Written Interview: Eric Heisserer

Today’s interview is with Eric Heisserer who has amassed an impressive array of screenwriting credits in a short time including A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) (screenplay), The Thing (2011) (screenplay), Final Destination 5 (2011) (screenplay), and A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 (2012) (writer). In this interview on mypdfscripts.com, Eric talks about a wide range of subjects. A few highlights:

Q. When you first started to learn the craft, did you read/study any how-to books on screenwriting, and if so, which ones did you find to be the most beneficial?

A. I plowed through a handful of how-to books to see if there was any magical formula, but there isn’t. And there are a lot of how-to authors out there who come off as really, really proud of themselves for writing a how-to book. I am an experiential learner, so it felt better for me to simply dive in and start writing

Q. So, are you of the opinion that, rather than read myriad how-to books, it’s better to simply read scripts to learn the craft?

A. How-to books are a great help to many people. It depends on the writer. Some learn by studying and reading. Some learn by watching movies and listening to dialogue. Others have to do– try and fail until they figure out the craft. How-to books were not helpful to me, but I wouldn’t admonish anyone for using them.

Q. As a writer, how and where do you seek out inspiration? Alternatively, what really inspires you to write?

A. Inspiration is wily and elusive. I can’t really seek it out with any reliability; it finds me. It can be while I’m at a fine arts museum or in the frozen section of a grocery store. There is no telling what will set it off. It just happens. As to the second part of the question: Guilt. Guilt from not writing will push me to write. If I go too long without having written something, I get anxious. My knees bounce when I’m sitting down. I worry I’ll forget how to write if I don’t keep working those muscles.

Q. What is your writing process like (i.e. schedule, outline,notecards, treatments, etc.)?

A. I work out of a home office. Typically I get seized by an idea and start to jot down specific, if random, tidbits on notecards that I tack on my cork wall. These can be anything from scene sequences to specific lines of dialogue. Sometimes they’re questions, or concepts, or characters. It’s a total grab bag. Eventually that wall of notecards reaches a “critical mass” and I begin the process of providing a real structure to the story. That means tabulating, organizing, picking and choosing, etc. At the end of that process I have a detailed outline that serves as a guide for my first draft.

I don’t do any more outline work at this point, else I could lose the “fire of interest” in my gut to actually finish writing it. I get to script, and I push through as many pages per day as I can stand.

What Eric said above pretty much echoes what I said yesterday in this post.

I also thought this was a really interesting story from Eric and gives you some insight into how his creativity works:

Q. Can you tell me a little about THE DIONAEA HOUSE? The website you created was bit of an internet sensation a while back. What was the genesis of the project? Did the script come later?

A. This is a longer story.

It began shortly after I moved to Los Angeles. While driving through a neighborhood in the Valley in search of a friend’s home, I came upon a one-story house that looked remarkably like one I used to pass in Houston during my morning commute. Same elevation, same brick color, even the roof damage was similar. The sight disturbed me and made me wonder how two houses would look exactly alike so far apart from each other. Later, fighting a bout of insomnia one night, I caught a documentary on the Discovery Channel about the dionaea muscipula, known more commonly as the Venus Flytrap. I had a very cartoonish idea of the flytrap in my head, but in reality they can grow dozens of “mouths” from a single, large base. And I noticed all the mouths looked the same. Then the narrator began, “Disguised as shelter for insects…” and my head started to spin: What if we’re the insects?

I’d been a fan of Lovecraftian horror, so the idea of a series of identical homes inhabited by some otherworldly horror and interconnected across suburban America felt like a contemporary tale not unlike the Cthulhu mythos.

I began sketching the basics of the story and called my agent at the time, who told me “Original specs aren’t selling anymore. Everything has to be based on source material.” But I was undeterred. I decided I would create my own source material, and claim the screenplay was based on it. Now that I type that sentence, I see the ridiculousness of it, but at the time I was obsessed with the idea and interested in the Internet as a means of delivery. So, I began work on a series of websites, creating an epistolary story told in email, instant message chatlogs, LiveJournal and blog entries.

I was perhaps two-thirds of the way through that project when some search index found the main site (www.dionaea-house.com). I had not done enough to secure the site while I wrote the story, and I didn’t know enough about search engines to expect what happened next: I went to bed with 26 hits on the site — all me, poking around and checking links — to four million hits the next night. I was linked on major forum communities, webcomics, and linkshare sites. And then hundreds of email began pouring in. About twenty percent of the people understood it was a work of fiction (the copyright notice at the bottom of every page was a dead giveaway). The rest considered it gospel. I had people claiming they lived down the street from Mark, or went to school with Jennifer. Everyone wanted to help. Then the more bizarre emails began creeping in. A reporter from Boise wrote to tell me she thought someone was frauding me. A private investigator in Kentucky called my unlisted number and warned me that if he could find it, so could someone else. Two professional paranormal investigators asked to take “the case” on, free of charge. One of them sent me references. And a minister in Louisiana claimed to “understand the evil” I was facing and asked me to call right away.

I was simply agog at the way the story had a life of its own. I wish I could claim I’d engineered it with that goal in mind from the start, but I’d just tried to write a story that scared me, first and foremost. What the source material did for me was create momentum and attention to the spec screenplay that went out a few months later. It sold to Warner Brothers, with Heyday Films as producer. That was a truncated version of the strange and twisted adventure of THE DIONAEA HOUSE. If you want to hear the whole story, including the really crazy parts, you’ll have to get me drunk.

For the rest of the interview, go here.

Eric’s official website is here.

You can follow Eric on Twitter (I have been for months) here.

HT to Rob Fuller for sourcing the interview.

UPDATE: The Bitter Script Reader posted in comments that he did an interview with Heisserer re Elm Street. That link is here.

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