A CHAT WITH THE                 SCREENWRITING GOLDMINE COMPETITION . . .

 

    2012 Finalist Interview ~ Brian MacEvilly

    With Sally Brockway

Brian MacEvilly has lived several different lives – including advertising copywriter and long distance driver.

He's also spent a lot of time in the wilds of southern Colorado.

It’s not hard to see all these different worlds in his excellent screenplay 'SONG OF THE LOST SISTER', which tells the story of a battle for survival between a man and a woman among rugged Colorado mountains in deepest winter – and which came a worthy runner-up in this year’s contest.

You must be delighted at making that Final five out of so many scripts.

Absolutely. You put your soul on the page and, like a 5-year-old, you need somebody to tell you you’re a good boy every so often.

How long have you been writing for?

I was an advertising copywriter for a long time, and I only started to write screenplays full-time in the last couple of years. Even though I’m a little older than a lot of the competition, I still see myself as a new writer. I started entering contests for the first time in 2012.

Wow. And you’ve placed in quite a few of them.

Yeah, 'LOST SISTER' won the Atlantis Award at the Moondance Festival. It got a Top 10 Drama in StoryPros International, and a finalist in the Creative World Awards. I also won First Place in the Super Shorts category in the Gimme Credit Contest in LA.

Is that because you waited until you were ready to enter?

Pretty much. I hope.

Do you do a full working/writing day now?

I got up at 5 o’clock yesterday morning, mostly because I just couldn’t sleep. I’ll get at it before dawn. I might do it seven days a week. I’ll repair to the local tap house intermittently to keep myself sane, but it’s what I do all the time.

So are you making a living?

No, not at all.

What’s the plan?

My next plan is to write for television. A mini-series. I’m also doing a zero-budget two-hander called 'BENDER', which is about a macho cop who's tasked with interrogating an effeminate gay male, and finds himself in a battle of wills to prove who really is 'the better man'.
'LOST SISTER' was the first of a triptych of women’s portraits. The second, 'RAISE THE SKY', is the story of female executive handed a big break which, she discovers, is designed to sabotage her whole career.
The mini-series, 'SONS OF MEN' I plan to be the ultimate male weepie, spanning everything from 'Ordinary People' through 'Once Were Warriors' to 'Nixon'. I also write comedy as therapy, and I’m planning a hi-tech chiller.

That’s a lot of projects, Brian!

I have crates of notes in vaults, all filed and cross-indexed, but I may never get to half the scripts I’ve planned. I sometimes daydream about having a Renaissance style studio where a team of interns transcribe my notes, and I hammer out beat sheets while others 'execute'. I know it sounds insanely narcissistic.

Tell me about the project Lost Sister. How did it begin?

It kind of budded off other stuff. I read the feminists in my teens, you know, Germaine Greer and Kate Millet and many more, because women’s liberation I saw as an essential part of human liberation. I was also reading Black Power and Existentialists and the Beats at the time.

My politics have always been very socially liberal and I was a really enthusiastic teenage male feminist. But what fascinated me was that within a few decades it had become radical gender feminism, a very strident thing, and then went on to become ladette culture. I found that deeply disappointing. I accept that it was an inevitability and I always joke that women are entitled to be as obnoxious at men. But it seems we are at a time where males are beginning to accept that we have issues, and maybe we have got to explore our own vulnerability. And I thought, what if you put that together with feminism becoming more strident...? And then I gave it this classic, I suppose, Mills and Boon template without realising it. And there you had it.

The other key theme in the script is how, since the industrial revolution and the breakdown of nuclear families and indigenous rural communities, the whole mentoring process in males has disintegrated. That’s really what interested me. That’s what my mini-series will confront. Women have their bodies to teach them. Men don’t have the same biological process by which they come of age. They have to be mentored, and that has fallen apart. And that’s why you get this passionate following for football hooliganism or any rite of passage, often very dark. You know the attraction for violence. Violence has become the new Pop Art! I just think film could produce new archetypes of manhood. That’s actually what I was exploring.

And what about the backdrop?

I lived in southern Colorado for four years and I know that territory. I’ve hunted elk up there. Seriously, I was trying desperately not to shoot anything, unlike some of the rugged characters I was running with.
I’m attracted to wilderness survival. That subgenre has always fascinated me. And done well, it’s tremendous. It’s disparaged now but the 'First Blood', the original Rambo movie, was actually wonderful, before they turned Rambo into this right-wing lunatic. He was an anti-establishment, almost liberal character who got picked on by the cops. It was a very anti-authoritarian piece. Then of course it got co-opted into this awful reactionary agenda. But I loved it because it’s one man against the impossible.

How long do you think from start to finish it took you to write this script, if you take everything into account?

It might be five or six years since I first mentioned it to my wife. I might live with an idea for a few years before I’d actually write it.

Do you use the Goldmine method?

Yes.

You do? You lay it all out as Phil [Gladwin] recommends?

Yes. I pre-plan intensively. In fact, the original draft of Lost Sister was 280 pages, because it had been beaten out in such detail that I actually knew the lines of dialogue in the scenes before I’d typed anything. What Phil shows you is such a methodical system. You learn to interrogate and break stuff down. And particularly what Phil is very good at is quickly generating a character. It matches the way I learned to work as a copywriter. The Screenwriting Goldmine program is a field kit for how to do it in the real world – because Phil is a real world writer, not just a theorist.

That helps!

That’s actually what attracted me to this contest. When I saw Phil was doing contests, knowing where he was coming from, I wanted to be a part of that. But I never expected this! And it’s massively flattering, but on top of that, to be read by that final panel, you couldn’t ask for more than that.

Being read. That’s what you want.

It is. There are ten people out there who at least know who I am, whether or not they would have responded specifically. At least it means you got a chance to display your skill-set, good or bad, to them.  That's a fantastic thing.

So have you given up copywriting now?

Yes, I’ve given it up because it’s extremely bad for the soul.
In my twenties I went away and threw myself into the world and became a truck driver and a scaffold rigger and a bartender and all the rest of that. I'd been a voracious reader and writer in my teens and came out of college, where I was doing English and Philosophy, and packed it all in, burnt everything I’d written and decided that I’d read everything that I wanted to read. I never looked at a book again until I was in my late twenties.
I jokingly say I decided to get a decent job, but went into advertising instead. But being a copywriter taught me so much: a working method, actually functioning in a real-world writing environment, deadlines, collaboration, dealing with criticism and interrogating your subject.

But I will say you don’t have to read 70 screenwriting books. Because I have 70 books, I’m looking at them right now. At some point you’ve got to trust yourself. Throw yourself off the branch, you will fly! And I want to go more towards that. I’ve learned enough! I’ve been studying this thing forever.

I proposed a comedy to the Irish Film Board. One of the funders brought me up to Galway for a chat and we were talking about studying the craft and he said, “You know, all of those books are really just teaching you to refine your instincts.” And I think that’s true.

Nowadays I want to plan less and just write intuitively. Because that’s how I used to do it when I was a teenager. I read and wrote manically because I loved words, like a painter loves paint. Swim in the stuff.

It comes across that you love language. Your language is very vivid and strong in your work.

Thank you. I’m sometimes concerned that I describe too much. Some readers would think that I give too much direction.

Not at all. You’re telling a story and I didn’t once stop and think, Oh there’s too much detail in the story. It was very well executed.

Thank you. I’ve got a lot of feedback on that script and it’s extraordinarily contradictory. But you’ve got this Hollywood brigade who are into the Walter Hill school of screenwriting, where everything is stripped to the barest essentials. They just want to know what happened next, so they can read it in an hour and a half. But I think you have to create a world.

Have you sent your work out to any agents yet?

I haven’t. I would like to accomplish more before I do. Because you do have obligations to them and you need to be attractive to them.

What’s next for you now? Are you hoping that you placing in this competition will get more interest in this script?

I have this and another script, a comedy with a production company in Dublin; they’re just looking at it. Actually 'LOST SISTER' was picked up on when I placed in this contest. Another production company in Dublin looked for the script immediately.

Now you’re placing in contests I’m sure when you start to mention that people start to listen, don’t they?

Yeah, they do listen. I went into a pub in Dublin recently. It was a quiet night, but a couple of guys were talking production and I said, 'I’m going to insert myself here.' It turned out one of the guys was a pretty well known Irish TV director. I didn’t recognise him. Of course he’s thinking, here’s another bloody writer imposing himself. But as soon as I said 'Well, I’ve just been up to see Steve Matthews', producer on 'Love/Hate' and 'The Borgias' with Octagon Films, now he’s listening.
There are a lot of competitions, I know, but when you say that you’ve made the Top 5, and it was judged by people from the BBC Writers Room and Drama Development for ITV and Channel 4, they've got to listen. Because you’ve gotten past the sentries. These are people who know their stuff.

Will you continue to enter contests?

I don’t know that I’d keep doing that. I kind of got what I wanted, to an extent, which was the word 'Winner' or 'Top something' in it. Getting a couple of those was enough. I’d occasionally look at a writer’s site and he’d have 30 bloody contest results, and he's in the quarter-finals of the, I don’t know, the Spearfish Montana Film Festival and it’s like, 'God man, enough. Stop!'

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(Originally posted, WritersCut.net, 8/2/2013.)