Screenwriter John August made his bones penning what we'll call surrealist fantasy films -- "Charlie's Angels" and "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle," and embarked on a working relationship with Tim Burton that produced "Big Fish," "Corpse Bride" and 2005's box-office smash "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." Since then, his career has turned a corner towards big-budget superhero epics -- he's currently working on bringing DC Comics' Captain Marvel to life and he recently completed a stint on "Hancock," a movie about a disgraced superhero played by Will Smith, who strikes up a romance with a married Charlize Theron.
This week, however, he's anticipating the release of his first feature as director, an indie effort called "The Nines." Even giving a description of "The Nines" is tough, but here goes: it's a dense three-part anthology set in the entertainment industry, starring three actors -- Ryan Reynolds, Hope Davis and Gilmore Girls' Melissa McCarthy -- who play multiple characters existing in different levels of reality-reality and TV-reality. There's an actor living under house arrest, a TV executive starring in a Project Greenlight-style reality show, an overprotective publicist, a steely-eyed network executive, a neighborhood seductress, and a family stuck in the woods -- all of them trying to ascertain the true nature of existence. Oh, and koala bears are involved.
Ryan Stewart: How much fun would it be to wear one of those house arrest bracelets like Ryan Reynolds' character wears at the beginning of the movie?
John August: Yeah, and just be able to snap out of the world when you needed to?
RS: Sounds like you had the same thought.
JA: Definitely. Honestly, to me the bracelet is sort of a chance to walk into your creation, and after a certain point in time, you kind of forget that you can leave. It's his escape hatch. It's his pulling the rip cord.
RS: Of the three parts to this movie, did you start by writing Part 2 and branch out? That's the part, with the executive trying to save his television show, that seems the most autobiographical. Is that how you worked it?
JA: It really wasn't how I worked it. Generally, as a writer there are a bunch of ideas that are all competing for attention in your head and all three of those ideas were really sort of floating in my head at the same time, and I recognized that there were kind of the same idea. They were all about creators and their creations. So I really wrote Part 1 first, but I had a very good idea of what Part 2 was. Part 2 had happened to me, earlier in life. Part 2 was largely about experiences I'd had in television, but Part 1 was the first thing I wrote. Part 3 was really its own story.
RS: The focus group stuff was really fun -- you must have a million good focus group stories.
JA: Focus groups are amazing. I remember sitting through my first one, and just ... I was curious what people thought about the pilot, but I was mostly just fascinated by the process. For the movie, I could only show a certain little bit of it, but the real thing is even better.
RS: So they just bring in a bunch of yahoos off the street who have no idea what they're watching?
JA: Well, in TV you never know who is going to be watching TV, so it is important to have random opinions. But I couldn't really show in the movie -- because there wasn't time to squeeze it in and it wasn't relevant -- is that they'll actually have dials that they're holding, and they turn their dials when they like something and they don't like something. There's a display that shows these bubbles, and individual peoples' bubbles move up and down based on what's happening in real time, and it's just crazy. The people will try to make decisions, like, "Oh we need to cut five seconds out of this scene because people got bored right here."
RS: A lot of that dialogue in Part 2 really seems to cut to the bone. The dialogue between Ryan's character and Melissa's character. She's playing herself and they're fighting and even her looks are an issue. How did Melissa react to reading that?
JA: You know, Ryan is playing a slightly fictionalized version of me and Melissa is a very slightly fictionalized version of herself, and all of those conversations were basically the fights that Melissa and I would have, if we were to have a fight. That backstory is our backstory. All the things said are sort of the things unsaid between us. I can't speak for Melissa, how she reacted to it, but it's acknowledging sort of the reality of the situation.
RS: To put that out there must have caused ripples in your relationship. It must have changed the dynamic.
JA: You know, Melissa and I have done a couple of days of press about it, and we hadn't really talked about it, honestly, over the course of the movie ... we're both grown-ups. You recognize that there are lots of times in relationships where there's material that you're holding on to, knowing that if you ever were to have that disagreement, here's the thing that could be said. Fortunately, we've never had one cross word towards each other. And honestly, Melissa and I aren't as close of friends in real life as Gavin and Melissa are portrayed in the movie. I think she's immensely talented and I want her to be in everything I ever write, but we're not hanging out and having drinks all the time.
RS: Are you fascinated by the idea of avatars, in general? Is that something you've tried to explore previously in your work?
JA: Avatar is an interesting word. How it's mostly used now is in an online forum -- you have this little picture that's supposed to represent you. In that way, an avatar is just an identity that you're putting on and disposing at different times. In the context of the movie, Ryan is playing three different incarnations, but they are really just three different identities. It's not that one of them is "the real him." They're all just versions of himself. I've been fascinated to see, over the last couple of years, with the rise of Facebook and MySpace, that people are constantly trying to reinvent themselves online, and sort of pick the perfect set of backgrounds to sort of portray who they are to the rest of the world. And it's not who they really are -- it's who the world wants them to be. So the motivation behind the avatars in the movie is that you can be more than one person at once, but there are problems with that.
RS: Did you want to have a religious dimension to the film, or was religion just the best vehicle to explore those themes you mentioned?
JA: Yeah, I mean, people take the ending religiously -- I mean, obviously you're raising some big, metaphysical questions -- I think it really depends on the viewer. If you're a viewer who tends to look at things scientifically, there's a sort of scientific way of looking at it. If you look at things from a religious perspective or a purely philosophical level, it has a different meaning. To me, the question is, what is a creator's responsibility to his creation? You can take that in a religious context, but I mostly take it in terms of the characters in fiction that I create. Me, as a writer, I seem like an all-powerful God, when of course I'm just incredibly weak and fallible. There's a huge power disparity between me and my characters, and it's hard for them to grasp that.
RS: So are you a benevolent God in your writing universe? Are your characters disposable, or do you spend inordinate amounts of time developing them, tending to them?
JA: Honestly, I tend to care way too much about the characters I create. And it's very tough for me to walk away. As a screenwriter, a lot of the work you do never makes it to the screen. Either scenes get cut or whole movies never shoot. And I feel this responsibility to these characters that are created and sort of trapped in 12 pt. Courier. I ask myself, "At what point can I just give up on a project and realize that these characters are never going to come to the screen?" I face that all the time. One of the differences between a screenwriter and a novelist is when a novelist finishes a book, the book is done. Then the book is a success or not a success, but the book is finished. Whereas, a screenwriter is always writing a movie that may never become a movie.
RS: A lot of the characters you've written, though, are clearly designed to serve a story, like with the Charlie's Angels girls. Do you put as much of yourself into those characters?
JA: There are certainly situations where the characters are serving the story, but in the case of Charlie's Angels, the first three months of writing that movie weren't about figuring out the plot or the villain, it was about sort of, who are these three women and what is their relationship like and how do we create a story that we're charmed by and proud of these three girls? The best movies tend to be the ones where the characters are really driving the story. The plot of Indiana Jones is fun, but it's the character of Indiana Jones that makes you want to watch the movie again and again.
RS: You're exploring more superhero stuff in your career these days -- is the superhero identity just another avatar? What attracts you to that?
JA: The superhero movies are our modern mythology. They're our Zeus, our Apollo, our Thor. They're our Gods. So I think a lot of the time why we're attracted to superhero movies is the chance to explore a big theme with bigger than life characters. That's what makes them compelling to watch and that's part of the reason why we're seeing so many of them. It feels like a time when we're looking for some new Gods.
RS: By the way, they keep changing the title of that movie every week -- first it was Tonight, He Comes, then John Hancock, now Hancock -- could you tell them to just pick a title and go with it?
JA: I'll be sure and tell them that ... I'm not involved with the movie on a day to day basis. I helped out, for about three or four weeks, right before they went into production, with one specific thing. So I don't claim any ownership or authorship -- I'm just a huge fan of it. It's a great, great, great project and I think they're going to make an amazing movie out of it. The last I heard is that it's called Hancock, and I do believe they're going to stick with that. But I've been proven wrong, many times.
RS: Just to circle back to The Nines, I remember thinking how similar it seemed to a Richard Kelly film -- open to expansion beyond the bounds of the actual film, with either graphic novels or other supplements. Is that how you saw it?
JA: Definitely. I think there's an opportunity to move the ideas of the story beyond the 99 minutes of movie. We're doing a little bit of that with the online game right now; we're doing other things that are coming down the road, but what I really want people to do, what I want fans of the movie to be able to do, is take some ownership of it and create their own version of it. I'm trying to negotiate with Sony to allow me to release the underlying source material, so people can literally just have all the clips of the movie and re-edit it to the form they want. I love fan fiction. I love fan-created expansion and re-interpretations. I would love for people to be able to have the option to do that with this movie.
RS: Joel Silver is doing something on the interactive front too, with that Haunted Hill movie. The viewer will be able to re-edit the film in DVD, I think. Choose your own adventure.
JA: Yeah, I think one of the things that's happened with the rise of video games is that the upcoming generation is used to being able to play the story. They want a sense of control over the action. They're not content to simply sit back and be passively entertained, and I think there's an opportunity for movies like The Nines to allow them to get their fingers dirty.
RS: And you're okay with that?
JA: I'm totally fine with that. I have a movie with my name on it, that's 99 minutes long. That will always be on the shelf at Blockbuster. But if people want to do their own thing with it, more power to them. Some people may do something that people like better -- that's great too. I'm not a bit threatened by that.
"The Nines" is in theaters August 31. For more information check out www.johnaugust.com
This week, however, he's anticipating the release of his first feature as director, an indie effort called "The Nines." Even giving a description of "The Nines" is tough, but here goes: it's a dense three-part anthology set in the entertainment industry, starring three actors -- Ryan Reynolds, Hope Davis and Gilmore Girls' Melissa McCarthy -- who play multiple characters existing in different levels of reality-reality and TV-reality. There's an actor living under house arrest, a TV executive starring in a Project Greenlight-style reality show, an overprotective publicist, a steely-eyed network executive, a neighborhood seductress, and a family stuck in the woods -- all of them trying to ascertain the true nature of existence. Oh, and koala bears are involved.
Ryan Stewart: How much fun would it be to wear one of those house arrest bracelets like Ryan Reynolds' character wears at the beginning of the movie?
John August: Yeah, and just be able to snap out of the world when you needed to?
RS: Sounds like you had the same thought.
JA: Definitely. Honestly, to me the bracelet is sort of a chance to walk into your creation, and after a certain point in time, you kind of forget that you can leave. It's his escape hatch. It's his pulling the rip cord.
RS: Of the three parts to this movie, did you start by writing Part 2 and branch out? That's the part, with the executive trying to save his television show, that seems the most autobiographical. Is that how you worked it?
JA: It really wasn't how I worked it. Generally, as a writer there are a bunch of ideas that are all competing for attention in your head and all three of those ideas were really sort of floating in my head at the same time, and I recognized that there were kind of the same idea. They were all about creators and their creations. So I really wrote Part 1 first, but I had a very good idea of what Part 2 was. Part 2 had happened to me, earlier in life. Part 2 was largely about experiences I'd had in television, but Part 1 was the first thing I wrote. Part 3 was really its own story.
RS: The focus group stuff was really fun -- you must have a million good focus group stories.
JA: Focus groups are amazing. I remember sitting through my first one, and just ... I was curious what people thought about the pilot, but I was mostly just fascinated by the process. For the movie, I could only show a certain little bit of it, but the real thing is even better.
RS: So they just bring in a bunch of yahoos off the street who have no idea what they're watching?
JA: Well, in TV you never know who is going to be watching TV, so it is important to have random opinions. But I couldn't really show in the movie -- because there wasn't time to squeeze it in and it wasn't relevant -- is that they'll actually have dials that they're holding, and they turn their dials when they like something and they don't like something. There's a display that shows these bubbles, and individual peoples' bubbles move up and down based on what's happening in real time, and it's just crazy. The people will try to make decisions, like, "Oh we need to cut five seconds out of this scene because people got bored right here."
RS: A lot of that dialogue in Part 2 really seems to cut to the bone. The dialogue between Ryan's character and Melissa's character. She's playing herself and they're fighting and even her looks are an issue. How did Melissa react to reading that?
JA: You know, Ryan is playing a slightly fictionalized version of me and Melissa is a very slightly fictionalized version of herself, and all of those conversations were basically the fights that Melissa and I would have, if we were to have a fight. That backstory is our backstory. All the things said are sort of the things unsaid between us. I can't speak for Melissa, how she reacted to it, but it's acknowledging sort of the reality of the situation.
RS: To put that out there must have caused ripples in your relationship. It must have changed the dynamic.
JA: You know, Melissa and I have done a couple of days of press about it, and we hadn't really talked about it, honestly, over the course of the movie ... we're both grown-ups. You recognize that there are lots of times in relationships where there's material that you're holding on to, knowing that if you ever were to have that disagreement, here's the thing that could be said. Fortunately, we've never had one cross word towards each other. And honestly, Melissa and I aren't as close of friends in real life as Gavin and Melissa are portrayed in the movie. I think she's immensely talented and I want her to be in everything I ever write, but we're not hanging out and having drinks all the time.
RS: Are you fascinated by the idea of avatars, in general? Is that something you've tried to explore previously in your work?
JA: Avatar is an interesting word. How it's mostly used now is in an online forum -- you have this little picture that's supposed to represent you. In that way, an avatar is just an identity that you're putting on and disposing at different times. In the context of the movie, Ryan is playing three different incarnations, but they are really just three different identities. It's not that one of them is "the real him." They're all just versions of himself. I've been fascinated to see, over the last couple of years, with the rise of Facebook and MySpace, that people are constantly trying to reinvent themselves online, and sort of pick the perfect set of backgrounds to sort of portray who they are to the rest of the world. And it's not who they really are -- it's who the world wants them to be. So the motivation behind the avatars in the movie is that you can be more than one person at once, but there are problems with that.
RS: Did you want to have a religious dimension to the film, or was religion just the best vehicle to explore those themes you mentioned?
JA: Yeah, I mean, people take the ending religiously -- I mean, obviously you're raising some big, metaphysical questions -- I think it really depends on the viewer. If you're a viewer who tends to look at things scientifically, there's a sort of scientific way of looking at it. If you look at things from a religious perspective or a purely philosophical level, it has a different meaning. To me, the question is, what is a creator's responsibility to his creation? You can take that in a religious context, but I mostly take it in terms of the characters in fiction that I create. Me, as a writer, I seem like an all-powerful God, when of course I'm just incredibly weak and fallible. There's a huge power disparity between me and my characters, and it's hard for them to grasp that.
RS: So are you a benevolent God in your writing universe? Are your characters disposable, or do you spend inordinate amounts of time developing them, tending to them?
JA: Honestly, I tend to care way too much about the characters I create. And it's very tough for me to walk away. As a screenwriter, a lot of the work you do never makes it to the screen. Either scenes get cut or whole movies never shoot. And I feel this responsibility to these characters that are created and sort of trapped in 12 pt. Courier. I ask myself, "At what point can I just give up on a project and realize that these characters are never going to come to the screen?" I face that all the time. One of the differences between a screenwriter and a novelist is when a novelist finishes a book, the book is done. Then the book is a success or not a success, but the book is finished. Whereas, a screenwriter is always writing a movie that may never become a movie.
RS: A lot of the characters you've written, though, are clearly designed to serve a story, like with the Charlie's Angels girls. Do you put as much of yourself into those characters?
JA: There are certainly situations where the characters are serving the story, but in the case of Charlie's Angels, the first three months of writing that movie weren't about figuring out the plot or the villain, it was about sort of, who are these three women and what is their relationship like and how do we create a story that we're charmed by and proud of these three girls? The best movies tend to be the ones where the characters are really driving the story. The plot of Indiana Jones is fun, but it's the character of Indiana Jones that makes you want to watch the movie again and again.
RS: You're exploring more superhero stuff in your career these days -- is the superhero identity just another avatar? What attracts you to that?
JA: The superhero movies are our modern mythology. They're our Zeus, our Apollo, our Thor. They're our Gods. So I think a lot of the time why we're attracted to superhero movies is the chance to explore a big theme with bigger than life characters. That's what makes them compelling to watch and that's part of the reason why we're seeing so many of them. It feels like a time when we're looking for some new Gods.
RS: By the way, they keep changing the title of that movie every week -- first it was Tonight, He Comes, then John Hancock, now Hancock -- could you tell them to just pick a title and go with it?
JA: I'll be sure and tell them that ... I'm not involved with the movie on a day to day basis. I helped out, for about three or four weeks, right before they went into production, with one specific thing. So I don't claim any ownership or authorship -- I'm just a huge fan of it. It's a great, great, great project and I think they're going to make an amazing movie out of it. The last I heard is that it's called Hancock, and I do believe they're going to stick with that. But I've been proven wrong, many times.
RS: Just to circle back to The Nines, I remember thinking how similar it seemed to a Richard Kelly film -- open to expansion beyond the bounds of the actual film, with either graphic novels or other supplements. Is that how you saw it?
JA: Definitely. I think there's an opportunity to move the ideas of the story beyond the 99 minutes of movie. We're doing a little bit of that with the online game right now; we're doing other things that are coming down the road, but what I really want people to do, what I want fans of the movie to be able to do, is take some ownership of it and create their own version of it. I'm trying to negotiate with Sony to allow me to release the underlying source material, so people can literally just have all the clips of the movie and re-edit it to the form they want. I love fan fiction. I love fan-created expansion and re-interpretations. I would love for people to be able to have the option to do that with this movie.
RS: Joel Silver is doing something on the interactive front too, with that Haunted Hill movie. The viewer will be able to re-edit the film in DVD, I think. Choose your own adventure.
JA: Yeah, I think one of the things that's happened with the rise of video games is that the upcoming generation is used to being able to play the story. They want a sense of control over the action. They're not content to simply sit back and be passively entertained, and I think there's an opportunity for movies like The Nines to allow them to get their fingers dirty.
RS: And you're okay with that?
JA: I'm totally fine with that. I have a movie with my name on it, that's 99 minutes long. That will always be on the shelf at Blockbuster. But if people want to do their own thing with it, more power to them. Some people may do something that people like better -- that's great too. I'm not a bit threatened by that.
"The Nines" is in theaters August 31. For more information check out www.johnaugust.com
VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
(I already have tickets. I'm a big fan of his blog)
I like that comic books are our new mythology line.