Category: Wolf Man

            San Diego Comic Con is next week, and if you’re going it’s possible you’ve got time to kill in a car or on a plane.  Might I humbly suggest pre-ordering a shiny new audiobook to make the journey more pleasant…?

            Eight years after its original paperback release, The Eerie Adventures of the Lycanthrope Robinson Crusoe is finally available in audiobook format.  The folks at Audible have done an absolutely fantastic job with my long-ignored “middle child,” and they even got Tim Gerard Reynolds to narrate it! How cool is that?

            It’s up for preorder now, available next Tuesday.

            You  know… travel day.

            Is this pathetic or what?  Someone else offers to write a ranty blog post for me and I still can’t get it up on time.  It’s sad, really…

            Well, here’s Thom Brannan, author of Lords of Night and (with DL Snell) co-author of  Pavlov’s Dogs and their new book The Omega Dog, talking a bit about clarity.  I’ll be back later this week (hopefully on time) to talk about Easter eggs.

——————————————

            Hello is alright, again. On occasion, Pete has stuff to do; like, a lot of it, and he knows there are a lot of you who come to this blog for tips and tools.

            So this week, it’s me again. Thom Brannan. I’ll try to avoid disappointing you. Those of you who know who I am, congratulations! For those who don’t, here is a picture.

            Today, I’m here to talk to you about transparency. It’s a thing, a real thing, where you can read something an author wrote, and there’s a lot of the author in there, one way or another. Sometimes it’s political, sometimes it’s in the interests… most times, you’ll find it in the details.

            For your readers who are just like you, no doubt this will be a source of delight and entertainment. But not everybody is like you. For those readers, this will induce the effect known as “God, I’m skimming this part.” It happens.

            Let me hit you with an example. I recently finished reading something by Robert A. Heinlein. He’s one of my literary heroes, okay? I love his work and his verve and his ideas and just everything.

            Almost.

            I’m now catching up on works of his I’d missed previously, and it’s great joy. Except when he devotes entire paragraphs to doing math. Really, honestly, when I started reading his stuff, it made me want to run out and get a slide rule, just so I could keep up. True story. But that was a different me, back in high school. Math was one of my things. Now, when I get to a part where any of his hyper-competent characters go on about anything that remotely resembles figuring, I just skim over it.

            But that wasn’t enough to spark this blog entry. I’m also reading a WWII story about… well, about spooky stuff. (I don’t want to put too fine a point on what or who I’m reading.) So, there’s a passage where some dirty, nasty Krauts are in a plane with a creepy box which may or may not have something moving in it, and the author is clearly enamored with the plane. With the plane. There is a serious chunk of text dedicated to the plane and why it was chosen for this type of mission and the capabilities of the plane and how it got its nickname, et cetera.

            But what about the spooky box?

            The spooky box, if I’m reading the foreshadowing correctly, contains something (someone?!) which is going to be major later on, and next to no text is dedicated to it. It’s just kind of there, and the Nazis eye it, and the plane they’re in is endlessly fascinating.

            Now, in other places in this very blog, Pete has said things like have a reason to describe it, or to avoid being focused on the wrong thing. Sometimes, it’s hard to figure out when YOU’VE LOST YOUR GODDAMN… excuse me. Sometimes it’s hard to know when the thing you’re writing is what people need to read about the story. Or if people will even read it. Skimmers gonna skim.

            For an easy litmus test, corner someone your work with. Or someone you live with. Or someone in the grocery store. Whatever. Start telling them all this cool stuff you’ve unearthed about maybe Einstein being a plagiarist, or the use of Tesla technology to cripple other nations, or how the innards of a watch work, or how the Warthog got its nickname of the Warthog, or whatever stupidly addicting thing you’re bound and determined to include in your current or next work.

            If at any point their eyes start to glaze over, cross that crap off your list.

            And since I didn’t say this from the get-go, this is what I’ve found works for me. I have a relatively diverse background, and I find a lot of things fascinating. But only a fraction of that stuff finds its way into my prose because I’ve seen the look in people’s eyes, that loss of focus when they’re not really listening to me anymore. It happens quite a bit, as I tend to ramble.

For instance, in my most recent work, The Omega Dog(with D.L. Snell) there’s a section where the protagonists travel in the Gulf of Mexico in a narco-sub. I’m a former submariner, and the intricacies of the works of subs, even the fiberglass jobs used to transport drugs, kind of trips my trigger. So I sat and wrote maybe two pages of all this, and then I stopped.

            There was also a drug lord, my protagonists, a person who may or may not have been human, a strapped-down zombie and a goddamn WEREWOLF, all in this tiny space… and here I was writing about navigation and whatnot. A little bit of submarine development history had made it in there, too. What the hell?

            I deleted all that before I sent it to Snell, because he would just delete it. He’d be nicer about it than I was to myself, but the end result would be the same.

            There are exceptions, of course. What’s his name, the legal writer guy? The one who wrote The Pelican Brief. He leaves a lot of that stuff in there because hey, that’s what his readers are reading him for. The same with gun porn. I mean, men’s adventure. My good friend Doug Wojtowicz knows a lot about guns, and that kind of detail is not only expected in The Executioner, but welcome. God help him if he leaves something out. Or gets it wrong, yikes.

            But I guess I’m starting to get long-winded. Shaddap. I guess my point is this: if you’re including something like that, be sure it moves the story along, or is at least an interesting tangent with some story elements to it. If at any point, your manuscript starts to read like a Wikipedia entry, you’re doing it wrong.

            So there. My two cents. Again, your mileage may vary.

            Go write something.

            Here’s one more huge interview with a pro to tide you over until I get my act back together.  This time it’s David Self, the screenwriter behind Thirteen Days, Road to Perdition, and The Haunting, among other films.  Last I heard, he was working on the adaptation of the God of War videogame. 

            I got to chat with David for an hour or so about working on The Wolfman, the big-budget reimagining of the classic Universal Monster movie.  It was definitley a passion project for him (as you’ll see), and he was a lot of fun to speak with.  Alas, monster movies don’t do that well these days because too many people go in expecting horror and then blame the film for these expectations.

            A few points I’ve mentioned before.  I’m the one in bold, asking the questions.  Also, a lot of these aren’t the exact, word-for-word questions I asked (which tended to be a bit more organic and conversational), so if the answer seems a bit off, don’t stress out over it.  A long line of dashes (————-) means there was something there I didn’t transcribe, probably because it was just casual discussion or something I knew I wasn’t going to use in the final article.  Any links are entirely mine and aren’t meant to imply David Self endorsed any of the ideas here on the ranty blog.  It’s just me linking from something he’s said to something similar I’ve said.  And by the very nature of this discussion, there will probably be a few small spoilers in here (although I did cut out one big one).  If you haven’t seen the film yet, check it out.  It’s fun and you’ll get a bit more out of this discussion.

            Also, this is one of the rare cases where I didn’t get to see the fim before my interview (considering I was generally doing interviews two or three months before the films were released).  My questions are based off one of David’s earlier drafts I got to read, so you’ll see some back and forth as we establish what does and doesn’t happen in the movie, and why some changes were made.

            Material from this interview was originally used for an article that appeared in the January/February 2010 issue of Creative Screenwriting Magazine.

That’s just IMDb (laughs).  I haven’t been working on Deathlok in quite a long time.  I did a rewrite on Deathlok.

I guess I actively try to avoid boredom.  I want to find new intellectual arenas to challenge myself in.  I try to find projects that are different, have a different hue to them, work in different genres.  I make an effort to do that.  That’s my short answer, and I guess people buy it. (laughs)

This came to me from a good friend of mine, a producer, Scott Stuber.  I worked with Scott a long time ago.  He brought me actually three scripts.  Andy’s script, a script  by Paul Attanasio, and one Mark Romanek himself had been working on.  Kind of in the fall of 2007, just before the strike.  Actually, August, late summer.

At that point Andy had done what was the main draft.  Then they’d hired Paul to do a rewrite.  He got about halfway through and didn’t continue.  Mark Romanek started to work on it himself.  Paul, I think, was working at Mark’s direction at that time, and Mark got halfway through the script as well.  So they had two half-scripts and Andy’s script. When I came in I really wanted to work off Andy’s script because it was the most coherent and consistent one.  It was a complete script so it was the easiest to start from.

Oh, yeah.  I love the original.  The original film is a landmark.  It was my dad’s favorite film and I used to watch it with him when I was a kid and knew it well.  So there was a little trepidation in going back and trying to come up with a 2010 version of it.

Andy had really introduced a lot of the new elements that are in our version of the film.  In terms of the father-son dynamic and also, well… (David and I talked about a bunch of spoilerish stuff here that I’m not going to repeat for those of you who haven’t seen the film yet)  …That’s a major change from the original, obviously.  That idea was an idea Andy introduced.  Going back to your question— that was dramatically the biggest adjustment.

I think one of the things… In keeping with the original, Andy did well preserving the werewolf lore that the original film introduced to our sense of werewolves.  Changing at the full moon, being bitten.  Some of the rules we take for granted now.  Silver bullets killing werewolves.  There were a couple older films… you’d have to do your filmography… that this film all pulled together.  Those elements Andy was very particular in preserving, which I think was really important.

        
Among those things that was challenging is that the whole transforming at the full moon really limits…is a real structural issue that we struggled with for a long time.  How to make the plot advance quickly and turn our characters into a werewolf quickly when you’re dealing with this rule of having the full moon.

Exactly (chuckles).  So by nature, the earlier drafts of the script had a very extended amount of time before you got to see Benicio del Toro turn into the wolfman.  That was really the largest issue that I was brought in to solve–how to speed things up a bit.  It was still a very challenging thing, given the rules of our film.  That was the largest note that I had to contend with coming into it.

I generally like to outline, and I try to do the outline in one sitting, so it feels organic, to one moment and impulse.  The length of it can vary from a page to ten pages, depending on how much detail I’m seeing right off the bat in my head.  I just try to catch the organic impulse of the movie in one moment.  And then it mutates from there.

Yeah, this is a very different process.  It’s a film that is sort of a flashing green light to go.  There’s a lot more collaboration.  You’re working with a director, a producer, a studio, that all have things they need to achieve to get to where they’re confortable making the film.

Benecio was attached and Mark Romanek was attached.  They attached Tony and Emily Blunt after the draft I did in November.  And Hugo Weaving.  Those guys all came on after.  Although Benicio was just sort of… he wasn’t actively involved in development at that point, he was just waiting for us to do our job. ———–  I turned in my draft the night before the strike started and that was what they cast off of.  And then I was out on the lines

I’ve become more nocturnal with the advent of four of my children in the past couple years. Prior to that I was more of a workday type of guy.  I sort of now have a patched together day, where I work half of the day-day, and then after supper in the eveneing, after the kids go to bed, I have another work period where I tend to be pretty productive.  It was different when I was younger.

More of a scene or sequence objective I set for myself.  Not so much a page count.  One of the other things I like to do… I get slower as I get closer to the end of the script, because basically I read the script from page one again every day before I start writing again, so I can get everything in my head. It helps me with consistencey issues and voice issues.  I don’t have as much reading to do on day two or three, but when I’m getting down to the end I’m spending an hour and a half reading befoe I start writing new stuff.

Several scenes, like the sequence in the asylum, I just loved those.  There were pieces of Andrew’s writing that I just loved that I just cut and pasted those into the script I was writing.  I would tweak a word or two just so it made sense with what came around it.  I did start with an empty script when I started rewriting, but I had his sitting next to me the whole time as a reference.

Yeah.  It’s interesting, the character Andy —–  along was a haunted guy who had this sort of gothic, dark back story that preceded the film and becomes uncovered during the course of the film.  So he definitely structured that sort of psychological drama in that mode.  It was an important decision.  It’ll be interesting to see how it translates in the final version of the film, but the notion was this was a guy who had lost himself in theater and burned himself out.  He was a guy waiting to be saved.

That was Andy.  He was a guy who was haunted, who lost himself, was estranged from his family and has to come to home.  He’s taken on the least manly profession (laughs) in contrast to his father, this big-game hunter, depraved nobility kind of guy.

Yeah, we had several different versions of that.  I think it was challenging because——  A lot of that changed because of the physicality of the location that we had to work with.  There were a couple different versions which we had worked out, given the contingencies of the set.  This is the one Joe settled on at the end of the day.

Yeah, that version hasn’t made it into the final film.  We had a notion that this was not just an old guy, but there was this sort of implication that the creepy old guy could be Satan passing the cane along.  It didn’t make it (laugh), he just has the cane in the current film.  I thought it was just a good idea, it’s just his from the start now.  With the 2010 kicker of it being a sword.——I definitely tried to find a few places of connection for little spiritual totems of the original.

Yeah (laughs).  Aberline was introduced in Paul’s draft as a pursuing character that then we fleshed out.  He chose the name Aberline.  I didn’t really connect that with that notion when I first read it, but then I looked up the name and said ‘Oh, this is the guy from In Hell!’ (laughs)  We thought that was a fun grace note to have. 

——-No.  I mean, Paul didn’t bring it up that he’d been involved in the Ripper case previously.  We added that dimension to it.

(laughs).  No, he didn’t.  Not the script.  Benny is sort of… the process in independent films is a little bit different than this sort of film.  He didn’t rewrite anything but we had lots of conversations about his dialogue.  He certainly wanted to plumb his lines and stuff like that.  Not rewriting per se, but he had a lot of ‘Could I say it this way…?’  He’s a real professional.

I think as soon as you see Benicio del Toro and Anthony Hopkins are both in this film… (laughs).  I think the audience gets some satisfaction about having their suspiciions confirmed.  I think his sense of betrayal is a good thing. Rather than it just being (chuckles) Bela Legosi, just some guy who randomly bites him.  I thought this was a good, meaningful melodrama.

Knowing that you’re going to be outed?  (chuckles).  Yes and no.  I think it’d be much harder to pull off a Sixth Sense-style film these days that really depended upon that surprise.  I think that would be very difficult to pull off now.  On the other hand, if you’re creating enough engagement and suspense in the moment, you can know the outcome of a film.  Something like Thirteen Days.  You’re sitting in the theater so you know the world hasn’t blown up.  But you can create tensions and suspense, and if you’re doing your job, in the moment people will forget that fact.  ——–

—That’s the magic of it, that you can suspend disbelief there.  Watching something that’s well-told you can forget that you already know certain aspects of it.  There’s something anthropologically gratifyying about that to me.  The yarn-weaving and the storytelling is the social, fun experience, not the knowledge itself.