CUT TO: Eric Heisserer (Screenwriter)
Screenwriter Eric Heisserer took a few moments out of his busy schedule to chat with Sheridan via e-mail about writing, breaking into the industry, the accidental creation of an internet viral sensation, and treading on hallowed cinematic ground with A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET and THE THING.
Q. First off, tell us a little about yourself. Who is Eric Heisserer?
A. I grew up in Norman, Oklahoma, as the son of an ancient history professor. My writing career began humbly, in the tabletop roleplaying game industry. This was after high school, when I lived in Houston. Then one day I submitted a scenario to a publisher and got the rejection of: “This would make a good movie, though.” Short stories and game writing were my gateway drugs to screenwriting, because once I got to my first FADE OUT, there was no going back.
It wasn’t until a few years ago that I was able to sustain a career as a screenwriter. Before then, I was doing what everyone does: Work in a cubicle farm for ten hours a day, then crawl home and write for four hours a night until I fell asleep at the keyboard. These days I write ten hours a day and fall asleep in front of the TV. It’s a subtle difference, but preferable.
Q. How did you break into the roleplaying industry? And what and who did you write for, exactly?
A. I grew up around friends who were all gamers, so I was indoctrinated into that form of storytelling early on. By the time I was twenty, I had written enough scenarios for friends that it was a short leap to consider submitting one or two for publication. The first system I wrote for was Cyberpunk, by R. Talsorian Games.
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. I saw my first blooper reel when I was ten years old, and it made me think more than it made me laugh. Before then, I hadn’t considered all the mechanics of producing a movie. They simply arrived at the local theater every weekend, and I eagerly fell into their fictional worlds.
Q. What was it, specifically, that drew you to the writing aspect of filmmaking?
A. I was already a fiction and game writer. But as I mentioned earlier, I began to see certain stories in my head. When I tried to write these stories, I realized I was being almost entirely visual in my narrative choices. I was recording my mental images. Now and then these make for adequate novels or short stories, but prose wants you to stretch out and get inside a character’s head; to use palettes other than the visual. But a screenplay… That’s a transitory document. It’s meant to feel like a blueprint to a movie. You’re trying to describe what the movie looks like, the way you would when retelling a dream to a friend.
And that’s how I had begun to see my stories, almost exclusively.
Q. What was the first screenplay you ever read and how did it change or alter your approach or perspective on filmmaking?
A. Walter Hill‘s script to ALIEN. It blew my mind. It reads like haiku. He does such a phenomenal job of describing a scene with very few words. And he never uses exclamation points or question marks in dialogue, even when the character is asking a question. It made the reading… more natural and real, honestly. I could hear how these people talked. It gave them room to breathe. Plus it was an incredibly quick read. I realized you could suggest a style of direction, of even a camera angle, without being overt about it on the page. You could direct the movie without the director ever knowing you were behind the lens.
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.
Q. What screenwriting software do you use and why?
A. My job requires me to be fluent in both Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter. I’m fine with both.
Q. Once you’ve finished the first draft of a project, how many people, and who specifically, do you let read it?
A. I take my first drafts to a group of peers to do a table read and suss out any problems with the script that I might not be able to see. It’s taken me a number of years but I’ve found a tight group of fellow writers whose perspective and insight I trust implicitly. Their feedback elevates the quality of the next draft.
Q. As the old adage goes: writing is rewriting. How do you approach and what is your process in regards to rewriting?
A. When it’s my own material, I have to give myself a few days’ distance before I go back and rewrite. I know the history of decisions I’ve made with a script, and the paths I chose along the way, and sometimes the best thing you can do for a script is try and forget all those and come to it cold. Otherwise you miss out on some small logic problem, or some character’s voice that doesn’t ring true. Basically, I have to return to the script after I’ve fallen out of love with it.
Q. Does that process change when you approach rewriting someone else’s work?
A. I have zero emotional connection to someone else’s script when I begin to read it for the first time, so rewriting another person’s work has never been a problem in that regard.
Q. What was your first optioned/sold screenplay and how did the project come into existence?
A. In 2000, Artisan Entertainment optioned a spec of mine called THE MANIFESTANT. It’s a crazy little urban fable story I wrote after a dream I had while sick with a fever. The project had a short life span, as Artisan closed up shop shortly thereafter, but it got me my guild card.
Q. How long did it take you to write it; from the first word to the final draft?
A. Conception to completion, that one took about nine weeks. I wrote the first draft in seven days. The other eight weeks were all about rewriting.
Q. What was life like for you immediately after that script sold?
A. Not much different. It wasn’t enough money for me to move from Houston to LA; that happened later.
Q. How much later and what brought you to L.A., specifically?
A. The option of a second script lured me to LA. I figured if I could sell two projects in two years, it was worth it to move. Neither of those two projects ever saw the light of day, but they did pay for a year in Los Angeles as I tried to get a third script sold.
Q. Let’s talk a little about your two recent projects: A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET and THE THING prequel. How did you land the gig of rewriting them?
A. I’d been getting work for the last four years, both assignment work and original material, but nothing seemed to go the distance. One script — an original spec of mine called THE DIONAEA HOUSE — got extremely close, to the point we were two weeks from shooting and had sets built in Canada. But things go wrong. Projects die on the vine, as they say. And I had begun to worry I was going to be “always a bride’s maid, never a bride” when it came to a produced movie.
The meeting for A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET was one of those opportunities that was an intersection of the right material at the right time. I may have morned the stillbirth of THE DIONAEA HOUSE but that script got me a meeting at New Line with Walter Hamada and Dave Neustadter — two men who are so smart about genre, they shouldn’t be executives. It was initially just a general meeting, but they had a sudden need for a writer to re-awaken Freddy Krueger, and I jumped at the chance. From there, it was four very intense weeks of outlining and scripting to get a draft that would later land director Sam Bayer.
Wesley Strick had done a draft of ELM STREET for the studio, but they wanted me to start fresh and pitch my approach to the story, so it wound up being less like a rewrite and more like a brand new project.
Six months later, Eric Newman at Strike Entertainment found himself in a similar situation with the prequel for THE THING — he and director Matthijs had received Ron D. Moore‘s script and decided they wanted a fresh approach to the story, and my reputation on ELM STREET got me in the room with those guys. What followed was six months of the most intense, laborious, and rewarding work I’ve done in this business.
Q. In both cases you’re treading on beloved and hallowed cinematical ground. Being a fan yourself, I’m sure, they both seem like dream projects, but what was/is your approach to these films armed with that knowledge?
A. “Do NOT mess this up.” In both cases I took the job almost as a bodyguard to the source material — I didn’t want to break anything important, but my instinct was to grab for the job to make sure some other writer didn’t come in just for the paycheck and make a mess of Freddy Krueger or — in the case of THE THING — a cult classic. I felt like I was borrowing the keys to my father’s car.
Q. Do you find it difficult to work on projects, such as these, that already have a well-established canon, or does being able to reference and pull from what we’ve already seen/know actually make the process easier?
A. They were both difficult and easier. I had iconic imagery that gave me a kind of shorthand for the audience, but at the same time I had to consider the viewers who hadn’t seen any of the NIGHTMARE movies before, and with THE THING we all had to create a companion piece that stood on its own as a movie and didn’t require intimate knowledge of the 1982 Carpenter film. That balance was sometimes embarrassingly hard.
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.
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. Surreal. I’m not used to it. I don’t know if I’ll ever be truly comfortable with it. I become increasingly self-conscious, worried I fed the actors the wrong lines or gave them the wrong ideas about their characters.
Q. Has watching actors act out and speak your written words changed your process in any way?
A. I recognize now that subtlety works in novels but in the crazy, frenetic pacing of a script entering production, you really want the emotional beats in plain language on the page for your actors and director. In a spec script, I would never forgive myself for writing a line like “This is the moment where our heroine realizes she must make a stand.” It’s bald and on the nose. But by the time you have everyone working to shoot what’s on the page, you need to consider an annotated version of the script so any member of the cast or crew can glance at a page and say “Oh, well it says here this is the turning point for this character’s arc about being a wallflower.”
This process isn’t necessary on some projects, with the right people who get involved early on in the process, but for people who are stepping on board a moving train, you can’t count on having a meeting where you explain the nuances of your character arcs and point out call-backs in dialogue that make a scene significant. You can’t trust that others will catch it during a speed read. I now know: Be prepared to change on the fly and announce the intentions of your characters not in the dialogue but in the narrative.
Q. Given all of the projects that you’ve worked on so far, what lessons have you learned that you’ll be implementing or using when sitting down to write any current or future scripts?
A. I try and use everything I’ve learned in the past to help me whenever I sit down and write. But each script is a new problem. And for every tool I bring in from a previous project, I find I need to craft two new ones. So what I’ve learned most is: You never stop learning.
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. The strike, the recession, the corporatizing of the film business, and other stressors have made this an absurdly difficult career. Get me even slightly drunk and I will babble for hours about what I feel is broken and what should be done about it, but I’m not drinking today.
Perhaps I talk too much when I’m drunk. Hmm…
Q. If given the opportunity, would you write/direct/edit/produce your own film?
A. Yes. I hope to do so in the next two years.
Q. Are you currently working on any projects? What else can we expect to be seeing from you?
A. I’m working on a project at New Line right now and prepping a pitch.
Q. Finally, any inspiring words for those aspiring writers reading this?
A. Join a peer review group and treat the meetings like church. Nothing sharpens the saw better than learning how to constructively criticize a script; to speak clearly about the problems and the ways to solve them. You build valuable mental tools that you can then use on your own work. Plus you can make contacts and begin to build a social network for this career. Both are essential: the writing, and the networking.
Good luck!
Check out more:
Official Blog @ heisserer.com
Eric Heisserer @ IMDb
Eric Heisserer @ twitter.com/writerspry
Eric Heisserer @ Wikipedia
The Dionaea House @ dionaea-house.com
A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) @ IMDb
- Download the Script
The Thing (2011) @ IMDb
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