By Dov Kornits
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit they deserve. In this installment: Australian screenwriter Shaun Grant, who penned Snowtown, Nitram, Penguin Bloom and Jasper Jones.
While it’s a known fact that a great movie always begins with a great script, screenwriters are still the first to be kicked to the curb, to put things bluntly. That’s certainly something noted by Australia’s Shaun Grant, who made a shattering screenwriting debut with 2011’s Snowtown. “I’ve found that people will be very cautious in talking to a director, and that they don’t want to hurt their feelings. But writers hear the worst of the worst! You have to have a very thick skin, and luckily I do.”
That thick skin has served Grant very well. While the international success of local actors and directors has been well documented, Grant is proof that screenwriters can crack Hollywood as well…though without nearly as much credit. As well as scripting a number of high-profile Australian films (Nitram, True History Of The Kelly Gang, Penguin Bloom, Jasper Jones), Grant has also been deeply involved on a number of major studio projects in LA. Though many have not emerged from production hell to see the light of day, Grant did receive a credit on the acclaimed David Fincher-produced Netflix serial killer opus Mindhunter.
A truly gifted scribe, and a master at adaptation, Grant’s career has been an impressive one, beginning with the three years that he spent writing about the infamous Snowtown murders. Haunting and unforgettable, Snowtown erupted on the world stage in 2011, and its lauded first-time director, Justin Kurzel, seemed on a fast track to success, helming 2015’s much acclaimed Macbeth with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, before moving onto Assassin’s Creed (again with Fassbender and Cotillard), Nitram and True History Of The Kelly Gang (both with Grant), and also the upcoming The Order, with Jude Law.
And though Kurzel received the lion’s share of the credit (as directors often do), it was Grant, however, who was actually the catalyst behind Snowtown, the film that started it all. “It’s funny, everyone’s like, ‘You worked on Justin’s film?’” Grant laughed to FilmInk, a little dryly. “The cold concept was me, and Justin came on. That’s my issue with this country: writers are viewed in a different way.” Grant discovered the story one night when a power shortage saw the screenwriter scouring his brother’s bookshelf. He found The Snowtown Murders by Andrew McGarry, which he would eventually option. “I literally read it from start to finish by candlelight that night. I got to the end and said, ‘I have to make this film.’”
For Grant, who grew up in a small country town in Northern Victoria, cinema was something that he fell in love with, but never considered a viable career proposition. “As a boy, it was, ‘Stay in school, drop out in Year Nine, and then pick which abattoir you want to work at,’” Grant told FilmInk of his expected trajectory. “I didn’t think there was the possibility of being a filmmaker; I just fell in love with cinema. When I was six or seven, my parents were in the process of divorcing, so there was a lot of arguing going on. I would sit as close to the television as possible and turn the volume up, and I would get transported. Movies would take me away from what I had around me.”
Following his parents’ separation, Grant was raised by his mother, and the absence of a father figure was something that left an indelible imprint on the screenwriter and drew him to Snowtown. “I was raised by a single mum, and that’s what Snowtown is to me – it’s a boy trying to find a dad.” In many ways, the harrowing crime story provided the perfect hook for Grant to work through his own experiences, and that’s something that he believes writers in this country should do more of. “There’s this theory of ‘write what you know’, and we have a tendency to do that in this country,” Grant says. “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. So I always say write what you know thematically, but not necessarily what you know literally.”
It’s a formula that paid dividends, but the screenwriting process was a dark and difficult one. “It was an extremely taxing experience,” says Grant, who was working as a school teacher when he optioned the book. “A relationship ended because of it. I went to a very dark place, but I got the script to a point, and then I didn’t really know anyone in the industry. People say that you’ve got to know someone, but I don’t think that’s true. If it’s good enough, it will find a way. So many people want to produce, and they’re desperate for stories. I watched films that I admired, wrote down the names of the producers, and made cold calls. It helped saying that it was called Snowtown. Everyone read it and everyone met me afterward.”
The film premiered at The Cannes Film Festival to rave reviews, and since then, Grant says that “producers come to me” and that he’s found himself in the fortunate position of “saying no to more than I say yes to.” The screenwriter has been selective in what he has chosen to work on since. “I’m careful not to be pigeonholed,” Grant says. “With Snowtown and [television series] Killing Time, I got every true crime film in the world coming to me, and I said no to them all. I call myself creatively bi-polar. I’ve normally got 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 it’s good for a writer to have things to fall back on.”
Grant found himself in that very situation when he signed on to adapt two Australian novels simultaneously. One was Cate Shortland’s psychological thriller, Berlin Syndrome, and the other was Rachel Perkins’ coming of age story, Jasper Jones. “They both landed on my doorstep within weeks of each other,” Grant told FilmInk. “I couldn’t choose between them, so I just decided that for the next three years, my social life would be non-existent and I was going to work on these. I responded to them in two different ways – Jasper Jones took me back to my childhood, and Berlin Syndrome was definitely me wanting to delve back into that dark aspect again. In terms of the adaptation process, I forget pretty quickly; it becomes my own within the first draft.”
Grant reteamed with Justin Kurzel for the stunning and envelope-pushing adaptation of Peter Carey’s True History Of The Kelly Gang, and also for the controversial, award-winning Nitram, which took a fascinating approach to the subject of despised Australian mass murderer Martin Bryant. Hollywood has also come knocking, with Grant recruited to tackle, amongst other things, an adaptation of Eric Jager’s novel, The Last Duel with director Francis Lawrence, who eventually left the project to be replaced by none less than Ridley Scott, ending Grant’s involvement. “That said, I’ve been very fortunate in America. I had a large success with my first project, so you skip that stage of having to do things that you’re not madly passionate about. I haven’t had to write an episode of some serial. I’ve been in rooms and taken in my ideas, and they seem to have responded to them.”
Make no mistake though, it’s still a tough slog. “We’re the closest to it,” Grant says of a screenwriter’s intense relationship to a story. “Snowtown was six years of my life. For Justin, it was half of that. So, you are so close to it, but at the same time, no one cares! I get it, because it’s all about making the work better. So, when you’re in a meeting, and they’re like, ‘This is wrong, this is wrong, this needs changing’, you just have to remind yourself that anything that they didn’t mention, they liked! It’s a lonely job, and you need to be thrown a bone. It’s amazing how far a pat on the back can take you when you’re in a room alone punching at a keyboard.”
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
