a buffet of other jobs, from tech support to construction, and I always ended up writing, if not for its own sake, then ABOUT the terrible jobs I was doing. I had a professor at USC who used to say that writing is like a Heroin addiction — if you can give it up, you really should. I could not. And I expect that to eventually leave me pushing a cart and begging for change.

As I was doing research for this Q&A, I found the best source of information to be your blogs. So I thought we could track the arc of your career by using excerpts from your blog posts. For example, when I read your script “The Beaver,” which I thought was great, one of the first questions that popped into my head was, “Why a beaver? Why not a moose or an otter or a squid?” You provided a tantalizing tip in this blog post dated May 22, 2008:

If you read the old blog you may remember that nine months or so ago I responded to the news that my wife of one week was pregnant by trying to write a book about a beaver, which somehow seemed like a reasonable response at the time. I put together something like 13 chapters and then my brain broke and I laid in bed for a week meowing like a cat. Then, I decided to turn it into a screenplay because screenplays have less pages and I am very lazy. Several months, countless drafts, and much meowing later I finished said screenplay. And in what is surely a sign of both the apocalypse and the untapped market for beaver related films, on Monday someone decided to take it off my hands.

But you still didn’t answer my question. So… why a beaver?

I have no idea. It’s one of those things that just came to me so fully formed, a British Beaver Puppet, that I never thought to ask why, I just accepted it. But I suspect it has something to do with the presence of Radon gas.

More substantively, what was your inspiration to have a suicidal character find help, at least at first, in the form of a talking hand puppet?

I think I’m fascinated by the degree to which any of us can really ‘change’. There’s aisles upon aisles of books that not only assure us we can, but that it’s actually easy and just takes a few steps to get from here to there. In my experience, it tends to take more than 7 Highly Effective Habits. So, the Beaver was just sort of the most ridiculous incarnation of that desire for a quick fix, a silver bullet, or an easy answer.

One of the things that is most impressive about your script is the balance you managed to keep throughout in terms of its tone. It’s dark, dramatic, funny, and finally deeply human. Did you always see the story playing out that way or did it, for example, start out more as a comedy, then go dramatic?

I think it probably just started and ended a mess. If you read the blogs you know that I had no idea what I was doing and am as shocked as anyone that people have responded to it. I think there were things I always knew would be a part of it, and those were my signposts along the way, and those things felt fairly real and grounded, and in some cases tragic, and I think because of that whatever comedy there is tended to come from a somewhat dramatic place.

How did you get the script into the hands of potential buyers? Were you represented at the time and if so how did that happen?

I was represented. I turned a short story I’d had published into another screenplay the year before and had been lucky enough to fall in with good people because of it. It was actually Steve Golin, the owner of my management company, who preemptively took “The Beaver” off the market and set out to see the little piece of weirdness actually get made.

So someone acquires the rights to “The Beaver.” But then something rather magical happens. Another blog excerpt dated December 10, 2010:

I’d be lying if I said that I hadn’t read the Black List in years past, then scrounged around for the scripts on it, and been inspired to imagine how awesome it would be to end up in such a spot. I have no idea what will happen to The Beaver in the future. My hopes are high, but we’ll see. What I can say without reservation is that I never imagined more than ten people would try to read it, and of those, more than five would finish it. So starting with the sixth person who said they not only completed, but liked it, I’ve been pretty sky high.

Your script was named the #1 script on the 2008 Black List. What did that mean to you professionally? And when that happened, what sort of effect did it have on moving the project forward?

It meant an incredible amount on both fronts. Personally, it wasn’t about where I was on the list, it was just about being included among real writers. I had been outside of the world of working writers for so long that it just felt impenetrable, so to have some number of people sign off on your efforts and welcome you (as much as anyone is ever welcomed) to the club was an incredibly satisfying thing. Professionally it meant that people were suddenly not only willing to listen, but wanted to talk, and after years of outgoing phone calls they started to come the other way. It opened all the doors in television and features that I’ve been lucky enough to walk through ever since.

At various points, Steve Carrel was attached or circling the project to star. Then Jim Carrey. But it ended up with Mel Gibson in the lead role. When you were writing the script, did you star cast the role of Walter Black? How did Mel Gibson match up to the character you envisioned in your mind?

I don’t know if I had mentally cast the role as someone specific, but I assure you it wasn’t Mel. He wasn’t acting at the time and had more or less become only slightly more available than Bill Murray. But once Jodie brought him up I think we all saw an incredible potential there, and had a sense that he would have access to some of the dark places that Walter goes in a way that no other actor was likely to.

Jumping ahead several months, you have this blog post dated July 27, 2009:

We had a table read for The Beaver… at some point in this process I’ve begun to wrap my mind around the idea that a group of people were actually going to film the things I had written on a page, were going to say those lines, and record it, and put it together, and show it to people. And they were going to do all this on purpose!

For the benefit of all the aspiring screenwriters who will read this interview, would you mind describing what it felt like when you first really got it: “They’re going to make my movie.”

It’s really weird. You have this initial ‘Holy Shit’ moment where it all feels unreal. And then it quickly becomes very practical. There’s work to do, scenes that felt long, things the actors don’t like, that the director doesn’t like, that the producers don’t like. I think you sink or swim very quickly, and you stop feeling like the new guy, and just begin to feel like the writer. And in retrospect, it’s that second feeling, that this is just YOUR JOB, that’s far more amazing than the first.

You live in Austin, Texas, so it must have been especially meaningful to you that “The Beaver” had its premiere at SXSW 2011. Quite a journey from finding out your wife is pregnant and deciding to write a book about a beaver to a world movie premiere. Do you ever stop to think this is some sort of fantasy or alternate life? This can’t be me?

All the time. And I live like I’m about to wake up. Nothing’s promised and you can fall off the map like that. So I’m grateful for every day, which takes work, because like anything, dream jobs do eventually just become jobs, and you find a way to bitch about deadlines and people you work with and things so and so said to so and so. So when I hit those days I try hard to remember being paid to crawl around in laundromat ceilings and… well, deadlines still suck, but a little less when put in context.

And after all that, there’s this:

For more on the movie, you can check out this interview with the movie’s director and co-star Jodie Foster.

What’s the takeaway from Part 1 of this interview with Kyle? How about this:

You can be a writer living way outside of LA, even in the middle of Texas…

You can start off writing a novel, then decide to switch to a screenplay because it has “less pages”…

You can write a script in which the central story conceit involves a beaver hand puppet…

And if you write a great script, you can make it in Hollywood.

Tomorrow Part 2 of my interview with Kyle Killen.