I started back in March 2012 because my brother said people liked watching people play video games and making videos of that. So I started there.
I also had other reasons for it. Bad job. I got laid off. I was in college. I had a tumor and I needed to change my life. But getting the process going was a really arduous journey. That took a long time.
But, in the moment, when my first video went somewhat viral, I got third place on the video subreddit. That got me 100 or 200 subscribers. I was floored. I remember my phone started blowing up.
I was like, “Oh, my God. I have a huge following – unbelievably enormous. I tried to imagine 150 people in a room. I don’t even know 150 people.” I took that very seriously. So when I got to 10,000 followers, I realized that some stadia don’t even fit that many people.
I made videos on the milestones of 10,000, 20, 30 thousand people. When it got to 100,000, I was so blown away. This took years. I think I got my first million subscribers about two years ago, twelve years after I started.
Hitting a million subscribers, it started to be unreasonable. This is too many people. I made a pretty famous, very memable video with over 8 million views where I’m responding to a fan video where they’re just making really touching things. And I’m crying. I was devastated because I realized I will never have a relationship with any of these people. I will never be able to know this many people.
No human could know 8 million people. It’s impossible. When I look back on 150 people, I thought how large that number was, I realize that number is still large.
But 8 million is so large that it’s impossible to wrap your head around it. I made a promise to myself that no matter how big it gets, I need to remember the real people behind this number.
And 150 is just as important as the 8 million.
Becoming Markiplier – YouTube Sensation
Why would people want to see it? Uh, I don’t really know.
I’ve posted a lot of different types of things. I think there’s a bevy of content for people to come in and find. I have a lot of starting points for people.
It’s funny because my most popular videos are these random nonsense videos. There’s a series of three that have hundreds of millions of views that have nothing to do with the rest of my channel.
I think people stay because I’ve tried very hard to make sure that my channel is a representation of my journey as a creator and me as a person, as opposed to me as this big YouTuber.
I try to make sure that’s always part of it. And that often leads me to talking about my bigger projects and building something else. This Iron Lung movie is a sequence of various projects that I’ve started since I started the channel and making sketch comedies within the first few weeks.
So people have seen that trajectory and I think they stick around because they wonder what I’m going to do next and see if I can actually do the things that I’m talking about. Whether that’s people that really cheer me on or people hoping that I fail or wondering when I’m going to falter.
But I think at the very least, the thing that I provide is I surprise them with whatever the next thing is. I keep them guessing where I’m going to go.
From Horror Video Games to Filmmaker
I played the Iron Lung game in 2022 and I really liked it. It was very different from the other horror video games. I played a lot of horror games of various different types and I couldn’t really categorize this one.
It was something that put so many restrictions on players that other horror video games might not. The concept is so out there in terms of this apocalypse that people don’t understand, you’re in a blood-filled moon in a leaky sub. It takes itself super seriously, but doesn’t give you the answers you’re looking for.
You really have to dig, you have to put your ear to the wall to hear something, you have to make guesses. There’s a lot of inferred information. It was scary and entertaining too.
But universally, it was very highly rated, around 90%. When I saw that, I reached out to the developer David Szymanski and I asked if he’d like to have a movie made of this. He was an individual game developer and agreed.
So working with him, I got to pick his brain about the questions that I wanted answered while I was building out the rest of the story for the movie. It was a unique experience because it was so contained.
There were enough things in the game that left things unanswered and I didn’t feel I had to answer all of them. I wanted to be faithful to the game while also allowing me to build to the universe for the movie. I worked with David to figure out where that story was going to flourish. It had a lot of things going for it because I was able to work with one person instead of making this with a team or a company.
I was able to loop David in on the creative decisions and keep his opinions integrated into how the story was going to unfold. And then, I just then started making it and assembled the team really quickly.
Making Good Trouble @ Robert Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios
The pre-production went all the ways that I usually go the other projects. Meet with the team, find the key roles. It was also a union shoot. We did it both SAG and IATSE because I wanted to do it as officially as possible because this was going to be my first feature even though I’ve done bigger productions than this before. It wasn’t an ego thing. I also want people to feel comfortable and feel like I could be trusted.
There were some things of the process I had to learn along the way. But other than that, it went smoothly. We could have used a little more pre-production, but the location we were filming at, Troublemaker Studios in Austin, had a deadline when they needed the space.
Troublemaker is a nice space, but we were in the non-air-conditioned, climate-controlled soundstage, which was fine because we could drill our whole thing into the ground. Everyone built their whole department zones and offices on the soundstage.
You can see some of the behind the scenes footage some of the crew posted about where they’re doing the makeup, working on the costumes, and working on the props. The set was the central feature of the whole space on this big motion control rig so it could be thrown around and look realistic.
It was a 35-day shoot. It was originally going to be a 25, and then I talked to Robert Rodriguez. I was trying to charm some extra days because they had that deadline. Thankfully, his kids knew me. And usually, if someone’s kids know me, then I’m okay.
He was really cool. The post-production side of it took the longest. That’s because I was working on a lot of it myself. I had only weekends to work on it. I had the YouTube channel and then I had this podcast deal lined up.
I was making three to four podcast episodes a week, in addition to my YouTube videos. Then I had this clothing company that I was working on. There were a lot of things that took away my weekdays, so I was only able to crack the project open on weekends. And then, with ADHD, it’s very hard for me to work Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or most of the time, Saturday, Sunday, and then wait a week, do a whole bunch of other things, then come back and do it and continue that chain of thoughts.
It was very difficult. And so that’s why it took a lot longer, in addition to the talking and trying to figure out distribution and things like that.
No Studio Distribution. No Problem
I already put out a few trailers before release. They’ve been watched over 10 million times. People knew about the Iron Lung project for three years on my YouTube channel.
I didn’t set out to send a message to the film business. It was all consequential. I had no idea that it was going to reach this level. I made jokes about it when it was happening.
I think that all I’ve been trying to do my entire second half of my career when I was making bigger projects is, “There’s a whole world of talented creators out there on YouTube, and the wide world of video production and movies and TV should give them a chance. There’s so much content and the landscape is transforming.”
So it’s never been a middle finger to the industry. It’s been, “You need to adapt.”
You need to take advantage of these creators who look at this from a different lens. I want to help the businesses that have made movies that I cherish very deeply. I think that the movie industry could be a lot healthier if they take a different approach to it. That change is very hard.
So, the only thing I want people to take away from this is, “I have a lot of subscribers, but this isn’t a recipe that a lot of people could follow.” But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of other creators out there with, less, but still substantial following. That’s a huge foothold to start from.
There’s value there. If you’re a business, there’s value. If you’re a consumer, if you watch this kind of stuff, there are incredible ideas that are just lurking beneath the surface waiting to be discovered and have their chance.
The more you can open that, the more people go through that, the wider it gets, and the more people can see the end of it and get some success out of it.
Audiences, Followers, or Fans?
Audiences. I use it sometimes. Audiences is more like people in a space. I often think of that very physically. Followers ties into influencers.
I don’t typically look at any kind of metric. I famously don’t look at analytics. I don’t make plans based on them.
When you say followers, as opposed to fans, it detracts from the fact that they are people who’ve given you their time. And that is an extremely valuable thing. Hardly any of us would ever say that we have too much time. So, I always want to respect that, even if I can’t do it personally.
I think fans is a term I would use more than followers because they are supportive and they want it to succeed and help if they can. And that’s the best part of it. If they want to help and you give them an avenue to help, it feels good for everybody.
Markiplier: Innovator or Disruptor?
I think the term that jumped to mind is a nuisance. (A pain in the lung).
I think that I just really annoy a lot of these companies more than anything because I’ll burst through a door being Markiplier, here’s my movie. And then I walk out, don’t even talk to them afterwards.
Bam, here’s Iron Lung. And I’m like, “All right, thumbs up. I’m going to work on the next thing.”
I’m ignoring some calls from studios asking, “Do you need help distributing that?” And I’m like, “Sorry, I’m off to somewhere else.”
I don’t like the term disruptor. That feels too startup culturey. I’m just a YouTube man. I make YouTube videos.
“All I got’s my two balls and my Word — and I don’t break them. For nobody.”
-From the Screenplay of Scarface, by Oliver Stone.
Oliver Stone knew he was headed for trouble when he wrote the remake of Scarface, and trouble he got. The film was blasted by the critics upon its initial release in 1983, but since then the court of public opinion has weighed in otherwise. Now it’s safe to say that Scarface has become a modern classic, and considering the recent popularity of films that deal with the drug trade, it’s a film that’s ahead of its time as well.
Under the masterful direction of Brian DePalma, Scarface is an epic tale of a gangster’s rise and fall. On first viewing, some may be surprised to find out the film was written by Stone, but there are many themes in Scarface that often appear in his work. “To some, it’s a movie about cars, palaces, money and coke,” he told Playboy. “It’s not just about that. It’s about what those things do to you and how they corrupt you.”
With Scarface, Stone created one of the most vicious gangsters in cinema history, Tony Montana, which Al Pacino considers his greatest role. One of the script’s strongest points is its memorable dialog and many lines in the film stick in your head like the words to a song.
Scarface is a film that is popular with a wide variety of people. Brokers on Wall Street have told Stone they loved the film because it reminded them of their business. When watching the MTV show Cribs, which takes you inside the homes of popular musicians, many of the rappers have Scarface posters in their mansions. And some of the film’s biggest fans are real life criminals who have told Stone his portrayal of the gangster life was right on target.
Stone and his work often get bashed in the press, and what usually gets overlooked is that the man is a fine writer. For this retrospective of Scarface, he was happy to reminisce on one of his most memorable screenplays.
The version of Scarface that you wrote was not so much a remake of the original thirties film but a reinvention in a sense. What was it that appealed to you about remaking the film and having it deal with the drug trade?
The origins of the movie, it’s an interesting story. I had directed The Hand and it had failed at the box-office, I was completely ignored. In fact, it took a heavy hit, The Hand. If you go back and check the reviews, there was a lot of personalization in the reviews. It was probably because Midnight Express really hit people hard and some people went after me. It was also a period in my life when I also needed inspiration. I didn’t have inspiration at the time, I felt stale as a writer. (Producer) Martin Bregman had approached me and I said I wasn’t interested in doing it. I didn’t like the original movie that much, it didn’t really hit me at all and I had no desire to make another Italian gangster picture because so many had been done so well, there would be no point to it. The origin of it, according to Marty Bregman, Al had seen the thirties version on television, he loved it and expressed to Marty as his long time mentor / partner that he’d like to do a role like that. So Marty presented it to me and I had no interest in doing a period piece.
Then he called me months later, Sidney Lumet had stepped into the deal. Sidney, who I had met from Platoon, was a New York director and he had worked with Al quite a bit. So there was a lot of linkage there. Sidney had a great idea to take the 1930’s American prohibition gangster movie and make it into a modern immigrant gangster movie dealing with the same problems that we had then, that we’re prohibiting drugs instead of alcohol. There’s a prohibition against drugs that’s created the same criminal class as (prohibition of alcohol) created the Mafia. It was a remarkable idea. The Marielitos at the time had gained a lot of publicity for their open brazenness. The Marielitos were the quote “crazies.” They were deported by Castro in 1981 to America. At the time it was perceived he was dumping all the criminals into the American system. According to the police enforcement in Miami Beach, they were the poorest people, the roughest people in the prisons who would kill for a dollar. How could you get this outlandish, operatic character inside an American, contemporary framework? It’s very difficult if you think about it. Al is a brilliant actor. I worked with him on Born on the Fourth of July in 1978. He was genius in a room. And I saw the rehearsal for Born on the Fourth of July in 1978 with a full cast. He was on fire in that wheelchair, fire! It stayed with me for ten years. I put as much of that energy as I could into working with Tom (Cruise) in another way.
Did you try and tailor the role of Tony Montana to Al Pacino?
Of course, from the get-go. It was Al. Scarface grew out of this Lumet idea from the Marielitos coming to America, the brazenness, the drug trade, making it big, taking over from the old Cuban mob. I went with it and wrote the script. I researched it thoroughly in Florida and the Caribbean. I had been in South America recently and did some research there. So I saw quite a bit of the drug trade from the legal point of view as well as from the gangster point of view. Not many people would talk, it’s a very closed world.
How were you able to get in touch with those people?
I was exposed in certain situations on both sides of the law. I went to the Caribbean, there’s no law down there, they’ll just shoot you in your hotel room. It got hairy. It gave me all this color. I wanted to do a sun-drenched, tropical Third World gangster, cigar, sexy Miami movie. Pacino’s accent (laughs), people imitate it to this day and it was derided at the time. It may not be literally accurate but what the fuck, it works!
I remember you had said in Playboy that at the time you researched the film you saw a lot of things going on in the drug trade that later played out into big things like Iran Contra.
Oh yeah, the shit was heavy. In Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Miami Beach, Miami Dade, there’s different law enforcement departments, DEA, the FBI, plus Justice, so you have a lot of organizational activity and bureaucracy. And you gotta think about how they interact with each other and how much they all compete. This was the beginning of the drug war. The stories were outlandish. The story of the chainsaw was one of the things that happened that was on the record.
So that was a real incident that happened?
Yes, but not done that way. I dramatized it. They were rough, the Colombians played tough. So I moved to Paris and got out of the cocaine world too because that was another problem for me. I was doing coke at the time, and I really regretted it. I got into a habit of it and I was an addictive personality. I did it, not to an extreme or to a place where I was as destructive as some people, but certainly to where I was going stale mentally. I moved out of L.A. with my wife at the time and moved back to France to try and get into another world and see the world differently. And I wrote the script totally fucking cold sober.
Writing the script, was it in any way a therapy in weaning yourself off the drug?
Oh, it was more than that. One of the things that’s bugged me, I think a lot of writers will agree with this is we spend money on our vices and we pay through the nose for our mistakes. I’ll admit that coke kicked my ass. It’s one of the things that beat me in life. As a result, getting even, getting paid to make a movie about it and making it a good one on top of it, there’s nothing better. But to go back and finish the story as to how the film originated, Sidney Lumet hated my script. I don’t know if he’d say that in public himself, I sound like a petulant screenwriter saying that, I’d rather not say that word. Let me say that Sidney did not understand my script, whereas Bregman wanted to continue in that direction with Al.
Do you feel the story might have been too strong?
Yeah, I think that he felt there was too much gratuitous violence, which was the ultimate rap on the film that came from the critics. From Sidney, it went to a couple of other projections and then we went to Brian (DePalma), which was a good idea. And Al liked him and trusted him. It turned into a film that has its own history. It basically took off with Brian and Al, and Bregman was the control pilot.
Being that you had a cocaine habit, do you feel it gave your script a different perspective than if you had never tried the drug?
Probably so because the big switch point for me in the script is the fall of the king. I see Al turning paranoid in that movie, I see it perhaps because I was more attuned to it. But the paranoia of coke is the most striking (aspect), the fire of it. I’ll give you an example. You’re down in the Caribbean, you’re having coke, you’re drinking at a bar with three Colombian management guys. They run the cigarette boats out there with tons of shit every night. They go right to the Florida coast in these cigarette boats. They fly across the moon, they skim the ocean at night, it’s really incredible. Full speed, then they slow down to nothing, they whisper in the night, and you can’t hear the engines. Then they sneak up past the coast and the by-ways, past the Coast Guard. It’s really a trip.
You do this, and you get into that world. All of the sudden, you’re flashing coke in the hotel room at four in the morning, you’re talking the coke talk about how great things are, they started boasting, and I started telling them I was a Hollywood screenwriter. They thought I was an informer because I dropped the name of a guy who had been one of my helpers, he was making money now on the defense side of the ball game. But the guy had previously busted one of these three guys as a prosecutor. So at four in the morning, that gets dangerous! Two of them went into the bathroom and I thought they were gonna come out and blow me away. But you know, the truth of the matter is I got out by bullshit, by the skin of my teeth. I was nervous the whole night, nervous beyond belief. That never could have happened to me if I had been straight. And they never would have taken me to any conference, nor would I have the necessary elan to approach them. I would have been totally out of sorts. You can’t do it from one side of the coin.
During my first interview session with Stone, he prefaced our talk by saying he hadn’t read the screenplay for Scarface in some time. For the second interview session with him, he had a copy of the screenplay with him and we both had fun revisiting it.
I enjoyed this very much because it’s one of those scripts like Wall Street where it’s filled with zingers. We worked on the zingers a lot, they come from the subconscious a lot. What I love about original writing is you can really let out some of your deepest feelings. Sometimes you’re amazed what comes up. You say stuff that you don’t think as a civilized being you’d say.
So there were some lines of dialog in the film that reflected your views?
Oh, many of them. That’s the beauty of originals is you can be subversive. Your most subversive side can pop up and you can say anything through a character. You’re not saying it; Tony’s saying it or Manny’s saying it. You can say something so outrageous and if the actor goes along with it, nobody recognizes it as you and you got away with it in a way.
The restaurant scene were Al Pacino delivers that great monologue is one of my favorites in the film.
“Say goodnight to the bad guy,” yeah, yeah, yeah. Where is that? Hold on…(turns pages) Oh yeah, here it is: “Is this it? Is this what it’s all about, Manny? Eating-drinking-snorting-fucking, then what? You’re fifty, you got a bag for a belly, you got tits with hair on them, your liver’s got spots and you look like these rich fuckin’ mummies.” I know why. I was in a restaurant in Miami thinking those thoughts (laughs)! Because everyone’s over-fed down there and they live like manicured lives. They have Cadillacs, manicured fingers, so I was thinking, Man, what could be worse than this kind of death? Luxury is corruption. Corruption lives in luxury. (Continues reading) “Is this what I worked for with these hands? Is this what I killed for? For this?” Is this what I killed for is obviously a little over the top, but that’s the direction the script was going in general. This sounds very Shakespherian: “Is this how it ends? And I thought I was a winner.” How about the one about the women? “First you gotta get the power…”
Yeah! That’s one line everybody always talks about, how did you come up with that?
I thought about it, first you gotta get the money in America in my opinion. This was me in 1981-82 when I saw the system in my thirties. First you gotta get the money, then the power, then the chicks. That was the way it works…I think (laughs)!
That sounds like the natural order!
I think in dramatic terms where you hear that kind of concept, it’s power is always last, or it’s first but it’s really the second. It’s funny because the thing that they wanted was not the power but the chicks (laughs)! This one I got from a car dealer, “What’s a haza? It’s Yiddish for pig. It’s a guy who’s got more than he needs so he don’t fly straight anymore.”
You got that from a car salesman?
Yeah, not the dialog but the description of a haza more or less. A guy who wants too much, a pig, a greedy guy. There’s a few in the movie business, I really know ‘em! There’s nothing worse than a haza because they pig out. It’s okay to want money and to make it, but when you want too much money then you fuck the other guy. That’s the real drug war in my opinion, in the eighties anyway when I was researching, was guys would get to a place and they’d always blow it because they’d want more. Or they were incompetent. They’d go to a place where they had three thousand people working for them and they couldn’t do it anymore. They’d go crazy, they’d become paranoid or hit their own supply, or they would become really paranoid. Look at Escobar, the guy went nuts.
What’s interesting about the dialog in Scarface is how much the word “fuck” is used.
Actually in the script, there’s probably a hundred and something, I think Al made it three hundred and something!
Why was the word used that much?
Because I’d heard it a lot between Vietnam and Miami (laughs)! Also in New York, New York City. It’s not like I grew up in rural town life, I grew up in the heart of the city. If you read the script, the word fuck is used, it’s used deliberately, it’s not just thrown away. It’s used for rhythm. But Al managed to use it his way by inserting it more and finding the right rhythm. He used it well. I mean with Universal, it was a really tough film, it was really hated at the time.
I remember before the release the controversy about the ratings board threatening to give the film an X unless the chainsaw scene was cut down.
Yeah, but it was even more than that. It was the amount of revulsion…I was in L.A. at the time and the amount of revulsion of so many people inside the industry toward it. Like, “This was a horrible thing to do to our industry.” The critics were so cruel, except a few of them who got it. There was such revulsion, very much like Natural Born Killers, the bad boy complex, the bad boy movie. It was too much. We had gone one step over. Brian was in the hottest water of all.
When the script was done and the movie was being made, was there any concern from the studio then or that came after the film was done?
It was a tough movie to make. I think Bregman really championed that one through with Ned Tanen (then the President of Universal) at the time. Ned was his friend and I think Ned was the guy who took the hit. But I’m glad he made the movie. The way they made the movie was torturous for them. It was scheduled to shoot for three months, and it went almost six. I would have shot it another way, but that was Brian’s domain. I learned a lot from Brian, he was very generous. He let me watch everything.
So you were allowed on the set while the movie was being made.
Yeah, at Al’s request too because dialog changes were going on all the time.
There’s something interesting I noticed in how Tony has his downfall. Throughout the film he does a lot of bad things, but when he tries to do the right thing and prevents a mother and her children from being killed, that’s what brings about his assassination.
That was intended. It was based in fact on the idea that he was pure in a way. In his honesty there was something pure and his honesty is such that he cannot kill the innocent child. He just can’t, and it costs him his life.
Let’s talk about the process of writing the film. I remembered reading in the biography Stone (by James Riordan), your wife at the time Elizabeth said you wrote in a very dark room and you shut out the lights of Paris while you were working. Did you feel you needed to be in an environment like that to write the film?
Yeah, I guess so. It’s concentration. It’s basically a womb. I still do it on the movie set because I’m sort of known for building this black cave and carrying it around with me with every shot. But it really is important. It’s not like hubris, I just need separation and concentration. Because what goes on in the movie when you’re directing it is it’s very complicated, there’s a lot of things distracting you, and there’s many levels of thought. But you have to really get the essence of the script. You have to remember what it is you started out to do with the scene because you’ll get lost otherwise. I think what I do is I reconnect to the origin of the scene. I study the script and I say, “What was it I intended?,” and then I know where I’m goin’. So I need that womb.
Did you work a specific schedule when you wrote Scarface? Did you try and write a certain number of pages a day?
No, I’d feel that towards the weekly basis. I was not too strict about it, but I would say by the end of the week, I’d like to be here in the process. I believe in going back and getting the first look, the first draft, the first structure is really important. Like I’d say, by the end of the week, I’d like to be at this area of the script. The first draft is formed roughly over six weeks, could be seven or eight, could be three or five, but let’s say six. And doing it in a six-week rough, gives you a taste for the movie better. Do it fast, don’t get stuck. Bob Towne probably spent a day fixing a line, I’m not sure that’s the right solution. And I respect him very much as a writer, it’s just a different style of working. With Midnight Express, I had exactly six weeks, they were pushing me hard. And I did it. The first draft did hold up.
So for Midnight Express, the movie was pretty much the first draft?
It did hold up, yeah. On Scarface, a lot of improvements were made, but I wouldn’t call Scarface a six week draft frankly.
How much longer did you work on revisions after you completed the first draft?
Oh, that was a painful process because we’re talkin’ Pacino here (laughs). He was in his hey-day when he loved to rehearse. There were a lot of revisions, a lot of revisions of dialog, but the structure didn’t change that much.
You used to work on a typewriter in those days. Do you still use one?
No, I’ve moved on. I tried a computer, I’m not wild about the keys. So I use long hand and dictation. I dictate into a machine, I don’t dictate to another person. I’m going over it alone in a room into a machine and I often retape and retape. I like to speak, I try to act it out. I’ve always done longhand and typing. Now I try to do it through dictation. I think I’m more focused and you also get into characters. Now that I’ve been around actors a lot of my life, I do some of the acting myself. Sometimes I come up with some crazy stuff. It makes you work a lot harder at externalizing. You can’t fuck around (laughs). You’re hearing yourself right away. You gotta step up, you’re in the arena. You’re an actor now, you’re no longer a guy hiding in the shadows on the sidelines. It’s an interesting way to work.
You had mentioned earlier how Scarface was received very badly when it first came out, but years later it’s really grown in popularity. I hesitate to say it’s a “cult” film, but it’s gained a life of its own.
Oh definitely. We knew that back then. I would hear stories, people would come up to me, “A bunch of us lawyers we get together to watch Scarface. We know the lines.” You’d hear these stories for years. You’d know because people are telling you, and that is the way I judge movies. I have to, look at my career. I mean, I’ve gotten more slams than Bob Evans! There’s very radical points of view on me, right? Ultimately, I believe real people who come up to me and tell me in the street. This black dude came up to me the other day, it’s really funny, I thought he was gonna rob me. It was in a parking lot about midnight after a movie. A black dude, about 6’2, strong lookin’ guy comes up to me and circles me as I’m about to get in my car. He says, “Hey, are you Oliver Stone?” “Yeah.” “You do that football movie?” “Yeah.” “Man, that was a really good movie. Man, that said some things man.” I was relieved! He appreciated that I did a film about a black quarterback. That was more real for me than a review in the New York Times, honestly.
Why do you feel Scarface became popular years after it’s release? Do you feel it was ahead of its time?
Scarface was definitely on the money, it was right on. It was exaggerated, but it was close to the truth and nobody got it at the time. Miami Vice plunged in right where we (left off). Michael Mann saw it right away, he told me that. He saw the power of it. They cashed in on it more than we did. They made money on it, we didn’t! I think sometimes the pioneer dies, you know. The pioneer doesn’t make the money. He’s the guy who does it, he dies out, then the next wave is the one that makes it.
The last question I wanted to ask is about something that you said Premiere that got a lot of attention. It was a joint interview with Darren Aronofsky where you said: “I’m ready to go soon, I’m talking about a final movie, the final movie.” You had said this a while back now. Are you still planning to make your final movie?
Actually, that was misunderstood. I think that made the world press again. A lot of wires came out on that saying I’d announced my retirement. Then I saw (wires) from England from the movie critics praising that I was getting out of movies! So it was really a nice little circle. But if you really read the Premiere article in the spirit of it, you’ll see the context. I think it was a wistfullness about being, you know, I wish I were young again and could have the same energy as Darren has. But I’ve done a lot, achieved a lot. I’m saying now each movie really does count, you put your heart and soul in it, and you can’t take it lightly. So every time you invest a piece of yourself or peel off another layer of skin, it’s gonna cost you. And at the end of the day, how much skin can you give? I’m talking in that philosophical sense, maybe I don’t have that much more to give. But by doing that, I’m gonna go out like The Wild Bunch, I’m gonna go out with a bang! I’m gonna do something that’s gonna rock. I’m not gonna go out with a whimper. I’m not saying I’m retiring, maybe I do have the energy for another seven pictures, I don’t know. I’m not that old you know!
I think you’ve definitely got more movies left in you.
I think so. I do. I think I have a way of seeing things that most people don’t.
-David Konow, "Writing in a Very Dark Room," Creative Screenwriting, Jan 20 2015 [x]
The version of Scarface that you wrote was not so much a remake of the original thirties film but a reinvention in a sense. What was it that appealed to you about remaking the film and having it deal with the drug trade?
The origins of the movie, it’s an interesting story. I had directed The Hand and it had failed at the box-office, I was completely ignored. In fact, it took a heavy hit, The Hand. If you go back and check the reviews, there was a lot of personalization in the reviews. It was probably because Midnight Express really hit people hard and some people went after me. It was also a period in my life when I also needed inspiration. I didn’t have inspiration at the time, I felt stale as a writer. (Producer) Martin Bregman had approached me and I said I wasn’t interested in doing it. I didn’t like the original movie that much, it didn’t really hit me at all and I had no desire to make another Italian gangster picture because so many had been done so well, there would be no point to it. The origin of it, according to Marty Bregman, Al had seen the thirties version on television, he loved it and expressed to Marty as his long time mentor / partner that he’d like to do a role like that. So Marty presented it to me and I had no interest in doing a period piece.
Then he called me months later, Sidney Lumet had stepped into the deal. Sidney, who I had met from Platoon, was a New York director and he had worked with Al quite a bit. So there was a lot of linkage there. Sidney had a great idea to take the 1930’s American Prohibition gangster movie and make it into a modern immigrant gangster movie dealing with the same problems that we had then, that we’re prohibiting drugs instead of alcohol. There’s a prohibition against drugs that’s created the same criminal class as (prohibition of alcohol) created the Mafia. It was a remarkable idea. The Marielitos at the time had gained a lot of publicity for their open brazenness. The Marielitos were the quote “crazies.” They were deported by Castro in 1981 to America. At the time it was perceived he was dumping all the criminals into the American system. According to the police enforcement in Miami Beach, they were the poorest people, the roughest people in the prisons who would kill for a dollar. How could you get this outlandish, operatic character inside an American, contemporary framework? It’s very difficult if you think about it. Al is a brilliant actor. I worked with him on Born on the Fourth of July in 1978. He was genius in a room. And I saw the rehearsal for Born on the Fourth of July in 1978 with a full cast. He was on fire in that wheelchair, fire! It stayed with me for ten years. I put as much of that energy as I could into working with Tom (Cruise) in another way.
Did you try and tailor the role of Tony Montana to Al Pacino?
Of course, from the get-go. It was Al. Scarface grew out of this Lumet idea from the Marielitos coming to America, the brazenness, the drug trade, making it big, taking over from the old Cuban mob. I went with it and wrote the script. I researched it thoroughly in Florida and the Caribbean. I had been in South America recently and did some research there. So I saw quite a bit of the drug trade from the legal point of view as well as from the gangster point of view. Not many people would talk, it’s a very closed world.
How were you able to get in touch with those people?
I was exposed in certain situations on both sides of the law. I went to the Caribbean, there’s no law down there, they’ll just shoot you in your hotel room. It got hairy. It gave me all this color. I wanted to do a sun-drenched, tropical Third World gangster, cigar, sexy Miami movie. Pacino’s accent (laughs), people imitate it to this day and it was derided at the time. It may not be literally accurate but what the fuck, it works!
I remember you had said in Playboy that at the time you researched the film you saw a lot of things going on in the drug trade that later played out into big things like Iran Contra.
Oh yeah, the shit was heavy. In Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Miami Beach, Miami Dade, there’s different law enforcement departments, DEA, the FBI, plus Justice, so you have a lot of organizational activity and bureaucracy. And you gotta think about how they interact with each other and how much they all compete. This was the beginning of the drug war. The stories were outlandish. The story of the chainsaw was one of the things that happened that was on the record.
So that was a real incident that happened?
Yes, but not done that way. I dramatized it. They were rough, the Colombians played tough. So I moved to Paris and got out of the cocaine world too because that was another problem for me. I was doing coke at the time, and I really regretted it. I got into a habit of it and I was an addictive personality. I did it, not to an extreme or to a place where I was as destructive as some people, but certainly to where I was going stale mentally. I moved out of L.A. with my wife at the time and moved back to France to try and get into another world and see the world differently. And I wrote the script totally fucking cold sober.
Writing the script, was it in any way a therapy in weaning yourself off the drug?
Oh, it was more than that. One of the things that’s bugged me, I think a lot of writers will agree with this is we spend money on our vices and we pay through the nose for our mistakes. I’ll admit that coke kicked my ass. It’s one of the things that beat me in life. As a result, getting even, getting paid to make a movie about it and making it a good one on top of it, there’s nothing better. But to go back and finish the story as to how the film originated, Sidney Lumet hated my script. I don’t know if he’d say that in public himself, I sound like a petulant screenwriter saying that, I’d rather not say that word. Let me say that Sidney did not understand my script, whereas Bregman wanted to continue in that direction with Al.
Do you feel the story might have been too strong?
Yeah, I think that he felt there was too much gratuitous violence, which was the ultimate rap on the film that came from the critics. From Sidney, it went to a couple of other projections and then we went to Brian (DePalma), which was a good idea. And Al liked him and trusted him. It turned into a film that has its own history. It basically took off with Brian and Al, and Bregman was the control pilot.
Being that you had a cocaine habit, do you feel it gave your script a different perspective than if you had never tried the drug?
Probably so because the big switch point for me in the script is the fall of the king. I see Al turning paranoid in that movie, I see it perhaps because I was more attuned to it. But the paranoia of coke is the most striking (aspect), the fire of it. I’ll give you an example. You’re down in the Caribbean, you’re having coke, you’re drinking at a bar with three Colombian management guys. They run the cigarette boats out there with tons of shit every night. They go right to the Florida coast in these cigarette boats. They fly across the moon, they skim the ocean at night, it’s really incredible. Full speed, then they slow down to nothing, they whisper in the night, and you can’t hear the engines. Then they sneak up past the coast and the by-ways, past the Coast Guard. It’s really a trip.
You do this, and you get into that world. All of the sudden, you’re flashing coke in the hotel room at four in the morning, you’re talking the coke talk about how great things are, they started boasting, and I started telling them I was a Hollywood screenwriter. They thought I was an informer because I dropped the name of a guy who had been one of my helpers, he was making money now on the defense side of the ball game. But the guy had previously busted one of these three guys as a prosecutor. So at four in the morning, that gets dangerous! Two of them went into the bathroom and I thought they were gonna come out and blow me away. But you know, the truth of the matter is I got out by bullshit, by the skin of my teeth. I was nervous the whole night, nervous beyond belief. That never could have happened to me if I had been straight. And they never would have taken me to any conference, nor would I have the necessary elan to approach them. I would have been totally out of sorts. You can’t do it from one side of the coin.
[During my first interview session with Stone, he prefaced our talk by saying he hadn’t read the screenplay for Scarface in some time. For the second interview session with him, he had a copy of the screenplay with him and we both had fun revisiting it.]
I enjoyed this very much because it’s one of those scripts like Wall Street where it’s filled with zingers. We worked on the zingers a lot, they come from the subconscious a lot. What I love about original writing is you can really let out some of your deepest feelings. Sometimes you’re amazed what comes up. You say stuff that you don’t think as a civilized being you’d say.
So there were some lines of dialog in the film that reflected your views?
Oh, many of them. That’s the beauty of originals is you can be subversive. Your most subversive side can pop up and you can say anything through a character. You’re not saying it; Tony’s saying it or Manny’s saying it. You can say something so outrageous and if the actor goes along with it, nobody recognizes it as you and you got away with it in a way.
The restaurant scene were Al Pacino delivers that great monologue is one of my favorites in the film.
“Say goodnight to the bad guy,” yeah, yeah, yeah. Where is that? Hold on…(turns pages) Oh yeah, here it is: “Is this it? Is this what it’s all about, Manny? Eating-drinking-snorting-fucking, then what? You’re fifty, you got a bag for a belly, you got tits with hair on them, your liver’s got spots and you look like these rich fuckin’ mummies.” I know why. I was in a restaurant in Miami thinking those thoughts (laughs)! Because everyone’s over-fed down there and they live like manicured lives. They have Cadillacs, manicured fingers, so I was thinking, Man, what could be worse than this kind of death? Luxury is corruption. Corruption lives in luxury. (Continues reading) “Is this what I worked for with these hands? Is this what I killed for? For this?” Is this what I killed for is obviously a little over the top, but that’s the direction the script was going in general. This sounds very Shakespherian: “Is this how it ends? And I thought I was a winner.” How about the one about the women? “First you gotta get the power…”
Yeah! That’s one line everybody always talks about, how did you come up with that?
I thought about it, first you gotta get the money in America in my opinion. This was me in 1981-82 when I saw the system in my thirties. First you gotta get the money, then the power, then the chicks. That was the way it works…I think (laughs)!
That sounds like the natural order!
I think in dramatic terms where you hear that kind of concept, it’s power is always last, or it’s first but it’s really the second. It’s funny because the thing that they wanted was not the power but the chicks (laughs)! This one I got from a car dealer, “What’s a haza? It’s Yiddish for pig. It’s a guy who’s got more than he needs so he don’t fly straight anymore.”
You got that from a car salesman?
Yeah, not the dialog but the description of a haza more or less. A guy who wants too much, a pig, a greedy guy. There’s a few in the movie business, I really know ‘em! There’s nothing worse than a haza because they pig out. It’s okay to want money and to make it, but when you want too much money then you fuck the other guy. That’s the real drug war in my opinion, in the eighties anyway when I was researching, was guys would get to a place and they’d always blow it because they’d want more. Or they were incompetent. They’d go to a place where they had three thousand people working for them and they couldn’t do it anymore. They’d go crazy, they’d become paranoid or hit their own supply, or they would become really paranoid. Look at Escobar, the guy went nuts.
What’s interesting about the dialog in Scarface is how much the word “fuck” is used.
Actually in the script, there’s probably a hundred and something, I think Al made it three hundred and something!
Why was the word used that much?
Because I’d heard it a lot between Vietnam and Miami (laughs)! Also in New York, New York City. It’s not like I grew up in rural town life, I grew up in the heart of the city. If you read the script, the word fuck is used, it’s used deliberately, it’s not just thrown away. It’s used for rhythm. But Al managed to use it his way by inserting it more and finding the right rhythm. He used it well. I mean with Universal, it was a really tough film, it was really hated at the time.
I remember before the release the controversy about the ratings board threatening to give the film an X unless the chainsaw scene was cut down.
Yeah, but it was even more than that. It was the amount of revulsion…I was in L.A. at the time and the amount of revulsion of so many people inside the industry toward it. Like, “This was a horrible thing to do to our industry.” The critics were so cruel, except a few of them who got it. There was such revulsion, very much like Natural Born Killers, the bad boy complex, the bad boy movie. It was too much. We had gone one step over. Brian was in the hottest water of all.
When the script was done and the movie was being made, was there any concern from the studio then or that came after the film was done?
It was a tough movie to make. I think Bregman really championed that one through with Ned Tanen (then the President of Universal) at the time. Ned was his friend and I think Ned was the guy who took the hit. But I’m glad he made the movie. The way they made the movie was torturous for them. It was scheduled to shoot for three months, and it went almost six. I would have shot it another way, but that was Brian’s domain. I learned a lot from Brian, he was very generous. He let me watch everything.
So you were allowed on the set while the movie was being made.
Yeah, at Al’s request too because dialog changes were going on all the time.
There’s something interesting I noticed in how Tony has his downfall. Throughout the film he does a lot of bad things, but when he tries to do the right thing and prevents a mother and her children from being killed, that’s what brings about his assassination.
That was intended. It was based in fact on the idea that he was pure in a way. In his honesty there was something pure and his honesty is such that he cannot kill the innocent child. He just can’t, and it costs him his life.
Let’s talk about the process of writing the film. I remembered reading in the biography Stone (by James Riordan), your wife at the time Elizabeth said you wrote in a very dark room and you shut out the lights of Paris while you were working. Did you feel you needed to be in an environment like that to write the film?
Yeah, I guess so. It’s concentration. It’s basically a womb. I still do it on the movie set because I’m sort of known for building this black cave and carrying it around with me with every shot. But it really is important. It’s not like hubris, I just need separation and concentration. Because what goes on in the movie when you’re directing it is it’s very complicated, there’s a lot of things distracting you, and there’s many levels of thought. But you have to really get the essence of the script. You have to remember what it is you started out to do with the scene because you’ll get lost otherwise. I think what I do is I reconnect to the origin of the scene. I study the script and I say, “What was it I intended?,” and then I know where I’m goin’. So I need that womb.
Did you work a specific schedule when you wrote Scarface? Did you try and write a certain number of pages a day?
No, I’d feel that towards the weekly basis. I was not too strict about it, but I would say by the end of the week, I’d like to be here in the process. I believe in going back and getting the first look, the first draft, the first structure is really important. Like I’d say, by the end of the week, I’d like to be at this area of the script. The first draft is formed roughly over six weeks, could be seven or eight, could be three or five, but let’s say six. And doing it in a six-week rough, gives you a taste for the movie better. Do it fast, don’t get stuck. Bob Towne probably spent a day fixing a line, I’m not sure that’s the right solution. And I respect him very much as a writer, it’s just a different style of working. With Midnight Express, I had exactly six weeks, they were pushing me hard. And I did it. The first draft did hold up.
So for Midnight Express, the movie was pretty much the first draft?
It did hold up, yeah. On Scarface, a lot of improvements were made, but I wouldn’t call Scarface a six week draft frankly.
How much longer did you work on revisions after you completed the first draft?
Oh, that was a painful process because we’re talkin’ Pacino here (laughs). He was in his heyday when he loved to rehearse. There were a lot of revisions, a lot of revisions of dialog, but the structure didn’t change that much.
You used to work on a typewriter in those days. Do you still use one?
No, I’ve moved on. I tried a computer, I’m not wild about the keys. So I use long hand and dictation. I dictate into a machine, I don’t dictate to another person. I’m going over it alone in a room into a machine and I often retape and retape. I like to speak, I try to act it out. I’ve always done longhand and typing. Now I try to do it through dictation. I think I’m more focused and you also get into characters. Now that I’ve been around actors a lot of my life, I do some of the acting myself. Sometimes I come up with some crazy stuff. It makes you work a lot harder at externalizing. You can’t fuck around (laughs). You’re hearing yourself right away. You gotta step up, you’re in the arena. You’re an actor now, you’re no longer a guy hiding in the shadows on the sidelines. It’s an interesting way to work.
You had mentioned earlier how Scarface was received very badly when it first came out, but years later it’s really grown in popularity. I hesitate to say it’s a “cult” film, but it’s gained a life of its own.
Oh, definitely. We knew that back then. I would hear stories, people would come up to me, “A bunch of us lawyers we get together to watch Scarface. We know the lines.” You’d hear these stories for years. You’d know because people are telling you, and that is the way I judge movies. I have to, look at my career. I mean, I’ve gotten more slams than Bob Evans! There’s very radical points of view on me, right? Ultimately, I believe real people who come up to me and tell me in the street. This black dude came up to me the other day, it’s really funny, I thought he was gonna rob me. It was in a parking lot about midnight after a movie. A black dude, about 6’2, strong lookin’ guy comes up to me and circles me as I’m about to get in my car. He says, “Hey, are you Oliver Stone?” “Yeah.” “You do that football movie?” “Yeah.” “Man, that was a really good movie. Man, that said some things, man.” I was relieved! He appreciated that I did a film about a black quarterback. That was more real for me than a review in the New York Times, honestly.
Why do you feel Scarface became popular years after it’s release? Do you feel it was ahead of its time?
Scarface was definitely on the money, it was right on. It was exaggerated, but it was close to the truth and nobody got it at the time. Miami Vice plunged in right where we (left off). Michael Mann saw it right away, he told me that. He saw the power of it. They cashed in on it more than we did. They made money on it, we didn’t! I think sometimes the pioneer dies, you know. The pioneer doesn’t make the money. He’s the guy who does it, he dies out, then the next wave is the one that makes it.
The last question I wanted to ask is about something that you said Premiere that got a lot of attention. It was a joint interview with Darren Aronofsky where you said: “I’m ready to go soon, I’m talking about a final movie, the final movie.” You had said this a while back now. Are you still planning to make your final movie?
Actually, that was misunderstood. I think that made the world press again. A lot of wires came out on that saying I’d announced my retirement. Then I saw (wires) from England from the movie critics praising that I was getting out of movies! So it was really a nice little circle. But if you really read the Premiere article in the spirit of it, you’ll see the context. I think it was a wistfullness about being, you know, I wish I were young again and could have the same energy as Darren has. But I’ve done a lot, achieved a lot. I’m saying now each movie really does count, you put your heart and soul in it, and you can’t take it lightly. So every time you invest a piece of yourself or peel off another layer of skin, it’s gonna cost you. And at the end of the day, how much skin can you give? I’m talking in that philosophical sense, maybe I don’t have that much more to give. But by doing that, I’m gonna go out like The Wild Bunch, I’m gonna go out with a bang! I’m gonna do something that’s gonna rock. I’m not gonna go out with a whimper. I’m not saying I’m retiring, maybe I do have the energy for another seven pictures, I don’t know. I’m not that old you know!
I think you’ve definitely got more movies left in you.
I think so. I do. I think I have a way of seeing things that most people don’t.
-David Konow, "Writing in a Very Dark Room: Oliver Stone revisits Scarface," Creative Screenwriting volume 11/1, Jan 20 2015 [x]
Tom Rob Smith, a British TV writer, wrote subtantially on American Crime Story, including the Emmy-nominated episode of American Crime Story “House By The Lake.” We chatted to him about his writing process and inspiration behind writing crime dramas.
With a title like American Crime Story, the instinct for many would be to automatically focus on the viewpoint of a police investigation. For this screenwriter, however, the tale of the murder of Gianni Versace was much different. He knew the story should come from many angles, but should be expressed through Versace’s killer, Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss).
“It was never going to be a story told through the point-of-view of the police, which is normally when it becomes pure crime drama. Part of this is because there was never a central piece to the killing of Versace. You have the police investigating in Minneapolis, police investigating in Chicago, police investigating in Miami—they never really linked up. There was never a cohesive story from a traditional crime point-of-view.”
Despite not having one source story from one perspective, Smith realized that the real story was always about Andrew. By focusing on the degradation of this character, it wasn’t so relevant to focus on the police’s point-of-view. In a reflective nature, Andrew’s life was also the opposite of Edgar Ramirez’s character, Gianni Versace.
The original concept of the anthology series for American Crime Story came from screenwriting partners Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood, The People Vs. Larry Flynt). The creators knew they wanted each season to have a slightly different feel. Originally, they were going to focus on the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, but they decided to push that idea for Season 3 and partner with Smith for the fascinating story of Gianni Versace.
Before Smith landed on this series, the writer and producer was best known for his work on Child 44(Tom Hardy) and London Spy (Ben Wishaw). Karaszewski and Alexander both liked Smith’s previous works and wanted to see his take on an anthology murder series. After reading and re-reading the source material 7 or 8 times, Smith realized the biggest question was where to begin the story.
Creating A TV Series About True Crime
During the first season of American Crime Story, the alternating mini-series focused on the trials of O.J. Simpson, before moving into Season 2 about Versace. Looking back at these two very different crimes, Smith believes each version of hindsight reflects the world in which we live in.
“I’ve often heard people talking about this crime [assasination of Gianni Versace] and saying that it doesn’t have as much significance,” said the screenwriter, “but I find it hard not to find something grisly about crimes. It’s all significant. It’s all social commentary. It’s about poverty or equality or police funding or bigotry—there’s always something larger in these crimes.”
Overall, the series focuses on crime, but there are also aspects of celebrity, which makes the show different than other crime dramas on television. “It’s really ahead of its time in terms of social commentary. A lot of reactions to the show were people wondering what Andrew Cunanan would have been like on social media in modern times.”
In the 1990s-set story, Andrew would send postcards to people he wanted to impress. The postcards were essentially pre-Facebook updates. The character wanted to show off and explain that he had been spending time with important people. He discussed people, places, and things out of the reach of many, like a misguided “representation of life.”
“I think this story is on the cusp of social media breaking out. Andrew never really defined what he wanted to do. He just wanted to be famous. He wanted to walk into a room and be admired,”said the screenwriter. “There was nothing more behind it. It was the exact opposite of Versace, who was about material, fabric, and clothing.”
“This case is very different than the O.J. case because only a tiny part of it was known, which is the murder of Versace,” said Smith. “We didn’t really know anything about Andrew. In many ways, there was an iceberg quality to this case.”
Creating A Timeless Period Piece
Essentially, the general public only knew about Versace getting shot in Miami. In many ways, the writers knew this was going to be the end of this disturbing story, but there was much more dramatic tension to create. The tale started in San Francisco and then moved through Minneapolis, Chicago, and Miami.
“We’re dealing with people who were outsiders. They were marginalized and we were trying to bring their stories forward. It was really unmasking something deep about the character,” said the writer. “Unmasking versus sensationalism.” In addition to the pre-social media aspects of the story, Smith also noticed additional questions of identity.
Tom Rob Smith is obsessed with what people can overcome and what beats them down. “When I read Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors: The Hunt for Andrew Cunanan, the Man Who Killed Gianni Versace, I had a very intense reaction to it. It’s not like going to a museum and seeing pieces behind glass and not reacting to them.”
“It’s highly combustible and provocative, so you know you’re in a story that speaks about today as much as it did about the period, and a hundred years leading up to that.” Smith knew he wanted the story to speak to various audiences, even those too young to remember Versace’s murder from the news headlines.
The writer said that there were two elements able to reach younger audiences. First of all, Versace was an amazing individual, which led to a rediscovery of the man. Surprisingly, many people who only know about the Versace fashion brand didn’t even know that Versace had been murdered.
In addition to the life story of a fashion icon, the character of Andrew felt contemporary in terms of his ambitions and desires to “be someone… anyone” and to “make a mark on the world.” There were also issues of how young people fit into America in terms of race, work ethic, reputation, sexuality, and so on, to consider.
The Many Elements Of A Crime
Potential spoilers ahead for American Crime Story Season 2.
Overall, the debate within the show is how to define the relationship between Andrew Cunanan and Gianni Versace. Based on the book, the duo originally met in San Francisco, where “Andrew met Gianni at his high point.” As such, the character of Versace saw potential in the boy, but it wasn’t clear if there was a sexual relationship, even though the chemistry was evident.
For Andrew, he felt like this was the high point of his life; living vicariously through Versace. After this initial introduction, Versace went on to do great things while Andrew’s life fell apart. Therefore, some sort of resentment or vengeance sparked in the young man, who started to become more and more obsessed with the idea of celebrity.
As this twine started to unravel, the writers discussed individuals who wanted to be known for shooting a celebrity (like Mark David Chapman or Robert Ford). “The murder is very complicated in that Andrew doesn’t just go and kill Versace. First of all, his life collapses. We drew a line between the murders. The first two were about people that were close to him—his best friend and his ex-lover.”
By showcasing the original murders, the writers made it clear that the character had not only snapped, but crossed a line in a way that he would likely never return. “He’s now crossed the line of morality into this abyss. Had he given himself up at this point, those murders wouldn’t have been covered. They weren’t getting the attention he wanted.”
This loss of humanity led to the murder of Gianni Versace. Andrew couldn’t make a name for himself as an individual, but he might be able to as a murderer.
Creating Tone For Character, Not The TV Series
Smith said the tone came from the material. The TV series is certainly unlike other shows such as The Killing or Mindhunter, which are noticeably darker and more homgenous in nature. “If you’re making a decision to adapt a book, then you’re looking at the source material of these people’s lives. They have an energy. You can’t go into Versace’s world and not get caught up in his exuberance and his love of life.”
As for Andrew, he was a character drawn to success, but he wasn’t able to achieve any level of success on his own. Those around him were quite successful. “The tone was about these different people. There wasn’t a standard tone that ran across the whole TV series,” added Smith.
“The different episodes have a different tone based on who is at the center of each episode.” As such, the episodes in which Versace is at the center, there is a brighter bounce to the episodes. It’s more about the overall authenticity of each individual character, which came out in each singularepisode.
But, without a shadow of a doubt, the most iconic episode is Season 2, Episode 4: “House by the Lake.” While Smith is very proud of each episode, this episode was vital for the series because audiences finally got to meet David Madson (Cody Fern). He was another reflection on the actions of Andrew.
“[Fern] came in and read and we immediately had a powerful connection to him. I said, ‘He can really pull this off. We can watch this episode meet him for the first time, and also cry over his death at the end. You feel like you see his whole life in his episode,” said Smith.
The screenwriter believed the various strands of the show started to weave together through this individual episode. “There’s this bar of outsiders that are never given the time of day,” he mused.“Andrew is sitting there with his best friend thinking, ‘How have I ended up here?’”
Since both characters felt defeated by the world, the episode came off as even more powerful. There was a moment when David was looking out the window where most characters would have ran away, but he had nowhere to go. There was no safe place. Instead, the “two lost souls listened to a heart-breaking song. One is irretrievable and the other wants to fight for love. You have this battle between two characters. It very much captures the essence of the entire TV series.”
Creating Empathy For Criminals
Smith felt that the character of David was completely innocent. He technically broke the law as an accomplice, but the screenwriters wanted to explore a side of David that wasn’t really explored by the police: “Why would someone feel so trapped in a situation that they felt like they couldn’t go to the police?”
“There’s a big difference in that and being an accomplice that is involved in the murder. David didn’t have any violence in him. He was full of love. I was really struck by this idea that if I had walked back into my apartment and suddenly one of my friends attacked someone else with a hammer and it happened in my home, how would I react?”
As the person who brought the friend-turned-murderer into the house, David couldn’t simply abandon his friend, despite the consequences. “It’s very hard to know how you would react in that situation. Andrew was a manipulator. We take the view that Andrew staged that scene to entrap David.”
Because Andrew made David bring Jeff (Finn Wittrock) into the apartment, he essentially trapped him in this murder. By using circumstantial evidence from the various source materials, Smith and company came to this conclusion. Andrew was manipulative and David was caught in a trap.
“There’s this sense that you are scared of the people that are meant to help you,” added Smith, in regards to the social commentary of the episode. David didn’t think the police would help him, which is reflective of today’s societal view. The commentary was more about life than death.
“You’re not coming up with cliffhangers,” concluded Smith. “It’s a real person and people kind of have the facts, so you’re not trying to create suspense as to whether someone lives or dies. You’re trying to create the suspense of the emotional intensity of their lives rather than making it about their death.”
Tom Rob Smith is currently working on a thriller called MotherFatherSon, which will star Richard Gere, Elena Anaya, and Ciarán Hinds.
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Jhan Harp: "Other readers might think characterization or premise as the most important, but I think a reversal is the strongest way to go."
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