Times Are Changing for J. Michael Straczynski

by Andrew Gnerre | Published October 23, 2008

(Page 2)

MM: You said you were avoiding the movie industry on purpose and now looking at the projects you have coming up, they’re all movies. How has the switch been for you?

JMS: It’s been quite dramatic and one of the things that has made that process work is that after Clint and Ron and those guys did the laying-on of hands, I went from TV guy to A-list writer guy and it lets you hopscotch or leapfrog over the development process. And you’re working with filmmakers who get films made, as opposed to developing executives. So everything I’m working on, I’m working with filmmakers. Whether it’s Tom Hanks’ company and Paul Greengrass or Wolfgang Petersen or all these other guys who will actually get the movies made. I’m working with really creative guys and it is a much more Technicolor world than I am used to—literally and figuratively. I mean being at Cannes for Changeling… I’m a street kid from New Jersey. I grew up without connections to the industry, no family or friends in the industry.

MM: You grew up in Paterson, New Jersey, correct?

JMS: Well, I grew up all over. I was born in Paterson. I was a street kid in Newark fighting in the streets and when I said I wanted to be a writer everyone laughed. Guys like me who grew up middle class, blue-collar families didn’t become writers, you know? And for that person to suddenly be in a 20-car caravan with Clint Eastwood, Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich (laughs), going through the streets of the south of France with French police before and after because of the paparazzi, you think, ‘This can’t be real.’ It’s been the most surreal time of my life and the really good part for me is the chance to work on really good stories with really good filmmakers.

MM: Some pretty good advice for moviemakers: Work with Clint Eastwood.

JMS: Even more to the point, suddenly, everyone wanted to meet me. When I went to these meetings, what I discovered was that nobody knew who I was and that’s salutary, that’s good for the following reasons: They didn’t care if I was 20 years old or 80 years old; they didn’t care if I had sold a million scripts or no scripts and this was my first screenplay; it was my first script. All they knew was the words on the page. Which for the up-and-coming writers says it doesn’t matter if you didn’t go to the best schools, it doesn’t matter if you didn’t have friends or family in the industry. What matters is the quality of your storytelling. If it’s there on the page they will get the recognition; it may take some time but it will get there and I find that vastly encouraging for new writers.

MM: You’ve done so much science fiction writing, I was wondering if you brought any of that mentality into Changeling? It’s a true story, but it’s an outrageous, surreal true story.

JMS: I relied much more upon my journalistic background than my science fiction background for this. Because the story is so bizarre, it really had to be spot on and as accurate as humanly possible because if we started fictionalizing it at all then that would call the entire thing into question. Which is why, after Cannes, when we lost the Palme d’Or by two votes because they couldn’t believe that it actually happened…

MM: Is that true?

JMS: Yeah, yeah. I went through the script at Universal’s request to put the “True Story” on there. I had to annotate every single scene, where it came from; 95 percent of what’s in the movie was taken verbatim from testimony, articles of the time, transcripts and correspondence. It really had to be rigorously factual.

MM: That’s something. This many years after the fact, this woman’s story still isn’t believed.

JMS: Yeah, still fighting for credibility.

MM: The movie seemed a throwback to classic cinema. What sort of movies were you looking at while you wrote the movie?

JMS: None. I think that’s a trap. I think what dangers a lot of writers have today is that they regurgitate what they grew up watching. “This scene is a testimony to this movie.” In general, I don’t like that; I don’t approve of it and in the case of this film, all the scenes were taken from what was actually done. So there were no influences; my influences were the transcripts.

Which is why when I sold the script, because the story is so bizarre, I literally included clippings and pages of testimony in the script; put it in those points where they think, “This couldn’t have happened.” Then they turn the page and sure enough, there’s confirmation of what happened.

Could I have invented more to make it cinematic in the traditional way? Sure. But I thought, ‘Let’s try something a little bit different and basically write an article for cinema,’ which is what this is. It’s less a movie in the traditional sense as it is an article for the movies.

MM: Looking ahead, what movies are you working on now?

JMS: I just finished the last pass on They Marched Into Sunlight for director Paul Greengrass and Tom Hanks’ company [Playtone], which is also based on a true story and a Pulitzer Prize-nominated historical novel by David Maraniss. I also finished up Proving Ground for United Artists, possibly for Tom Cruise; we don’t know for sure yet. I did a rewrite of The Grays for Wolfgang Petersen. Just finishing up Lensman, an adaptation of a series of novels for Ron Howard, to whom I also sold another spec script also based on a historical case, called The Flickering Light.

MM: Pretty busy.

JMS: Yeah. (laughs) It’s pretty crazy right now.

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Comment by صور on 12/21/10 at 2:30 pm: thank you very much
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Comment by صور on 12/21/10 at 2:30 pm: thank you very much
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