by Dov Kornits
“When I was 10 weeks old, my parents took me to a Chinese numerologist in a shopping center… and I still have the numerology piece of paper, it says, ‘she’s going to be a writer and a very successful one’. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a vet and a fire truck at one stage, but throughout all that time, I just wanted to be a writer.
“I spent a lot of my childhood writing fantastical stories about a cockroach ball where they all rode mice and fun things like that. I changed schools when I was 14 and met an English teacher, Sarah Mannix. She looked at my work and went, ‘this is very imaginative, but you have no structure, no grammar.’ I actually hated her for about six months, and I think she hated me. And then we came to understand my genius…” laughs Justine Juel Gillmer.
“She’s a very good teacher, I needed to keep my imagination, but find a way to harness it and make it work. I credit her with understanding the structure of writing and at least trying to get some spelling right. She’s still a big part of my life.”
Justine Juel Gillmer is on zoom from Prague where she is ‘number 2’ on Season 2 of Amazon’s adaptation of Robert Jordan’s popular book series, The Wheel of Time.
“It’s such a terrible job title,” Gillmer winces when describing the role, which is second only to showrunner Rafe Judkins.
“I was producing a block for Season One, including one of the episodes I wrote. The big break of a show like this is that it’s an enormous budget. This is over a hundred million dollars for eight episodes. We have 700 people working on the show, we build entire villages, the scale of it is so huge and there’s an enormous responsibility to get it right.
“I’ve got a really great idea of every kind of facet now, from beginning in the writer’s room to postproduction and dealing with network and studio and promotion and marketing. This is the kind of experience that unfortunately I couldn’t have had in Australia.”
Growing up in Sydney, Gillmer applied for the national film school AFTRS when she was only 20. “I’d written what I look back as a really terrible feature script,” she says about her application. “It was about one of Henry VIII’s wives. I did the two year master’s course. That was a great training ground, learning about film, TV, writing. It was a great creative bubble to be in.
“One of the things that I think film school is wonderful for is teaching you to think big,” she says before trailing off… “And one of the things that’s dangerous about film school is teaching you to think big. At that stage, I think there was much more of a snobbery about television than there is now…
“When I graduated, I went off and traveled for 10 months and I came back and got McLeod’s Daughters and learnt how to be a script editor. I went in and got to basically be the writer’s assistant in the room for about three months. And then at the end of it, they offered me a trainee script editor job.”
Gillmer stayed on McLeod’s Daughters for four seasons, then Packed to the Rafters for three, plus gigs on Neighbours, Reef Doctors, Home and Away and children’s show Sam Fox: Extreme Adventures.
“Such a wide range of genre was a great training ground to then go to America and know that I could do all of these things,” she acknowledges.
Her first American gig was Season One of Into the Badlands. Gillmer also worked on Halo, which has just been released on Paramount+ to much marketing fanfare.
“I think we’re at such a crossroads of fan service versus fan demand,” she answers when we ask her about the constant chatter online. “I came from a show called The 100 where there was a very strong fan base that was partially based on the excellent books that were written by Kass Morgan, but also just the show itself. There was a character called Lexa, who was killed off in a way that was very tropey. There was a lot of fan backlash; a lot of vitriol that was understandable to the fans themselves, but felt very personal to us, the writers who hadn’t necessarily made that decision.
“What it taught me is when you’re dealing with issues of race or gender or sexuality, we can create a sci-fi or fantasy world where those things almost don’t matter, that it’s truly judged on character. It doesn’t matter if you’re gay or black, but the outside world still exists and entertainment can exist in a way that can be the only lifeline for some people who are struggling through something, and this is very, very meaningful to them.
“We do have a responsibility to handle those storylines with care, to understand what the tropes are. And if we’re going to try and subvert them or use them, we have to be very prepared for an understandable backlash. When we make a change, we have to understand exactly why we’re making that change and it can’t just be ‘well, it’s convenient’. I do believe that you have to be respectful of the fans, but you can’t let that dictate story. There’s danger in letting a very vocal group of passionate fans dictate how you move forward when they don’t necessarily understand the incredibly complex machine that goes into making television.”
Justine Juel Gillmer however did earn herself plenty of fans on her first feature film screenplay, The Survivor.
“It was 2015 in the states, my managers brought me this project and said, ‘this is a comic book and a novel written by this guy’s son, a nonfiction kind of story, a biography about Harry Haft, who was a boxer and survived the Holocaust. Are you interested?’ Boxing was my main sport, I’d done it for years and years. It was the Holocaust plus boxing, so felt right. I’d always wanted to write historical fiction in a way that felt meaningful. I wrote that feature on spec. I developed it with a couple of guys. We knew that there was a great story there, but like a lot of historical stories, they don’t fit neatly into acts.
“Part of the process for me was trying to find a way to make this man who, like a lot of Holocaust survivors, didn’t talk about what happened; to force him to talk about it. I created this journalist character who was trying to learn his story, and that’s one of the machines in the script to try and get Harry to open up.
“Then in 2017 and a wonderful producer Matti Leshem came on board, and he and I developed it, and the script got on the black list, the Hollywood list of best unproduced screenplays. That’s when Barry Levison became interested as well in directing it. In 2019, they started shooting.”
The film stars Ben Foster as Harry Haft, and Peter Sarsgaard, John Leguizamo, Danny DeVito, Vicky Krieps and Billy Magnussen in support, and premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
“One of the greatest moments of my life as a writer was when Harry’s daughter turned to me and she said, ‘I don’t know how you did it. You’d never met him, but you got him’. That was incredibly touching,” says Justine Juel Gillmer.
Seven years after she started it, The Survivor is finally coming out in the US on April 27, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The writer’s next feature film project was also Holocaust themed, though this time she was paid upfront.
“I wrote Irena Sendler for Gal Gadot’s production company. Gal, her husband Jaron Varsano and Marc Platt were looking for a writer for this story. They actually searched for two or three years to find a writer. I ended up pitching it six times before I was chosen for it. Then as a team, we went to Warner Brothers and a couple of other places and Warner Brothers ended up wanting to buy it and paid me to write the script.”
With a wealth of experience now in film and TV, does she prefer one over the other? “There’s tremendous benefit to both,” she answers diplomatically. “TV storytelling, you get to spend more time with the characters and it’s a very different discipline of writing, a different way of producing. Whereas features, you have two hours to tell this story and it has to hit and it has to work and it has to really exist on its own. I think ultimately almost all writers prefer television because we get to be producers. We get to be very hands on. Whereas in features, it still works very differently, where it’s the writers that are taken out of the process and you kind of hand over your baby. If you’re used to control and collaboration and being part of the process, that can be very difficult.”
Any words of advice for aspiring writers out there?
“You want to be a writer, sit down and write and don’t be afraid of a blank page,” answers Justine Juel Gillmer. “The first thing you write is probably going to be crap, but you can always change it. I think certainly with a first draft, just write the way that you see it. And it could be completely unproducible. Then trim. You have to understand that throughout all the process of writing, rewriting and getting notes, you have to develop a very thick skin about it because ultimately TV and film are a collaboration. This will not be what you thought it was in the beginning. It merges and it changes, and it becomes something beautiful that is slightly different to your original vision, but that’s okay. That’s the process. Plus, there’s nothing like a deadline to make it easier to write freely. Panic is your best friend as a writer.”
The Survivor is streaming now on Stan.
