One Woman's Writing Retreat: Interview

Alex Epstein

  By Nicola Warwick

NW: How did you get started screenwriting? Was it something you had longed to do? Did you have ambitions to work in the film industry as a child?

AE: Absolutely none. Actually, I didn't start writing at all until I was around 13, and it wasn't until the last year of high school that I wrote anything outside of a class. At the time that seemed a terribly late start; you read all those interviews with writers who say they were writing stories in their notebooks when they were six years old. My passions were science fiction books and, later, war games, which I obsessed about to the point where I started seeing hex grids in the nighttime sky. The same thing a fortiori with filmmakers. Francois Truffaut was sneaking into movie theaters when he was eight. I remember seeing Day For Night at Yale and thinking: too bad I didn't see this movie when I was younger, I might have become a filmmaker.

What happened was I started writing poetry in high school, and people kept complimenting me on my images. Then I wrote stories in college, and people kept complimenting me on my images. Then I went to hang out in Paris after college, to avoid getting a real job. I was shooting short video movies at the University of Paris: a twenty-minute version of Danton's Death, and a short piece called "The French Girl You Need" in which my Senegalese friend who wanted to avoid military service back home tried to talk women on the street into marrying him so he could stay in France.

The beauty of slacking in Paris after college is that no one asks you when you're going to stop slacking and get a job: you're doing the Paris thing. On Bastille Day a very beautiful girl told me I really should go to film school. It was that or go into advertising.

UCLA was then utterly chaotic, but you got to fool around with equipment, and you're required to make a couple of short films. I got to study with Richard Marks (editor of Apocalypse Now) and Stirling Silliphant (writer of In the Heat of the Night). I also spent two years at the Joanne Baron Studio learning the Meisner Technique of acting. If you're going to write, you ought to know how to act, even if you're not an actor; it really informs your writing.

I got into screenwriting at first just because the UCLA program is a writer-director program and you have to write. But I kept taking screenwriting classes, and then once I was out kept writing screenplays. I think if you're a writer, you just keep writing. When I don't write, I become irritable, I bark at dogs and mutter.

NW: Did you ever want to do anything else?

AE: You mean, aside from be Ruler of the Known World? My degree was in computer science, but I can't say I ever had a longing to be a computer scientist. Until I decided to shoot the moon and try to become a filmmaker, I just kind of fell into things that seemed fun to do, or at least difficult and impressive. But I always hung around the theater in high school, without being an official dramarama. I think what most attracted me was the feeling of being in a family you get in a theater production. For the run of the piece, everyone's working together at something all but impossible, and you watch the thing take root and grow before your eyes. I suppose that's equally true of being a construction worker, but in compensation for being excessively level headed I think I've always sought out the company of crazy people. Hence show business.

NW: What has been your greatest achievement? Do you have a particular favourite out of all the screen writing projects you've worked on?

AE: Unfortunately my greatest real achievement would have to be my sole produced writing credit, Warriors, starring Gary Busey. I've written many scripts I love better than that, but I can't really call them an achievement since they're still just scripts. But my most beloved screenplays are:

SIRRAH: the true story of James Hogg, a shepherd who wanted to become a poet; Walter Scott, who discovered to his dismay that Hogg had talent, and Hogg's dog Sirrah, who had the misfortune of having a poet for a master.

FURIES: "on a ship hunting the mysterious giant space creatures known as sylphs, a man escaping a crime in his past fights a battle of wills with a captain obsessed with vengeance."

CITY OF RAVENS: a "mystery dance" about a waitress who may be an angel fallen from heaven, who meets a singer with the voice of an angel.

THE WINE DARK SEA: in 1184 BC, a war hero heads home after ten years of war. But he makes an enemy of the god of the sea, and must fight sorcery and fate to get home to his beleaguered wife and homeland.

NW: Do you hobnob with the stars?

AE: Oh, yes, why just the other day I was telling Jodie . . .

NW: Do you have any funny stories you can tell? What was it like working with Richard Attenborough?

AE: Richard Attenborough is the most utterly charming man alive. He has this way about him that some politicians have, that he can ask you for the salt ("would you . . . pass the salt, darling?"), and for the moment his attention is fully focussed on you, you feel like the most important person in the world to him. Unfortunately, for this very reason, it is not always easy to tell the true depth of his interest in your project.

Gary Busey makes better stories, though, and tells marvelous stories about his days back on the ranch when he got stuck with the worst jobs, such as crouching inside the fake cow trying to catch bull semen in a jar. When he flew to Montreal for Warriors, I, being the lowest ranked actual producer, went to pick him up in the limo at midnight. He had his guitar out in moments, and was hollering Buddy Holly songs, The Buddy Holly Story having been his first break. He wanted to go out on the town in the limo, but I was able to persuade him to go to the hotel first (or the production would have got stuck with a thousand-dollar limo bill!). So we're up in his hotel room, and he's playing tunes he made up on the plane and stamping his feet at midnight.

Suddenly he decides we have to go out to a strip bar. I'm no connoisseur, but only in Montreal do the girls really put their heart and soul into it--maybe it's the French thing. So we're talking while some girl is gyrating on the tabletop over us, and Gary says: "so tell me about Colonel Vail," his character in our movie . . . and suddenly I begin to suspect that Gary has not read the script! Sure, his manager read a synopsis, and a reader at the agency probably read it . . . but Gary hasn't.

Alex: "Well, Gary, Colonel Vail is a very tightly wound up guy. He's killed so many people that he's full of tremendous rage; but he bottles it up inside of him. He's a lot like Colonel Joshua," Gary's character in Lethal Weapon, "he feels a lot, but he barely shows more than a tenth of it."

Gary (bellowing): JESUS CHRIST THAT'S GREAT!

I think the girl nearly fell off the table, she was so startled. And I'm thinking, er, *no*, not like that, maybe just a tenth of that . . .

People tell a lot of stories about how difficult Gary is to work with. But in my experience, he just wants two things. He wants to be absolutely confident that the filmmakers know what they're doing. If an a.d. calls him out of his trailer and he finds himself cooling his heels for an hour, he gets frustrated and irritated. He also does not want to be alone. He's very high energy, and if he doesn't have some way to get that energy out, if he's lonely and bored, he'll find a way not to be alone . . . and the producer probably won't like it. It's sort of like a border collie: they want to run 30 miles a day, and if they're cooped up in a backyard, they'll find something to do there that you won't like. You want to have someone keeping Gary company at all times.

NW: Is there a novelist or specific book you would like to write the screenplay for?

AE: Yeah. Neal Stephenson's book Zodiac. It's in turnaround at Warner Bros. It's about an eco-guerrilla who's a bit of a jerk but who uncovers a conspiracy to dump poison into Boston Harbor. It's timely and it's fresh

NW: Do you have any ambition to write books?

AE: I have an unpublished novel about the childhood of Morgan le Fay, and I'm developing my screenwriting web page into a book. It's growing slowly as people ask me questions.

NW: Is there a film you would have scripted differently? Is there an actor you would like to write for?

AE: I think Michael Douglas would make a perfect Odysseus for my script "The Wine Dark Sea." Hugh Grant would be a terrific James Hogg for "Sirrah"; both Grant and Hogg have the quality that you can't stay mad at them even when they've misbehaved terribly. Brad Pitt would be the perfect hero for "Furies," with Michael Douglas playing the captain.

I will say that it's always fun to work with an actor who has a good sense of story. We had William Shatner attached to Warriors in the beginning, and he had a lot of extremely intelligent things to say about the script. There are actors who are very smart people, like Jodie Foster and Robert Redford, and they are always going to be more fun to work with, even when they disagree with you, than actors who just think they're smart.

NW: What would be the ultimate dream come true in terms of writing or producing a film? What would be the greatest opportunity anyone could offer you?

AE: Writing anything for Mel Gibson. Braveheart is one of my favorite pictures, and it's the sort of thing I could write. I'm always amazed by Bob Fosse's work, but I don't know if I could write a Bob Fosse movie, even if he weren't dead.

NW: What authors do you read?

AE: Neal Gaiman. Neal Stephenson. Raymond Chandler. I recently discovered Emma Bull's novel Finder, and she's terrific. I reread Shakespeare now and then.

NW: Do you enjoy producing or screenwriting best?

AE: Screenwriting, no question. Producing is all headaches, and I'm not a king schmoozer by nature.

NW: You must have been walking the streets of Paris just the year after I was there (84/85). What did you think of Paris in 86?

AE: Cold and grey; and that was just the people. Seriously, I think in my heart I'm an Anglophile.

NW: How do you work when writing for a director? Do you have a lot of autonomy or do the directors often have strong ideas of their own that they want you to work with?

AE: Good directors have a vision of what they want a script to be. Good screenwriters rework the screenplay to fit and enhance that vision. You only really have autonomy when you're writing a spec.

NW: How’s Tell Me No Lies coming along? What is it about?

AE: I believe they've selected a cast and they're going to record it soon. It's a radio play about a strange little girl hitching her way out of LA. People tell her their secrets because they don't know her, but it turns out she may have a much darker secret than any of them.

NW: How do you write? Do you stick to a rigid schedule or does it vary? Where do you write? And do you use a PC?

AE: I putter about until I get sick of it, and then I sit down and write. I've been experimenting with blocking out bits of time for writing, something I've never done before. I write in my garage, which was converted to an artist's studio. But sometimes I take my Mac laptop over into the courtyard, or into bed, or out to a park or cafe, and write there.

NW: How do you start writing a screenplay? Can you describe the process to us? What sort of research do you do and how extensive is it?

AE: I don't believe in doing too much research, particularly not at first, unless you're telling a true story. The bottom line is I need a good story idea--a character, a precipitating incident, a goal, an obstacle, a villain, and an ending. I generally write an outline that grows to about ten pages. From that I write the screenplay all the way through, usually in about a month. Then I tinker forever. The computer kind of puts paid to the notion of "drafts," except in the contractual sense. How much do you have to change for your first draft to become a second draft?

I think knowing too much can put you on the wrong track. You can always tell when someone's been too faithful to historical truth or to a book: there are scenes that are dramatic and illuminating in themselves, that stop the movie dead in its tracks because they don't have anything to do with the main theme. Movies are short stories, not novels.

I did a lot of research for "Sirrah", in two chunks. I read a lot of books to try to find out the story of James Hogg. Then I wrote the treatment. Then I went to Scotland to get the flavor of the place, and ask people if the incidents I'd put in the movie were believable. Then I wrote the screenplay.

On the other hand, in "Telephone Man", I got a very brief rundown on what a telephone lineman keeps in his truck, and pretty much made up the rest of it on the fly. In a thriller, the audience doesn't really care if you're dead accurate, only that you're consistent and believable.

Whew. Gotta get back to writing!

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