Screenwriters Roundtable, Part 1: Chris Borrelli, F. Scott Frazier, Chris McCoy, Justin Rhodes, Greg Russo, John Swetnam
A special treat this week as I will be posting excerpts from a screenwriter’s roundtable I did with a group of talented Hollywood screenwriters: Chris Borrelli, F. Scott Frazier, Chris McCoy, Justin Rhodes, Greg Russo, and John Swetnam. How good are they? Between them, they have sold more than a dozen spec scripts and have multiple original screenplays on the Black List.
This is the third GITS screenwriters roundtable, the first two of which you can read here and here. Hopefully this will continue as an annual event as it’s a great way to take the pulse of what’s happening in the screenwriting universe, track the careers of these talented writers, and benefit from the many insights into the craft they share.
Here is Part 1:
Scott: It’s been awhile since we did the second annual roundtable and I think clearly the number one question on everyone’s mind is this: Why the sudden inexplicable disappearance of Scott Frazier from Twitter?
Chris McCoy: [laughs] That is a delicious question. I want to know the answer to that right now.
John Swetnam: Yes.
F. Scott Frazier: I don’t know if everybody knows, but I actually had a baby back in February.
Scott: Congratulations.
F. Scott Frazier: Well, I didn’t. My wife did. I just kind of hung out. I was getting to the point where there was so much going on on Twitter and so much work stuff and baby stuff, and it’s just like one of them had to go away for a little bit. And so I chose Twitter.
Nothing scandalous, just he started crawling, and he’s a little bit more of an actual person that you have to take care of on a day-to-day basis. It was a priority thing.
Chris McCoy: Frazier, there are thousands of Twitter followers that need you and only one baby. I feel like you’re making a selfish choice.
[laughter]
Scott: Besides, you’ve got zone defense with the kid. It’s two parents, one baby.
F. Scott Frazier: This is true, but yeah, there’s nothing scandalous or salacious.
Scott: Brian Duffield will be very happy to hear that because he tweeted we had to ask this. “Does Scott still love me?” “Am I still Scott’s BFF?” “Why won’t Scott return my calls?” “Why did Scott send me a restraining order?”
F. Scott Frazier: It’s weird. He was at my front door last night asking the exact same things. I didn’t understand what was happening.
Scott: That’s because you weren’t on Twitter.
F. Scott Frazier: Yeah.
Chris McCoy: Did he have the boombox?
F. Scott Frazier: He did. It was a weird moment. Yeah.
Scott: “Tweet Anything”.
F. Scott Frazier: Yeah, exactly.
Scott: Thanks for clearing that up for us, Scott. As long as we’re catching up, I know each of you has got some interesting developments going on, so I thought I’d check in one by one to start things off.
Borrelli, you’ve got a movie that’s due out, “The Vatican Tapes.” Can you talk about that? What’s the history of the project and what’s going on with it?
Chris Borrelli: It’s a very long history, being on the Black List in 2009, and it looked like it was going to go down. It just finally happened, and when it happened, it happened quickly. I think a lot of Mark Neveldine, who’s directed it, and I’m looking forward to it coming out and being in theaters.
And in the meantime, it’s also encouraged me. It hasn’t been announced, but I’ve set up a… I wrote another small horror… when I say small, small budget horror film. And it’s encouraged me to really pursue what I’ve wanted to pursue for a long time, which is directing. I’ve had offers on this other script, but it’s been set up with me directing, and I guess we have the money. I’m hoping in 2014, I’m shooting a movie. It kind of helped encourage me to what I really wanted to do.
One of the reasons I even wrote “The Vatican Tapes” back then was thinking I would direct it, but I stepped aside. On this latest film, I’m not doing that.
Chris McCoy: Nice. Congrats.
Chris Borrelli: Thanks, yeah. It hasn’t been announced, but we’re all pretty excited.
Scott: So you’re definitely going to direct this new one?
Chris Borrelli: Yeah, yeah. It looks great, with some very good producers. We will see. As we know, until it’s actually rolling… it’s not a jinx thing for me, it’s just that I like to sort of undersell. I think that’s a smart thing for our own personal careers in some ways, is to have plenty of irons in the fire that we care about.
But at the same time, when it actually goes, I’ll be very, very excited. We do have the funding, and I’m with really great producers. I don’t see anything stopping us since it’s not a cast‑contingent movie, either. Hopefully I’ll have some real news on that one.
Scott: That’s terrific. Actually, I could segue off to Chris McCoy on this, because, Chris, you are trying to transition into directing. I know you did a short film The Bicycle that blew up on Vimeo. Can you talk about that and then this other project you’re directing?
Chris McCoy: Yeah, sure. I co-directed it with my friend Adam Neustadter. We had a nice run of festival appearances. We played at the Austin Film Festival. We played at the Mecal Barcelona. We played at Interfilm Berlin. We played all over the place.
You basically have a year to do all your festival appearances, and then you can put the film out publicly. So we put it up on Vimeo, and it was a Vimeo staff pick. We were getting tens of thousands of views a day.
It’s exceeded any expectations we could have had. So that was terrific, and that was also good training because we’re looking to shoot “Good Kids,” which is a script that I had on the Black List in 2011.
That’s with Depth of Field as producers, which are Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz and Andrew Miano. I think that so often, doing what we do and being writers, you’re always trying to attach a director. It’s kind of like, well, just be that guy.
F. Scott Frazier: I’ve come across those same problems this last year as well. It’s always about getting a director. You need that director to take it from a script to a movie. It’s a very small list of people that can get movies made, and you just kind of get to the point where it’s more of a barrier than a help. You get to the point where you just want to be able to make it. Writing scripts is fun, but I’d rather be making movies.
Scott: For you, Scott and Greg and Justin and John, are you all thinking maybe eventually moving into the writing/directing mode?
F. Scott Frazier: Yeah, I definitely am.
Greg Russo: I’m not. I don’t want to mess around with cameras. I break everything I touch.
[laughter]
Chris Borrelli: You’ve got to get up early, by the way. That’s what kept me away for years.
Greg Russo: Get up early? Hell no. That’s why I became a writer.
Scott: Did you see this tweet from Brad Bird? He said if bullets were questions, each day directing a movie’s like the D‑Day landing sequence in Saving Private Ryan.
[laughter]
Scott: And this is something you guys want to be doing, right?
Chris Borrelli: I actually call it “answering questions”. That’s a huge part of directing. I consider producing, coordinating a movie, kind of like planning a wedding reception every day. That’s what that feels like. Directing is just answering thousands of questions over the course of the day.
I’ve seen both. I’ve been with and even two hours ago, had a conference call with a director on another project, and I was very impressed with the way he handled the call and his vision for this other film I was hired for earlier this year.
And so that went very well, but I’ve also had plenty of directors that don’t understand writing, and they come on board, and they’re either only thinking in visuals, or they don’t actually understand the script they’ve attached themselves to.
I’ve seen all those kind of ridiculous things happen. There’s a few directors that really add value, and there’s a few that whether or not they technically add value, they have passion and you can share in their vision and then there’s plenty of others. I feel like I’ve dealt with all of that.
Scott: Greg, you had a splash last November when you got hired to adapt the movie version of a TV series, “It Takes a Thief,” that 70s series. How did you get involved with that project?
Greg Russo: That’s an interesting one. You can actually trace the origins of that project all the way back to the early 90s. It’s something that a lot of writers have tried to break. I really respond to challenging jobs like that. I like trying to figure out why it never happened, and see if I can solve it.
When I first learned about the show, I had no idea what it was so I had to go back and take a look at it. My parents were like, “Oh, what a great show that was.” I was like I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. What I loved about this project when I first got the script, was the character. The character at the heart of this movie, is this morally ambiguous thief. You never know if you can trust him. One of those roguish good guy/bad guy roles that I think actors love to play. It’s a really fun character to write.
It was a long process. I think it’s an important property to Universal considering how long they’ve invested in it. They want a big franchise picture. It was funny because when I got the project I was traveling in Peru and I remember I had to pitch the producers from Lima on a call and it was just an absolute disaster.
The call dropped out every three seconds. I remember walking back to tell my wife: “Well, I fucked that one up.” She was like, “Have a Pisco Sour. Or five. Forget about it.” Eventually, I found out that I didn’t actually fuck it up and ended up getting it.
Scott: The logline for it, “A clever thief is recruited to work for the CIA after eluding them for years.” I’m old enough to remember the TV series, which was a lot of fun. Robert Wagner. Is your version keeping some of that fun caper dynamic?
Greg Russo: It will absolutely be fun. People who know my stuff, know I can’t help but try and pull fun out of the projects I work on. But it’s important to remember that it’s still the studio that made Safe House.
Scott: More action?
Greg Russo: While being big and fun, the goal is to make sure the project also feels grounded and present day. That’s not to say there won’t be any levity. It’s lighter than Safe House. Mission: Impossible is probably the best comp for tone. Real world, serious grounded stakes, big set pieces, and if there’s humor to be mined from the characters in those situations, even better.
Scott: Justin, you’ve had a pretty high profile project you’ve gotten involved with called “The Breach” with Lorenzo di Bonaventura and David Goyer. How did that project come about?
Justin Rhodes: I had a relationship with Goyer from something else we’d done and he optioned the book and took it to Lorenzo to produce. I think, just based on our prior relationship, he was interested in having me take a look at that. We actually just finished the going-out-with-it draft a couple weeks ago. And Goyer’s attached to direct and they’re actually talking to a couple of potential cast right now.
Scott: This is from a Patrick Lee book, right?
Justin Rhodes: Correct. Yeah.
Scott: “An ex‑cop races to prevent an artifact from bringing about an apocalypse.”
Justin Rhodes: Yeah. It’s more of a Bourne thriller with some scifi elements to it. The apocalypse part, I don’t really know about that.
Scott: I think it’s a trilogy so are they looking at this as a franchise?
Justin Rhodes: Very much so, yeah.
Scott: Is this your first adaptation? If so, how was that?
Justin Rhodes: It’s actually my second adaptation but the first one was based on a true-life memoir so this is my first fictional one. It was a very interesting process. It’s like legally sanctioned plagiarism.
What I found different from writing a spec is that with an adaptation everybody already has some idea of what they’re passionate about from the moment the project arises. The will to turn this story into a movie predates you as the writer. The conversation shifts from “should we even do a story about this at all?” with a spec to “what’s the best possible version of this that we could do?”
The flip side of that is that everyone also approaches the project with some preconceived notions of what the sacred cows are and what they want to abandon. Those notions don’t always line up with your own, so with an adaptation you can also sometimes find yourself trapped within a bit of a box. And of course with a spec there’s no box because nobody knows what the borders are until you tell them. Probably the secret key to infinite happiness is to write a bestselling novel, get it optioned and then adapt it yourself.
Each day for this series, I’m going to highlight one of the writers. Today: Chris Borrelli.
Chris Borrelli has two features in post-production. The Vatican Tapes [Black List script] will be released theatrically on February 27, 2015, and the thriller Eloise, which wrapped shooting in June 2014.
Another spec, Wake, is going into pre-production with a start date in January 2015. Two other specs, Rounds and Sad Jack, are currently under option with the latter having been re-sold to a new financier this month.
In the past, Chris wrote the Universal / Gold Circle horror thriller Whisper and co-wrote the Fox / WWE action film The Marine 2. Other credits include the remake of Bad Influence for MGM, the French horror film ILS (“Them”) for Gold Circle, the live-action series Necessary Evil for the Cartoon Network, “Twittering from the Circus of the Dead” based on the Joe Hill short story of the same name for Mandalay and a blind deal at Focus / Rogue.
Please take time to leave a reply with your observations and follow-up questions, and while you’re there thank these writers for taking time out of their busy schedules to do this roundtable for GITS readers and the wider online screenwriting community.
On Twitter:
F. Scott Frazier: @ScreenWritten
Chris McCoy: @thatthere
Justin Rhodes: @twopointfour
John Swetnam: @JohnSwetnam
Many thanks to Wendy Cohen for logistical help with the roundtable.
Tomorrow: Part 2 of this exclusive screenwriter’s roundtable.
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