MovieBytes Interview:
Screenwriter John Sheerin

An interview with screenwriter John Sheerin regarding the British Feature Writing Competition.

A: The title is The Legend Of New York Pizza. The producer has asked me to keep the story under wraps as much as possible (so I'm treating it like missile launch codes) but I don't think I'm giving too much away to say that it's about a guy who inherits a friends pizza business and is trying to keep it afloat. The development process will be ongoing right up until the clapperboard goes down and someone says "action" so details may change but that's the basic gist of the plot.

A: I was actually trawling around the interweb looking for some information on what had happened to the Oscar Moore foundation when I stumbled on the website. I've never really written shorts so the last eight years of Kaos and the British Shorts Competition had managed to pass me by. Why did I enter? The chance to get a film made. That's the Holy Grail. I previously entered the script in American Zoetrope's competition where it made the semi finals. I also entered it in the Nicholl's Fellowship a few years back where it was down to the last thirty entries before falling at the last fence.

A: Absolutely. So far Kaos have been fantastic. In the first development meeting we had, the producer handed me the software package that I was part of the prize, which I had forgotten about and I've already had a couple of meetings with my new agent Katherine Vile at United Agents - getting the offer to be represented by such an illustrious agency is obviously fantastic aspect of the prize. Obviously the big part of the prize is getting the film made which is a long winded process, but we've been working on that from the minute the winner was announced, and although to me it may seem at times that we are dragging ourselves to the finish line by our eye lashes, I am assured by others with more experience than I that things are actually moving along at a pretty snappy pace.

A: I honestly can't remember. The original idea came about from a conversation about urban legends that I had with a cousin on mine in a bar. A couple of months later, another friend and I were chatting in work and he mentioned a similar idea and I had that epiphany moment where two things collide in your head and you see the story more or less complete. I wrote a few basic things down - scenes here and there, snippets of dialogue, but I wouldn't call it an outline. For someone who claims to be a writer, I actually spend quite a lot of time staring into space, just turning things over in my head. I will write stuff down just to make sure I don't forget it - but sometimes if I actually put it down on paper, I "lock it" in my brain, and then have difficulty thinking of an alternative. So let's say from the first set of notes to the draft I submitted took about six months, twenty or thirty pages of notes, and about three revisions of the first full length draft. And then about another six drafts since winning the competition. As a sidebar - developing a script with other people is much, much better than trying to do it by yourself. Kaos' Script Development lead on this script - a very nice lady called Jessica Loveland - was absolutely fantastic, and brought a huge amount to the table - but just to have someone to bounce ideas back and forth with is brilliant in itself.

A: I used a package called Sophocles, which I really liked for the original script. Unfortunately during my first post win rewrite, the PC died one day taking Sophocles with it, and I had to download Final Draft and use it on the Mac and then write the script out again from scratch. As one of the first directives was to cut 117 pages down to 95, I was delighted to discover that the dialogue margins on Final Draft are slightly wider than they were on Sophocles - nine characters by my count - which saved me about seven pages without having to cut a thing.

A: Unfortunately not - as that pesky thing that is life always intrudes. My day job is pretty time consuming. I set myself a target of ten good pages a week and try to meet that. At a very rough level, that gives me one script every six months (three months for a first draft, then a tweak) There were a couple of books in there that I come at in a different way too, but ten pages a week is about the best I can manage now. Hopefully this win might allow me to consider making a few changes in my life, but wait and see as the Zen master said.

A: My big problem is usually coming up with the initial premise - the spark to set it all off. If the idea doesn't really excite me, then no matter how many words I am marching across the page, it's probably not working. If I can't sell myself than how am I going to sell anyone else? Once I have an idea that I am happy with, I don't generally get stuck. Occasionally I will write a scene that I know is pretty clunky but I generally just save those for the rewrites as I don't want to lose the momemtum.

A: Irish, 38 years old, college degree in Media Studies and English. I've wanted to write scripts since I was 12 years old sitting in the dark and saw Harrison Ford say "I don't know, I'm making this up as I go..." Since leaving college, I have written a few short stories, two novels, one eight hour TV series by myself, another TV series along with a group of writers, and about five full length scripts. There are a few other scripts in there that I would admit are not very good, although I occasionally cannibalise the odd scene here and there. I had a script in development with Warp X a few years back, but this is very definitely the big break.

A: I live in a small village in Wiltshire. One shop - two pubs. I spent a week in Los Angeles on holiday last year, and think I spent about three of my seven days stuck in traffic, so it wasn't really winning me over as a nice place to spend my days. I have no plans to move there, but at the same time, if I ever got the chance to work on something big, I would definitely consider relocating on a temporary basis. Let's face it - if Mr. Spielberg phoned any of us up and said "would you like to work on my new project?", we'd all be down at Heathrow before our chair had stopped spinning.

A: There are several things on the go at once. Once script that my girlfriend has been nagging me to write for years (I have a start and an end, the middle act is killing me), and my agent suggested having a look at reducing the eight hour TV series down to feature length. In addition, there is one idea that I would love to write, but as it is a true story about people who are still alive, I am a bit reticent about diving into that briar patch (although it is a great story). I'm also hounding a producer friend for any work he thinks might be in my wheelhouse. And of course, there is still some work to be done on Pizza. So enough to keep me off street corners, and fingers crossed, I can springboard into something else, and not let the pitch sail by.

Posted Thursday, January 21, 2010