John August Makes Movie Magic

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It may sound queer, but John August never realized that one could be a screenwriter. No, August spent his formative years in Colorado, where he churned out fantastical short stories, which he continued penning while studying journalism. A certain script, however, changed all that:

It wasn’t until I had gone through college that I read my first screenplay – I read the script for Sex, Lies and Videotape and realized that images are happening, the movies really is happening on the page first.

August’s focus soon switched to films, where his taste for fantasy scored him some winning scripts – and killer collaborations, including three Tim Burton-directed flicks: Big Fish, Charlie and The Chocolate Factory and The Corpse Bride. He also penned and directed his own feature, The Nines, which starred Ryan Reynolds.

It’s not that August can’t get enough fantasy. He learned to play the game:

As I’ve had the luxury of going through the process, I’ve gravitated more towards fantasy movies, which have been getting made in the last ten years. It’s not a genre that I’m dying to write, but I’m fortunate in that I’m good at doing it.

August recently opened up to our editor about a lot more than just his movies, like whether or not staying in the closet qualifies as a lie and why he never rebelled against his Colorado upbringing. Never fear, movie loving reader, we also get a bit of dirt on his latest project, Shazam!

Andrew Belonsky: Did you always want to be a writer?

John August: I always wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t know what kind of things I would write. I always wrote short stories, I wrote for the school paper.

AB: You were always in the thick of it as a kid. What was the appeal of writing for you?

JA: I think it was – like most writers – this ability to create a whole new universe that was inside and being able to control it in a way that you couldn’t control your outside.

AB: How old were you when you came out to your family?

JA: I didn’t come out until I was twenty-three. When I got through college – I had been living in Los Angeles for a year – and I came out when I went back to my family.

AB: And how did that go down?

JA: It turned out great – all coming outs are challenging, but I had no drama or blowouts or anything bad. It was classic – I could have done it years before that.

AB: How did you find the courage to do it, then, if you feel like you could have done it before?

JA: As you go through life, you enter some stages where you’re allowed to sort of re-declare your major – a lot of people come out when they first go to college, a lot of people come out after moving to a new city following college – and that was really my area. So, I came out when I came to Los Angeles. It was about really figuring out who I really was while I was here. Then it was a matter of going back and telling everybody, “By the way, here’s all the stuff I wasn’t telling you”. I also think the fear of coming out isn’t so much that people are going to be bad or reject you, it’s you feel bad about lying to people for however many years it was before you came out.

AB: But is it really a lie?

JA: It’s dishonesty. You can make whatever distinction you want to make, but if in your heart of hearts you know something and you’re misrepresenting who you are to people, it feels like a lie.

AB: So, you came out to your family when you were twenty-three. When did you know definitively that you were gay?

JA: Probably only the year before that. I knew internally since I was about eight years old, but I hadn’t had a boyfriend, I hadn’t had sex in any meaningful way that a grownup thinks about it.

https://youtu.be/c5mFAc1OTVM
[The trailer for The Nines, which August wrote and directed.]
AB: What was that transition to screenwriting like? You said that you started with short stories…

JA: It wasn’t until I had gone through college that I read my first screenplay – I read the script for Sex, Lies and Videotape and realized that images are happening, the movies really is happening on the page first. I was comfortable enough with writing that I had a reasonably good chance to get into this.

AB: How did you approach it when you had only been familiar with short stories in college?

JA: Well, my degree in college was journalism and that was a good parallel for the challenges of screenwriting. It’s very much – the art of economy. You’re trying to say a lot with a limited number of words. There are restrictions on what you’re allowed to say and what you’re not allowed to say. A journalist isn’t supposed to be speculating, but reporting in a very structured format. You can cut the story off at any point and it still holds together. In a screenplay, you can only talk about what characters can see and hear. You can’t go into their thoughts. You can’t describe the texture of something. It’s a very limited form, but within those limitations there’s a lot you can do.

AB: Do you still write short stories?

JA: I have written some fiction, but nothing really of note; the occasional magazine pieces and a play that I wrote, but it’s mostly just screenplays.

AB: You sit down, you write it, and you have a rough draft of a movie. How many drafts do you go through? How much does the screenplay change from conception to screen?

JA: I would say – after thirty scripts, my rough drafts tend to be closer to what the movie is. You get a sense of what scenes you need to write to get the story from place to place, so I go through fewer drafts now. But there’s also the script that you write for yourself, which isn’t the same as the one you turn in, which needs to help them achieve a goal. One of the challenges of writing a script professionally is that you’re a step in the process. Your final draft of a script isn’t really the final product. It’s like being an architect: you’re making the plans, but you’re not actually constructing the finished product.

AB: Let’s go back to Colorado when you were a kid. You said you wrote to create another world…

JA: One thing I was lacking in childhood was that classic thing to rebel against, to push against. I went to great schools; I had great teachers, good friends. There was nothing classically wrong to push me into artistic endeavors. The writing I did was to fulfill my own enjoyment. And, also, the feedback – I’d write something and people would tell me it’s good and that would encourage me to write more stuff. I wasn’t writing to get back at something.

AB: Do you remember the first story you wrote?

JA: The first story I really remember writing was on a typewriter that was my mom’s. It was a manual typewriter and I was determined to write on it even though I was only about six years old. I would just type one letter at a time and if I made a mistake, there was no correcting, so I would have to think of what word or sentence I could make with the mistake I made, so I ended up writing a two paragraph about a boy on mars, but I’m sure that’s just how the letters ended up occurring.

AB: Do you still have it?

JA: No, I don’t, but we were one of the very first families I knew to get a computer – we had an Atari 800 – and I remember using the word processor on that at an early age. I still have a lot of the stuff that I wrote back in that time. I just transferred it. It’s all sort of Dungeons and Dragons-esque.

AB: Oh, really?

JA: Oh, yeah!

AB: Well, I’m looking at your CV here and it reflects a fantasy direction. So, that’s what you’re attracted to in film?

JA: That’s most of what I’ve been hired to do. I always say that my favorite genres of movies are those that get made. The movies I’ve gotten made are in the fantasy genre. For whatever reason, my mysteries or romance thrillers aren’t the ones that got made. I’ve written a lot of different genres.

AB: Personally, do you feel that you’re better at the things that end up getting made?

JA: I’m very mindful of what movies I can write that can actually get made. I think a lot of the job of a professional screenwriter is recognizing both what you’re good at and recognizing what’s actually going to make into film. As I’ve had the luxury of going through the process, I’ve gravitated more towards fantasy movies, which have been getting made in the last ten years. It’s not a genre that I’m dying to write, but I’m fortunate in that I’m good at doing it.

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AB: You’re now sitting down and working on Shazam!, right?

JA: Yeah.

AB: What drew you to that? Obviously it’s a super hero, but an old super hero that isn’t around very much anymore.

JA: I don’t want to say too much about Shazam because it’s so early on in the process, but what is great about the Captain Marvel character in the Shazam! mythology is – the underlying idea is that a thirteen year old boy can say a magic word and turn into Captain Marvel. That’s the central concept of the story: that empowerment and the responsibility that comes with it.

AB: Didn’t he have a woman and a teen sidekick? Was the teen sidekick really a baby?

JA: There’s a lot of different variations on the mythology and I can’t really say how we’re doing it, but it definitely plays – it’s going to play well to kids, because they’re right there in that moment, but it’s going to play well to – it embodies that frustration and excitement of being a 13-year old.

AB: So, when you approached The Nines, do you feel like you had more control over the finished product?

JA: Certainly. Going back to the difference between the screenwriter – the person who originally plotting the story and getting it ready to be shot but isn’t the person who lifts up the hammer and builds it. This was a story where I really knew what I wanted to do – I knew how I wanted to build the story. I had not just a sense of the story I wanted to tell, but how I wanted to support this movie.

AB: Do you want to continue going in that direction?

JA: I definitely want to direct again. I don’t think it’s going to be super soon. I have a lot of other projects. I think it’s going to be a ways off, but I enjoyed it. The panic of directing is that you have about a thousand decisions a day – everyone’s coming up to you. As a writer, I don’t have to make any of those decisions and I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to handle it, but I surprised myself.

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