Sheridan here. I interviewed New Zealand based screenwriter and producer, Matthew Grainger, over the course of eight months via e-mail while Matthew was in the midst of post production and releasing his latest film Under the Mountain.
I think what sets this interview apart from the few, but highly informative and extremely educational, interviews already on the site is that, while Matthew has hopes of cracking the proverbial Hollywood nut at some point, his passion to tell stories set in his homeland is of far greater importance at this stage of his career.
This is a lesson that I think all burgeoning screenwriters should really contemplate because while the majority of us wish to eventually make it to/in L.A., if we were to take a moment and look around us – really take in our surroundings, wholly – no matter where we may currently live or work or be at this very instant, I think we can find at least one engaging idea and story that is just begging to be told.
So, while Hollywood and the multimillion-dollar blockbuster may ultimately be our goal, we shouldn’t be so quick to overlook or ignore the stories in our own backyard.
Q: First off, tell us a little about yourself. Who is Matthew Grainger?
A: I’m a writer/producer and script consultant based in Wellington, New Zealand. I’ve been lucky enough to have movies made from two screenplays, both co-written with Jonathan King: The Tattooist (which was directed by Peter Burger) and Under the Mountain, directed by Jonathan. He and I are also producers on Under the Mountain, and I was the script editor on his first film, Black Sheep.
Q: When did you first become aware that films were actually made and that there was an entire machine and process behind what you were seeing on the screen?
A: My grandparents owned a small bookshop and had an even smaller section of imported magazines, which back then would take about four months to get to New Zealand. Every now and then they used to let me take something home and at some point I discovered Starlog. I would have been about seven or eight years old. The movies took even longer to get to New Zealand than the magazines, so everything in Starlog still seemed ahead of its time.
Starlog was the first place I read about screenwriting (I remember the article – a news item revealing that Lawrence Kasdan was going to follow up Raiders of the Lost Ark with this little thing called Revenge of the Jedi), and actually the first time I read ‘Making Of’ articles of any kind. It was an introduction to VFX, production designers, actors and directors, and they were always accompanied by black and white shots of guys with mustaches and sideburns wearing aviators. So from there I got a broad sense of the process and the scale of it all.
I think those magazines co-incided with what was a golden few years of moviegoing for me, starting with Star Wars, Superman, then Empire, Raiders, Poltergeist, E.T., Tron, Dark Crystal and later Jedi, Temple of Doom, Gremlins, The Goonies, Ghostbusters and Back to the Future (which remains to this day my favourite film).
I was completely immersed in Star Wars, which was the first movie I ever saw, but I heard the word ‘Spielberg’ more than any other over those years. I came to associate it with quality, and I think it was the first time I was aware of a filmmaker’s name as a brand, and definitely the first sense I had that people took authorial credit for a movie (I’ll also never forget the horror of Hook a few years later – the first time I discovered that no one was infallible). I can vaguely remember telling my Mum I wanted to be Steven Spielberg when I was nine or so.
So just normal, modest, readily achievable childhood ambitions for an introverted proto-nerd living in a small city at the bottom of the world.
Q: What was it, specifically, that drew you to the writing aspect of filmmaking?
A: I don’t think there was ever an epiphany. My two favourite subjects at school were English and Art, and I remember an English teacher imploring me to study literature and write stuff instead of going to art college, which were the two options on the table. So thank you, Robin Smith, wherever you are now.
After that I thought, supposedly I can write and I’m completely obsessed with movies, so, therefore, my perfect job must be to write movies. And to be honest, I never really thought about it again – something clicked in my brain and I just forged ahead.
I think around that time – age 15 or so – I started making notes about ideas for movies. I still have some of them. Actually, I have some notes on Under the Mountain that date back to around that time – 26 years ago. I think it just says ‘UNDER THE MOUNTAIN – NEW VERSION’ or something profound like that.
These days I try to flesh things out a bit more than that.
Q: What was the first screenplay you ever read and how did it change or alter your approach or perspective on filmmaking?
A: The first screenplay I ever read was Star Wars. In the late 80s, Premiere had a series where they’d publish quite nice facsimiles of screenplays, so the version I had was correctly formatted and in Courier. And I remember being quite struck at how different a screenplay was to a novelisation. I was also a bit surprised – I’d always assumed that a screenplay would be a loose blueprint, but as far as I could see, it was all on the page.
Q: As a writer, how and where do you seek out inspiration? Alternatively, what really inspires you to write?
This feels like a deft spin on, “Where do you get your ideas?” (which anyone who makes anything up for a living gets asked anytime anyone asks them anything).
I usually just get frustrated if I try and seek out inspiration. There’s something about taking a really long shower that gets my mind wandering down productive paths, or I guess like most people, stuff just pops into my head at random. I don’t really know where they come from, and I don’t feel like I have any real control over how that initial idea arrives.
Sometimes it’s a good idea but you just can’t figure out how it could be a movie; other times it’s half-baked or fragmentary, but you realise that with a little shaping, you can work with it. I have ideas I had 10 or 15 years ago that I come back to every now and then and see if anything clicks into place.
What inspires me to write is other people telling stories that I love, be they books, movies, graphic novels, documentaries. When I see a movie that reminds me why I love movies, it’s an experience that for me is intrinsically linked to the desire to provide that experience for someone else. Nothing makes me want to write more than enjoying someone else’s stuff.
Q: What is your writing process like (i.e. schedule, outline, notecards, treatments, etc.)?
I do a lot of thinking and a lot of outlining. Thinking time is underrated, but inside your head is where a lot of your work happens and the great thing (or the curse) is, it tends to happen anywhere you might be, whatever you might be doing at the time. Time spent just turning your idea over in your head is never, ever time wasted, and you have to resist the urge to open Final Draft too soon.
Beyond that, I don’t have a schedule (unless I’m writing for hire, which is a slightly different headspace) – but I will try and allocate myself a period of time to get the draft done. I think of what happens in Final Draft as being mostly dialogue – the bulk of the writing for me is in the outline. It’s where the story gets built structurally, and it’s easier to drop images or events in, shuffle them around and expand them without being beholden to the more technical aspects of screenwriting as a form.
Once I have an outline that feels to me like a whole movie (or near enough), which could be anywhere from 5 to 20 pages long, I’ll block out the screenplay in Final Draft, dropping in each scene from the outline to give the broad strokes, along with any dialogue ideas I’ve had along the way, and sometimes I’ll just write the odd scene I’ve been looking forward to writing just to get a sense of style for the big print overall.
I very rarely open Final Draft and work sequentially through the script – it’s a non-linear process, which a detailed outline allows you to do. How those old-school screenwriters managed on typewriters, I have no idea.
Q: What software do you use and why?
For outlining, I’ve recently discovered WriteRoom, by Hog Bay Software – a great little bare-bones word processor for OS X designed to minimise distractions – it basically clears your screen of everything but your own words, and I’m not sure how I ever got anything done without it.
I use Final Draft for the screenplay, perhaps because I’ve yet to find a compelling alternative. I’ve tried Montage and I used to have MovieMagic Screenwriter, and I think Adobe’s new Story app shows promise in that kind of Swiss Army Knife mould, but I settled on Final Draft simply because everyone else seemed to use it and it makes it easier to co-write things when you’re not trying to convert files. As anyone who’s ever tried to convert anything to Final Draft knows, you’re in for a formatting-related world of pain as soon as you ask it to sort out elements.
But for some reason I prefer to actually review my own work in PDF format, so I quite frequently print to PDF from Final Draft and read it that way. It’s a weird little tic that I have – maybe I just like the antialiasing more, or the font just seems that little bit heavier – but it looks more like a screenplay to me as a PDF.
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: In general I’ve actually found books to be most beneficial once I already have a draft of something, and can apply whatever the principles are to something I’ve already written. I’ve dipped into all kinds of things over the years, but I guess overall I’ve found McKee’s Story to be the most rewarding.
While I don’t subscribe to everything he supports, or even necessarily to the Cult of McKee overall, I think it’s a book with an exceptionally clear perspective. For me it remains unsurpassed in that regard.
Q: Earlier, you mentioned having a co-writer, but you’ve also written solo projects. In your opinion, what are the pros and cons in both of those approaches? Is it difficult to switch between the two?
I’ve collaborated with two or three writers over the last few years, to varying degrees of success – but my collaboration with Jonathan King has been the one that has borne fruit in that only one thing we’ve written together hasn’t been produced. Obviously that success rate may change! But I do like writing in either scenario, as they’re completely different headspaces. I like the freedom of writing on my own – but when you do that, you sacrifice that alternative perspective in the room, the wildcard of your writing partner having an idea that spins you off in a direction you would never have thought of on your own. I love that sense of your own work taking you along for a ride.
Q: Once you’ve finished the first draft of a project, how many people, and who specifically, do you let read it?
A: I tend not to let too many people read a first draft, because I think any first draft is inevitably very loose – the promise of something you’re driving at, which you hope to arrive at somewhere down the line. Jonathan is usually the first person I let read anything, and if I’m particularly happy with how the draft has turned out, I’ll also send it to my agent, Adam Levine, right away – if for no other reason than to assure him that I haven’t disappeared into the wilderness at the bottom of the world! But Adam has also been a great source of encouragement and frankness, both of which are necessary in equal measure.
Q: As the old adage goes: writing is rewriting. How do you approach and what is your process in regard to rewriting?
A: I usually approach rewriting by taking a step back from the draft and writing another outline, treating the new draft as an entirely new entity – for me that’s how a draft is distinguished from a polish or an edit. I find it’s great to start a new draft with a really strong grasp of the big picture – it’s so easy to dive back into your Final Draft file and start writing around in there, but when you do that you’re often rearranging the furniture when you should be renovating the house.
Q: Your first produced screenplay is entitled The Tattooist. How did this project come into existence?
The Tattooist was a writing assignment. Jonathan was in the process of developing Black Sheep, on which I was his script consultant; word got around that it was a good horror script and it was going into production, and he was offered The Tattooist by its producer, Robin Scholes.
Robin’s a hugely experienced local producer, and had been forging ties in Asia for potential co-productions. J-horror was everywhere, so she was keen to make a genre film with New Zealand elements in that vein; she bought a pitch by an Auckland-based Samoan comedian, Vela Manusaute, and an Australian writer had subsequently developed a treatment for what was then called The Ink of the Devil. Jonathan asked if I wanted to co-write it with him, which of course, I did. So we pitched for the project, and given that we’d devoured a lot of that stuff – Ringu, The Eye and its sequels (even – ouch! – The Eye 10), Ju-On, Dark Water, Shutter, Uzumaki, One Missed Call, that kind of thing – we got the job.
One of the first things we did was to move away from the existing treatment, which was a Final Destination-style thriller in which the main character’s transgression led to a series of accidents that took out his buddies one by one. But we’d read stories in the New Zealand media about how men would occasionally die from septic shock while receiving the pe’a, the traditional Samoan tattoo. It was rare and didn’t happen when reputable tattooists did the work, but there was a precedent for it.
So we decided to explore the idea of a ghost as an infection, a curse in the form of a tatau that literally devoured its wearer. This allowed us to explore elements of Samoan culture that interested us, concerning the friction between traditional elements of Pacific Island culture and Christianity, and the role that pride and shame play in contemporary urban Samoan culture in New Zealand. The idea grew from there.
Q: How long did it take you to write it: from the first word to the final draft?
A: The first draft I have is dated May 2005 and the shooting script is dated August 2006. Raintree Media in Singapore came on-board after the first draft, and originally the film was to have a Singaporean director, though plans changed as we got closer to the shoot. A number of challenges also came with the co-production aspect of the financing, chief among them being how to introduce Singaporean elements into an Auckland-set story about traditional Samoan tattooing, which for commercial reasons already had an American protagonist.
There is no organic answer to that kind of conundrum, so we opted to open the film in Singapore and establish Jake, the main character, as a fraudulent spiritualist who deals in mystical tattoos he doesn’t personally believe in. A lot of elements shifted during the course of development, and we were constantly rewriting to include new ideas from the various partners.
Q: What was the process like once it was sold (i.e. any rewrites during production)?
A: There were rewrites both immediately before and during production, but they were done by the script editor, with the occasional polish from us in between. We were brought back onto the film during post production to write ADR in an attempt to shift emphasis back onto some key details that had somehow gotten lost in the shuffle.
Q: What was it like to sit in a darkened theater with an audience and watch your words come to life for the first time on the big screen?
A: It was surreal. There was a sense of watching a film that was essentially the one we wrote – and yet on another level was telling a completely different story. It was such an unusual experience to see the macro aspects of the story filtered through a different set of sensibilities. Thinking back, I wish I’d enjoyed the wider significance of it all a bit more – I had my first produced credit on a feature film!
But I think that screening was a moment of epiphany for other reasons, really – it came with the knowledge that if we were going to invest ourselves heavily in something, we needed more control over the end product. I think watching The Tattooist with an audience was an experience that led directly to our decision to produce Under the Mountain ourselves.
Of course, a couple of years later, I can watch The Tattooist for what it is – and while I’m not in love with the movie, I think it’s a thriller with some really interesting elements in it, and one that’s definitely set in a unique world that I think Pete Burger brought to life in inventive ways on a shoestring budget.
It’s been released worldwide – Ghost House Underground picked it up for distribution in the U.S. – it found an audience, and it certainly has its fans who I think see it as a unique entry in a crowded genre. All of those are great things to be able to say about your first feature film.
Q: What was life like for you immediately after The Tattooist was made?
A: I think in New Zealand, having a screenplay produced isn’t really a game-changer in the sense that it might be elsewhere in the world. It certainly doesn’t open the floodgates of work offers, or even really open doors for you – there simply aren’t enough films developed or made in New Zealand for that to happen.
Also, New Zealand is a producer-driven filmmaking environment in which one important role of producing is to unlock development funding from the New Zealand Film Commission for writers to get paid to work on their screenplays. In other environments, a produced script might lead to expressions of interest in a writer’s other ideas from producers, but in New Zealand it doesn’t really work like that in my experience – as a writer you’re always in a position of going cap-in-hand to producers with new ideas, even after multiple produced credits, after which point your idea can be optioned by a producer for little or no money but the promise of development funding down the line.
All of which is to say, there wasn’t ever really a sense of anything having changed, or of opportunities being offered to us as writers – the film came out, and we went back to working on more ideas with the hope of being able to get them off the ground somehow. But thankfully, life after The Tattooist was also life after Black Sheep, which did achieve international success. And Jonathan and I made a number of big decisions after that movie that resonate today – the decision to start our own production company – to essentially take ownership of the part of that development hierarchy that we weren’t comfortable with – as well as the decision to develop screenplays as producers with other writers and directors, and the decision to make Under the Mountain together. I don’t think The Tattooist enabled those things to happen – but I think we were able to make those things happen in part from what we learned on both of those projects.
Q: What lessons did you learn from The Tattooist that informed or altered your approach to writing Under the Mountain?
There were already two or three drafts of Under the Mountain by the time I worked on The Tattooist, but I think more than anything else, the process of writing The Tattooist really taught me that you have to be able to fight for your ideas – that in order to respond to notes and feedback as a writer-for-hire often involves putting a spin on your own ideas that is more palatable to the powers that be, and that in order to do that without selling yourself out completely, you need a foundation of something you can stand beside and fight for.
I had actually walked away from my previous draft of Under the Mountain, and when Jonathan and I decided to pursue it as his second film as director, I was keen for us to start again from scratch. But he read the last draft I had written and persuaded me that it was a great basis for the film – that I had already broken the back of the novel, so to speak – and he and I then approached that existing work, applying a commercial sensibility that we had developed while working on both Black Sheep and The Tattooist.
Q: Has watching actors act out and speak your written words changed your process in any way?
A: It’s probably made me less precious about how the dialogue reads, because I know the level of adjustment that will happen on the day [of shooting]. It’s also taught me the benefit of reading things aloud!
I visited the set of The Tattooist once during production, and it was exciting to talk to Jason Behr – not just because he’s such a lovely, engaging chap, but also because he was so enthusiastic about the character and the world of the story. It was clear to me that he’d found something in the character of Jake that he was really drawn to, and that’s hugely gratifying as a writer – to know that an actor is driven to build on the work you’ve done.
And on Under the Mountain, there were definitely places where it felt like the combination of actor and page really came together – Leon Wadham, who plays Ricky in Under the Mountain, really brought that home to me. He totally got not just the character, but our take on him – and that character is just a delight for me, in that Leon simply IS the Ricky we wrote.
All of which is to say, I think I’m probably just more relaxed about dialogue now. It’s great from a selling perspective to make it an entertaining read, but it’s the right combination of actor and screenplay that will really bring the character to life.
Q: Has being Matthew the Producer on Under the Mountain had any effect on Matthew the Writer?
A: I think now I’m less inclined to pursue ideas that have no realistic chance of getting made in the current marketplace. I probably used to think that a cool idea will always find its way through somehow, whereas now I think that a cool idea could maybe find its way through if it’s delivered in a way that fits with what the international market is currently investing in.
I’m sure a lot of writers more experienced than I am reach a point where they have an innate understanding of these kinds of commercial considerations; I feel like I started to get my head around this stuff by being a producer.
Q: Sum up your feelings of Hollywood today and the process of getting a script made into a film. Do you feel that it’s a good process overall?
A: My feelings on Hollywood are those of an outsider. It seems like a labyrinthine process, and a fickle one – a difficult nut to crack, and then what you get out of that shell often seems to taste bitter. Jonathan and I have certainly flirted with it – we nearly committed to writing a reboot of The Blob a few years back for Fox Atomic, and we had a really cool take that the guys at FA really liked – but ultimately we decided to pursue Under the Mountain instead. There seemed to be so many remakes or reboots of things around even then, and we didn’t want to jump into that if we also had the chance to make New Zealand-based stuff that we were passionate about, even though it meant working on a tiny fraction of the budget that I’m sure The Blob would have given us. Which isn’t to say there aren’t things I’d be interested in remaking or rebooting – Under the Mountain is both an adaptation of a 1970s New Zealand novel and a TV series from the early 80s.
But I have an agent in Hollywood, and one day I’d love to be writing Hollywood films – it’s the cinema I grew up on, and ultimately it’s why I do this – but at this point I feel like I have more of an ability to write cool stuff and see it through to production here in New Zealand, where we’re supported by our government to some degree and we have this astonishing array of world-class facilities at our disposal, thanks in no small part to the infrastructure that Peter Jackson has created.
If I get to write films in Hollywood, I’d love for them to be the right films – and I’m fortunate to be able to say that in the meantime, I can keep working back home and keep building up a body of work comprised of the kinds of movies I love. Under the Mountain is one of those movies – it’s a movie I would have lost my mind over when I was 9 years old. That might not be everyone’s cup of tea – especially older audiences bombarded with Transformers sequels – but I get a kick out of knowing a movie like that is out there in 2010, and a lot of the people I’ve talked to who have really enjoyed the movie have done so for those reasons.
Jonathan and I always talked about wanting Under the Mountain to feel like a lost Amblin Entertainment film from the 1980s that someone found in a vault somewhere – a film from your childhood that somehow passed you by. It’s probably kind of dated in that regard, in that it doesn’t push the envelope in terms of visual overkill – we didn’t have the budget to do that anyway – but I love it for that. I love that it’s ostensibly a movie about characters and what they want, that it doesn’t pummel you for three hours, that it deals in shades of grey and that the physical stakes are dark and violent – there’s no doubt, I don’t think, that the Wilberforces want to kill these kids.
I digress – but I guess being able to tell a story like that on a low budget and work with people like Richard Taylor at Weta Workshop and our creature supervisor, Steve Boyle and wonderful actors like Sam Neill, and do it all in New Zealand and produce it ourselves sums up my feelings towards Hollywood – an incredible, lifelong source of inspiration, but one I don’t feel as though is crucial to my development as a writer right now, however much I’d love to jump into it if the right opportunity arose. And I count myself fortunate in that regard.
Q: Are you currently working on any projects and can we expect to see anything from you soon?
A: I’m working on a number of projects at the moment, under our Index Films production umbrella. I wrote a screenplay called The Great Explorers last year which I’d love to see made in some size, shape or form – it’s an Edwardian adventure tale about a race to claim Mars for the British Empire. We shopped it around last year and got a great response, but the onus is on me at the moment to write a second draft that takes it in a slightly more commercial direction. Or we may do it as a graphic novel, if for no other reason that it would allow us to tell the story on a scale that we wouldn’t be able to on film without the budget being massive and it needing to be a very different kind of story.
I’ve just finished a first draft of a fairly traditional horror movie – one that ticks a lot of boxes that other genre films aren’t really ticking at the moment for me. And we’ve recently optioned a non-fiction account of a famous New Zealand UFO sighting, which I’ll write and a young New Zealand director, Leo Woodhead, is hopefully going to direct for us. But with Under the Mountain finding its way out into the world, 2010 is a year of writing. Developing new projects and new IP.
Hopefully, in the meantime, the landscape of independent financing might start to look a little more optimistic, and some avenues will emerge regarding how we’re going to get our next films made.
Q: Finally, any inspiring words for those aspiring writers reading this?
A: I can only speak from my own limited experience, but I would say: don’t get too hung up on rules, tricks of the trade and other people’s breaking-in stories – just focus primarily on coming up with and writing stuff that you think is cool and unique.
Watch as many movies as you can, and when you love something, think really hard about what that movie did that you love and how it might relate to ideas of your own. Think about the structural elements that make great movies work – and learn to recognise them when you see them.
And above all, read scripts on sites like this one! There’s no better way to learn to write screenplays than to watch movies and read scripts – and to understand why some work for you and why others don’t.
Check out more:
Official site @ indexfilm.com
Matthew Grainger @ IMDb
Matthew Grainger @ twitter.com/mjgrainger
The Tattooist @ IMDb
- Download the script
- Official Site
- Purchase the DVD
Under the Mountain @ IMDb
- Download the script
- Official Site
- Purchase the DVD