I’m still making mistakes. We rewrite projects all the time and see glaring things. When I first started, I think one of the biggest mistakes I made was I was constantly trying to write something that I thought someone else would want to read, as opposed to writing something I was really excited about. Seeing a movie come out and saying, “Oh, The Hangover came out, so I should write a movie about this.” Even when we get pitched ideas from studios and production houses I always work very hard to make it my own. Make the journeys of the characters something I can relate with. Make the themes things that matter to me and not worry so much about what other people think or what other people might like.
And then, you know, I think in comedy — sometimes not understanding that earnestness is funnier than trying to be funny. Writing characters like Chandler Bing in a script, you can get away with it a little bit, but then you end up having all characters who are pandering to an audience, as opposed to presenting situations we can relate with that make us laugh.
When I talk with young writers, I always tell them, “If you tell a really good bar story, you’re usually not a hilarious centerpiece of the story. You’re usually the cuckold or the idiot. You’re making mistakes and frustrated. And in that story, your character finds nothing funny about what’s happening.” In general, we’re so used to getting laughs in real life because we make jokes or tease people; we think that’s what comedy is in a script. Comedy is real life happening in a script and taking things we recognize and just changing one thing, but keeping everything else as usual and normal as possible.
Those are things I had to learn the hard way, just off the top of my head.
15) Tell me about one particularly satisfying or memorable event in your career that made you feel like, “Yes, this is what I’ve been working toward.”
It’s interesting because in writing, there are no finish lines. I can remember specifically a project that we were going out and pitching and it was a comedy, kind of like a Ghostbusters thing. We’d really been trying to get in the room with this major producer and we got the death slot, which is 5:00 pm. It’s the worst slot I guess in any business because you know that person has probably heard 10 pitches that day already and he’s thinking about going home. So we went in and you could just see it on all the faces of the executives. We’re in a room — the president of the studio is there, these are faces you see in Variety all the time — and just taking a deep breath and then orally pitching them out this story and taking an audience that just wanted to go home and then turning it around through weaving this tale, having them in the palm[s] of [our] hand[s]. Having them laughing and sitting up and looking at each other like, “Wow, this is great!” Those are the moments for me…because I feel like storytelling, whether you’re oral storytelling or writing, it’s all the same craft. I can remember feeling [the] energy in [that] room.
By the way, the funniest part of this story is they did not buy this script. They were talking about buying it in the room and excited, but they thought that internationally the movie wouldn’t do well because it was a science fiction comedy. So we didn’t sell it, but in a room, just to see a story come alive and to have ownership of those people for over an hour, which is a really long pitch, that’s a fond memory.
To be honest with you, the most satisfaction I get is [during] quiet moments when I’m working on a story, especially one that has a preposterous plot, or it’s a sci-fi movie, or a horror movie, and I come across some little nugget of human truth that maybe I didn’t realize or had never articulated. I think that’s what keeps me going all the time. That’s just an amazing feeling, to feel like I’m 40 years old and in the quiet of some morning in my apartment I can realize something that maybe can expand how I see the world. I think that’s pretty amazing.
16) Do you feel successful? How do you define success? To what do you most attribute your success?
I think if you can wake up and do something that you really love every day, if you don’t owe anyone any money, if you still have time to pursue other things that matter to you, and you haven’t been so pulled out of your normal life that your relationships with your loved ones aren’t affected, and — this is just a very small specific — if I can afford to go have a nice lunch every day, just like a $20 lunch, that’s as successful as I ever really care. If I get more, that’s great, but yeah, I do feel successful. I feel successful because there is nothing material that I want . As long as I can make a living and not have financial worries, and do something that excites me, that is success. Anything past that, it’s a game of millimeters.
How have you managed to get where you are? Do you think it has anything to do with things you’ve experienced in the past or how you were brought up or is it just your own personality?
I think 90% of it is staying in the game, not letting your setbacks stop you, and being committed to getting better and providing a better product over any sort of ego or insecurity you have that might not allow you to address your faults. I think that’s it.
I do feel like I’ve always loved stories and I’ve always had attachment to them, but I don’t think you necessarily need to have always been told, “Oh, you should write,” or always been told “You’re so funny.” I think if you do the work and are willing to grow as a person in the process of doing that work, you’re going to have success.
17) Tell me about what you are working on now.
Right now I just finished up working on a draft of How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack for Robert Zemeckis, which I was really happy with and then we immediately moved into a Chinese pirate movie set in the late-1800s in China. This is a project for CJ Entertainment, which is a massive Korean entertainment and business conglomerate, and director Brett Ratner from the Rush Hour movies.
We’re also just starting to entertain new projects for the fall, what we might work on. The industry’s a lot better this year. After the writer’s strike and this economic collapse there were definitely times where you only had a handful of things to even fight for, but now there’s a lot of people with money that have a lot of interesting projects. So, just trying to figure out what I can be excited about writing for as much as two years. That’s important. It can’t just be about the payday or how good a chance it has of being made. Can you connect with this material and want to be submerged in it for a long stretch of time?
18) If you were conducting this interview, what question would you ask?
Q: What would be the one mistake you would have tried to avoid when you started all this?
A: Unfortunately, the answer would be you can’t rewrite your career. I definitely feel like there have been times where I thought to myself, “If only I hadn’t gone to New York and pursued playwriting or done wrestling and I could’ve only started writing around 24 or 25 years old,” or “If I’d realized that I needed to draw more from personal experience earlier, then I would’ve somehow skipped ahead of the line,” but that’s not true. Whatever point you’re at, there’s a reason for it and there’s a value to it. [It’s] better to embrace the positive of those mistakes and the choices that you made and try to make yourself even more unique, to just define your individual voice even more, than it is to look back and try to change anything, because you can’t.
Wow, thanks for such a frank, informative interview, Chad! Any aspiring screenwriters out there? Apart from buying a book, it’ll be hard to find more in-depth, first-hand information than what Chad so generously provided here. What do you think? Did you have a different vision in mind as to what a screenwriter’s life must be like? Were your surprised by anything Chad had to say? Please leave your comments below. Oh, and by the way, you can follow Chad’s improv group on Twitter and on Facebook.
