Dov Kornits
While director Justin Kurzel’s post-Snowtown success has been well documented (he shot last year’s Macbeth with Michael Fassbender for anyone who missed it), the film’s screenwriter, Shaun Grant, has also been just as impressively rising through the ranks. It was Grant who optioned the rights to the book upon which Snowtown was based and spent three years turning the harrowing material into an unforgettable screenplay. And it’s paid off in a big way. Having scripted two highly anticipated local films set to hit screens this year in Cate Shortland’s Berlin Syndrome and Rachel Perkins’ Jasper Jones, Grant has also cracked Hollywood and is currently adapting a medieval story for Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence. We recently had an in-depth chat with the screenwriter, and extracted this essential advice from our interview.
1. Find A Hook
Prior to writing Snowtown, Grant had been working on an original screenplay called Gap Year about a teenager who travels to central Australia and picks up work in a small mining community, with the story culminating in a gang rape. “I was interested in the influence that men have on young men, particularly young men who haven’t had a father figure,” says Grant who also grew up without his father around. However, when Grant discovered the harrowing story of Snowtown, the screenwriter realised that true story “had all the same themes, but it was Snowtown. I knew it would get noticed. As a writer in this country, the hardest thing is getting your foot in the door and to get your foot in the door, you’ve got to kick it down. Since I’ve been in, it’s been great. There have been plenty of phone calls, but to get in, you need something and I knew Snowtown was something I could trade in.”
2. Write What You Know… But Not Literally!
“There’s this theory of ‘write what you know’ and we have a tendency to do this in this country,” Grant tells us. “You see these writer-directors who have these passion projects, and they’re stories about growing up in their home town and it’s so literally them writing what they know. But with Snowtown, I haven’t killed anyone, but I know what it’s like wanting your father around and wanting to find love from that place. Berlin Syndrome is about a twenty-something guy who meets a girl in Berlin and they have a wonderfully romantic time together. He goes to work the next morning, she goes to leave and can’t get out, and he holds her hostage for quite a long time. It’s quite a dark psychological thriller. Thematically, I look at the film, and we’ve all been in relationships where someone’s trying to stay in it. The end of a relationship is never this mutual thing. I’ve been on both sides – I’ve gotten out first and hurt someone, and I’ve clung on to someone. So my point is, don’t just write about a guy going through a breakup in Melbourne. Thematically it is that, but lift the stakes. Make it bigger.”
3. Set Yourself Deadlines
While writing Snowtown, Grant was working as a high school teacher during the day, and attending screenwriting classes in the evening. Suffice to say, he needed to set deadlines to pull it off. “I optioned this book with my own money,” the screenwriter says of The Snowtown Murders. “I’m not a gambling man but I knew I could do this. I had three years. Deadlines are great ideas for writing because there are so many people who talk about writing. You keep talking about it and life gets in the way. Life would have gotten in the way in this case except I’m careful with my money and I don’t want to waste my money! So I worked weekends, nights and whenever I got the chance on this script, and it sort of snowballed when people read it.”
4. You Don’t Need To Know People
“I didn’t really know anyone,” Grant says upon finishing the script for Snowtown. “People talk about the fact that you’ve got to know someone and I don’t think that’s true. If it’s good enough, it will find a way because so many people want to produce and are desperate for stories. I watched films I admired, wrote down the names of the producers, looked through Encore, and made cold calls.”
5. Don’t Be Scared To Juggle Projects!
“I call myself creatively bi-polar,” says Grant, who was very careful not to get pigeon-holed as purely a crime writer post-Snowtown. “I’ve normally gotten two things on the go at all times. One will be darker than the other because sometimes I love life when I wake up and sometimes I don’t. You can get stuck so I think it’s good for a writer to have things to fall back on. Sometimes you’re banging your head against a script and it’s just not working. It’s always good to have something else to do.”
6. On The Adaptation Process
“My process is always the same,” Grant says. “Whenever a producer sends a book to my doorstep, I’ll read it without taking any notes and just feel things. Then once I’ve read the whole book, I write down what I remember – scenes, lines, characters and feelings. I call them my “irreplaceables”. They’re the things that I can’t lose. Then I’ll read it a second time and take notes as I go and really look at character and structure and map it out on cards and try to piece it together in some way. Adaptation is a crazy thing because each artform is such a different medium. A book has no place being a film. If you try and just transpose one to the other, you get those adaptations that are middling. I also do two drafts before I typically meet the author. I don’t want their impressions being put on me. It’s tricky, but you don’t want to form too much of a relationship [with the author] because you’re going to have to kill some of their babies.” According to Grant, it’s important though to keep authors in the picture. “They created it and they deserve that right and respect. I’ve had wonderfully hostile emails and conversations with some authors, and others are just so complementary. It’s an interesting thing.”
For more on Shaun Grant, be sure to pick up the upcoming issue of FilmInk on shelves February 17.
Awsome tips, Thankyou!