Go Into The Story Interview: Ian Shorr

My interview with 2022 Black List writer for his script The House in the Crooked Forest.

Ian Shorr wrote the original screenplay The House in the Crooked Forest which landed on the 2022 Black List. His scripts have also made the annual Black List in 2011, 2013, 2017, and 2019. I had the opportunity to chat with Ian about his creative background, writing a Black List script, and the craft of screenwriting.

Scott: Where did you grow up, and how did you become interested in writing?

Ian: I grew up in Park City Utah. Started going to the Sundance Festival when I was about 10. This was back in ’92, so it was around the time that “El Mariachi” and “Reservoir Dogs” were blowing up. You couldn’t go anywhere in my hometown without hearing about those filmmakers. It was just a really exciting time in that world.

For me, Sundance was like Christmas. I would get so excited when it was that time of year because I had always loved movies, always been obsessed with filmmakers. All the LA people would flood into my hometown dressed in all black, so I’d dress up like them and go hang out on Main Street outside the Egyptian, trying to strike up conversations with writers and directors.

I’d been hearing the name “Tarantino” for years but had never seen one of his movies because I was only 10 or 11 around that time. My parents went out on a date one night. They left me alone with a satellite dish. I found a screening of “True Romance” on HBO and was just immediately blown away by this thing.

It was a transformative, transgressive, unforgettable experience an 11‑year‑old boy could have watching a movie [laughs] because it was definitely not made for me. It was the first time that it occurred to me that somebody had fun writing the words coming out of the actors’ mouth. Somebody had a real palpable sense of joy in creation there. I decided I wanted to have that fun too.

So I bought a couple of screenwriting books and some screenplays. The first actual script I ever read was the screenplay for Trainspotting and it became a major influence on me creatively. So at age 12 I wrote my first feature. [laughs] Ever wanted to know what a Trainspotting rip‑off written by a 12‑year‑old from Utah who has never seen drugs looks like? I’ve got the script for you.

After writing that first feature, I discovered I enjoyed it. It was a fun hobby. So I kept writing one movie per year every year until I got to college. They say you need to write five bad scripts before you write a good one. I think I wrote fifteen bad scripts before I wrote my first good one.

Scott: You mentioned going to college. Did you go to SC?

Ian: I went to SC for undergrad. I studied screenwriting there. My freshman year professor was this guy Peter Gamble, who I became friends with and then eventually cowriters with. We wrote the script “10‑31” that was on the 2019 Black List. He changed my life. Made me a much better writer. He’s a big reason why my time at USC was worth every penny.

Scott: There’s a lot of screenwriters in pooh‑pooh film school, just move into L.A., become an assistant, and work your way up. It was a beneficial experience for you?

Ian: Everyone’s got their own path. I know plenty of writers who never spent a day in film school who write fantastic material and found their own way in. That’s totally viable, especially considering the financial risk you take by attending college. I was lucky to get enough work early in my career that I was able to pay off my student loans.

If you’re going to go six figures into debt for a degree that’s not worth the paper it’s printed on, that’s not a decision you make lightly. For me, the thing that made it worth it was I treated USC like a trade school. I knew that once I graduated, I was probably going to have to get a job in the service industry and write scripts at night. So that meant I had 4 years where my only job was to learn screenwriting, be my own harshest critic, and make myself into an employable writer by the time I got out in the real world.

Scott: Since I launched my blog in 2008, I have tracked announced spec script deals. Your name has popped up several times. There’s “Cristo” with Warner Brothers. “Capsule” with FOX. “10‑31” you just mentioned, and then Infinite with Paramount which got produced 2020 had started Mark Wahlberg and Chiwetel Ejiofor.

For TV, you’ve landed writing assignments, I’m sure you probably sold pitches too, but you’ve continued to write spec scripts at least until recently. What’s your philosophy about that? I mean, what’s the value of writing a spec if you’re already an established writer in Hollywood?

Ian: I ask myself that all the time now. [laughs] Specs are still one of the most reliable ways to break in –having a calling card script that showcases your voice, where you just put all your chips down and bet on yourself.

Once you’re already in, the question is: why keep gambling with your time? And for me, it comes down to this: if I’m doing nothing but chasing assignments, I’m just servicing other people’s visions. I don’t have something that I can call 100 percent my own thing.

When I’m writing a spec, it’s one of the few times in my life that I have total creative control over something. Don’t get me wrong. The second studio buys it, all that control goes out the window. Say you build a house and sell it to someone; they can now paint it whatever color they want. They can knock down whatever walls they see fit. But until you make that sale, you get the pleasure of creating something entirely on your own terms.

Scott: The spec market has gone downhill at least in terms of options and sales. I’m just curious what your thought is why that might be the case.

Ian: Audiences have been trained to stop showing up for original material. You had people who used to go to movies to watch original stories, and they stopped showing up. They now almost exclusively get their original storytelling from television and go to the theater for a different type of experience.

Once all the studios were bought by conglomerates, you have money-guys making decisions instead of creatives. The only thing that money-guys want is a safe bet, and the closest thing to a safe bet in this industry is something that people have bought before. Studio dollars that used to get spent on original material now get spent buying up IP, and so there’s only a tiny slice of the pie left for buying specs. It’s gotten to be a much smaller target over the years.

The one advantage that I’ve had my whole life is that the stuff that I love to write is the type of stuff that studios like to buy. Or are at least willing to take a chance on. There’s a big reason why I consistently write in action, horror, thriller, or sci‑fi. I’m a genre writer at heart, and thank God, studios will still occasionally open their wallet for a well-written genre spec.

If I was writing stuff that wasn’t genre, if I was writing more character‑driven stuff, more stuff geared towards grown‑ups, I probably would have given up the spec world entirely and gone to work in TV by now.

Scott: Certainly, the script we’re going to talk about, “The House in the Crooked Forest,” does fall into a genre. I’d say, too, that probably it’s a comfort level for potential buyers because that’s similar but different thing. There are elements to it that feel like, “Ah, this is like a successful movie that came before.” I want to talk to you about that.

Before we do that, I bumped into this thing called a BamBoom.

Ian: [laughs] Screenwriting it’s my side hustle for my DJ career! Screenwriting is merely a hobby, DJing pays all the bills. [laughs] For about the past eight years I’ve been doing a side project DJing for festivals around Southern California, Burning Man, etc. When I’m writing, I can work on something for years and never get to see the effect that it has on an audience. Might be months, it might be years, might be a decade, might never happen. But if I’m in the DJ booth playing a set, I get to see the effect on the audience immediately. It scratches that itch for me.

Scott: I think that’s important for writers particularly in a crazy business like Hollywood to have that thing, something that they can control and do and enjoy and know that they can always go and do that to balance out all the peaks and valleys of the business.

I was watching one video of you. I think it was with your little kid. The beach in the background.

Ian: I was living on Kauai during the pandemic and I did a couple of livestream shows where I’m hanging out on the deck with the ocean in the background. I’ve got my one‑year‑old in my arms, we’re dancing around to some house music. That was a fun day.

Scott: Let’s segue into a discussion about “The House in the Crooked Forest” because your script made the 2022 Black List.

Plot summary. “A mother and her young son fleeing Nazi‑occupied Poland, are forced to take shelter in a blizzard in an isolated manner where they discover the Nazis may be the least of their worries.” Obvious question, what was the inspiration for the script?

Ian: There was a specific true story that was the inspiration for this. Back in maybe late 2019, my manager came to me with this article that a producer had sent him. A true story about this woman living in Warsaw when the Nazis invaded. She got kicked out of her house and sent to go live in the ghetto. Instead, she escaped and snuck back into her own house and hid out in her attic unbeknownst to the Nazi captain who had moved in downstairs.

When they sent me that article I was like, “Oh, wow, the Nazi was living in a horror movie without even realizing it.” We started bouncing ideas back and forth abouit, asking “Is there a way to do like a DON’T BREATHE version of this. There’s a fun cat‑and‑mouse game there, but how do you get a 90‑minute movie out of it? My manager John Zaozriny was like, “What if we add a supernatural element? What if it’s a haunted house movie? What if we find a way to take a Jewish ghetto escapee and some Nazi soldiers, trap them in a house together, then have both sides simultaneously realize that the house is haunted?” Once we had that basic structure, we were able to crack the rest of the movie. It all started with that article.

Scott: I know John a little bit. It does seem like he’s pretty proactive in bringing material or facilitating the story development process.

Ian: John is an absolute hustler. I’ve known him since 2008. Before he was a manager, he was an independent producer who I went on a general meeting with. He was looking to hire a wrirter to do a “American Gangster”-style version of COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO. I brought in a pitch on that, and he rejected me in favor of a dude who went on to write a “Star Wars” movie, so I guess I don’t feel too bad that I didn’t get that job. But at the time I was so mad about him rejecting my pitch that I felt compelled to prove him wrong. Like, “All right, I’m going to bring him my next idea just to show him how wrong he was to hire the other guy.”

I brought him an idea for my next spec. He helped me develop it, and I discovered that dude was amazing at development. He was a wizard with ideas, super easy to work with, really intelligent. We worked on that script for about a year, took it out. Came this close to selling it, didn’t happen. The next one that we did together, that one did sell, and wound up on the Black List, and became the beginning of the next chapter of my career.

Every time I would write a spec, I would workshop it with him. And the stuff I’d collaborate with him on usually sold. So after a few years, he told me he was thinking of becoming a manager. I said, “If you do that, I will be your first client.” That was the beginning of Bellevue.

Scott: Wow, interesting. Fascinating to me that your script started with the haunted house thing. I would have sworn that it started with finding this area: The Crooked Forest.

Ian: That came later. I was looking for some wilderness to set the movie in and I was researching different forests in Poland. Then I come across this thing called the Crooked Forest, which is this terrifying‑looking place where all the trees are bent. They look like witches’ fingers coming up out of the earth. I was like, “Wow, I can’t believe that no horror movie has ever been set here before. The name alone sounds like a scary movie.” So we set it there.

Scott: I was talking about those movie associations, like successful films or films that have gone before. I’m reminded of several of them that came up to my mind. I’m curious whether you were influenced by that at all. For example, Pan’s Labyrinth which was also set during the war.

Ian: Yeah. Let me think back on what the incidences were. I would say definitely Pan’s Labyrinth. I’m a huge Guillermo del Toro fan. I love how he was able to take the realism of a war movie and then infused this creepy Gothic fairy tale sensibility into it. That was definitely an influence.

Obviously, you can’t talk about a modern World War II movie without talking about Inglorious Basterds. That was a tremendous influence as well. I love contained thrillers like Panic Room, and Don’t Breathe. The cat‑and‑mouse element of those movies was something I wanted to build into this.

Beyond that, I love the icky body horror of Clive Barker and David Cronenberg. There’s a reason why the heroine’s last name is ‘Kronenberg.’ Those are the big influences on the script.

Keep in mind, I wrote this during the last year of the Trump administration/first year of the pandemic. That was probably the darkest year of my life psychologically. Those were rough days for me. Being able to dive into something that was somehow even darker than my present reality felt almost like a form of therapy.

Scott: You mentioned your protagonist, Rivka Kronenberg. You describe her in the script as “30s, Polish Jew, street‑smart survivor.” Could you describe the circumstances that she finds herself in and her emotional state at the beginning of the movie?

Ian: We opened the movie with a moment that any parent would be terrified to experience. It’s Rivka, our heroine, and her nine‑year‑old son Hugo, hiding inside a ventilation duct in a townhouse in Warsaw while the occupying Nazis are liquidating the ghetto. Anybody that they find in house They load them onto a train to the Treblinka death camp. This mom’s trying to figure out how to get her son out of this house without getting caught by the Nazis, which turns into them having to escape from Warsaw in a truck and get out to a partisan base out in the Polish wilderness.

The entire first 20 minutes of the movie, they’re a horror film, but it’s a totally non‑supernatural, earthbound type of horror. Only towards the end of the first act, right around minute 25‑ish, does it start to take a turn into something more supernatural, more mystical.

The idea was to just grab the audience by the throat with a type of horror that was rooted in reality and then gradually ease them into something that was more fantastical.

Scott: If you didn’t know where it was going, you’d just say, “Well, this is a straight‑ahead action movie,” because that opening 15, 20 pages is just like boom‑boom‑boom‑boom.

Ian: [laughs] We’ll see how much of that we can keep. We don’t have a lot of money to make this movie. They get chased by wolves on page 20. I don’t know if we can afford wolves.

Scott: Let’s talk about the relationship between Rivka and Hugo because there’s a tragedy in the past. We could talk about the fact that the father died. Could you maybe unpack that a little bit?

Ian: Rivka’s husband dies before the story starts. He’s killed by Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto. Rivka blames herself for her husband’s death. She is unable to let go of that guilt.

In fact, the night that he was shot, she tried tourniqueting his wound with this scarf he was wearing, to no avail. In the aftermath, she still wears that scarf around her wrist as a way of reminding herself of this failure.

At the beginning of the movie, she starts it in this emotionally damaged place and has to come to terms with this while forced to protect her son from a bunch of big bad Nazis and a big bad haunted house. In the last shot, she lets go of the tourniquet and finally forgives herself.

Scott: I know that you’re going back to when the producer brought your manager John that article. That was the first character that you were working with, was Rivka?

Ian: In the article, it was a single woman. The first change that I made was, I wanted to make her a parent. I had just become a parent around that time. My son was born on New Year’s Day, 2020. There’s all kinds of fears that go along with new parenthood because you suddenly have this defenseless creature that you have to keep alive.

There’s that great quote about parenthood that says it’s “to live with your own heart outside your body.” That vulnerability spoke to me, and that was something that I wanted to explore in this script.

I knew that over the course of the story, I wanted to see how this mother and son working as a team, and them relying on each other, and how their love for each other saves them in the end.

Although what’s funny is, the whole thing about the backstory with the dead husband came in a later draft. I didn’t write much of an arc for her in my initial drafts because I was like, “Oh, it’s a survival movie, and survival movies have very thin arcs if they have any at all.”

After a few people came back with notes saying, “She needs something. She has to overcome something emotional. There has to be something unresolved here besides whether she lives or dies or her kid lives or dies.” So that’s when we started exploring the idea of, “What happened to the husband?” and where does she start the story emotionally?

Scott: Hugo’s got a feeling of culpability about something that happened in the past, too. It’s interesting that both of them have these ‑‑ I call them talismans, these physical objects with emotional meaning. She’s got the thing that she wrapped around the tourniquet.

Ian: Scarf, yeah.

Scott: He’s got this little floppy‑eared mouse called Boris that was a gift from his father. Maybe you could talk a little bit about Hugo because he’s got his own arc.

Ian: Oh, yeah. With Hugo, I was thinking, “If I’m nine years old, I’ve within the past few months have lost my father, I’ve been living in the most terrifying situation imaginable ‑‑ what is my attitude towards the world going to be? What’s the truthful way into this character?” And I realized that this is a kid who has learned to approach everything in his life from a place of fear.

Over the course of the story, you learn that like his mom, he also harbors some sense of guilt over what happened to the dad. One night when Hugo got sick, got this terrible fever that wouldn’t break, his mom and dad snuck out of the house in the ghetto and went to try to get medicine for him. They got caught out after curfew, and that led to them being chased and the father being executed by Nazis. You have the mom blaming herself for that and Hugo realizing, “If I hadn’t gotten sick, my dad would still be alive.” By the end of the story, they both come to a mutual realization that neither one of them are to blame.

That was one thing I wanted to work into his arc, but the bigger thing was exploring how a kid who has come from all that trauma, who approaches everything from a place of fear, can learn bravery by the end of the movie. That was the main part of the arc for him.

Scott: There’s a little bit of a redemption story. Their survival ‑‑ the fact that they do survive. Spoiler alert.

[laughter]

Ian: I’m not a heartless bastard. I can’t put a mom and a kid through the hell that they go through this movie and then not have them survive. They earn their happy ending.

Scott: I want to talk about some other human characters and inhuman characters. One character that’s quite fascinating to me is Vormelker Manor, this place where basically all the actions. This goes all the way back to that article about living in the cat‑and‑mouse thing and a stranger in the house. [laughs] That sort of thing.

How did you go about developing this place? I imagine that at some point you’ve got like architectural renderings or something because it’s got multiple stories and rooms and stuff. How did you go about developing Vormelker Manor?

Ian: First I started by looking up a creepy‑sounding German last name, and “Vormelker” fit the bill. Once I had the name, I was hunting through images of old Polish manners, seeing what these houses looked like.

You had these country homes owned by German and Polish aristocracy way out in the middle of nowhere. During the summertime, these rich families would live out there and go hunting. During the winter, we’re forsaken and forgotten. I thought of how creepy it would be to be inside one of these homes way out in the middle of winter with nobody else around.

Once I got into the house, I knew that I wanted there to be a sense of worlds within worlds within worlds. I wanted the house to be almost like a Russian nesting doll where you’d peel back some undiscovered layer about it every 10 pages or so. If you’re going to have a one‑location movie, you can save yourself a lot of heartache with the audience if you can have the location itself offer up surprises every 10 pages or so. That’s why the house has all those hidden things about it. The passageways, the hidden doors, the paintings with double meanings. It was me finding ways to get all the meat off the bone of this one location.

Scott: It’s definitely its own character, and I will never think of the words “wet room” again in quite the same way.

[laughter]

Scott: The Nemesis characters, Nazi soldiers in “The Escape,” there are some Nazis get killed, and basically these Nazi soldiers, they’re hunting down the Polish Home Army, I think is what they’re called, right?

Ian: Yeah. The bad guys are a group of Nazi partisan hunters who are looking for the same partisan base that our heroes are trying to get to. When I was doing my research, I learned about the Polish Home Army, it’s like the counterpart of the Italian partisans. Resistance fighters living in the woods and finding ways to sabotage Nazi operations, taking in escapees from the ghetto. Then I created this squad of Nazi soldiers who are on a mission to go track down this base, and forced them to take shelter inside Vormelker Manor during a blizzard at the same time Rivka and Hugo are hiding out in the attic. I was looking for a way to trap both predator and prey in the same location and not have it feel like total bullshit. So much of storytelling is just finding ways to lampshade coincidence from the audience.

Scott: This is like real pragmatic screenwriters stuff. You’re going to have this group, there’s five of them, the Germans, because you know some of them are going to get whacked. You need to have some of these guys die along the way, but you need to distinguish them, too.

I’m curious how you went about developing Kaiser who’s the leader of the group. There’s Schroeder who’s the madman. He’s the Niedermeyer, I guess you’d say of the group. Oscar Lange, Vogel Albert. How do you go about distinguishing and developing this core group of characters?

Ian: Real talk? I read the script for Saving Private Ryan and imagined what it would be like if the heroes were bad guys. There’s a reference to Captain Kaiser being a history teacher in his old life in Germany, which is a nod to Tom Hanks’s character in Saving Private Ryan.

Saving Private Ryan is absolutely one of my favorite things ever written. The character work is impeccable. Each one of those characters’ voices leaps off the page. I could listen to those guys talk to each other all day long. I was just writing the shadow-world version of that squad.

I knew that I wanted to have a leader who is this perverse everyman character. I knew I want to have a second in command who had some weird unresolved emotional issues with the leader, possibly daddy issues or hints of a closeted attraction. I didn’t want to explicitly make him a gay Nazi, because I didn’t want to open up that can of worms, but I thought there was something interesting about a character whose regard for his boss borders on worship or love. Weird example, but I was thinking about the relationship between Ben Foster and Russell Crowe in 3:10 to Yuma. Ben Foster did all the terrible things he did out of his love for Russell Crowe, and that made his character unforgettable to me.

Beyond the leader and his lieutenant, I knew I wanted to have at least one character who could be the tension relief, the wise‑ass cynic like the one played by Ed Burns in Saving Private Ryan. Since jokes aren’t going to fit into the mouths of Rivka and Hugo, and the lead villain would come off as less dangerous if I give him too big of a sense of humor, I wanted at least one of the Nazis to have a self-aware deadpan snark to him.

I would never talk about a Nazi as an audience surrogate, but to me, every movie needs somebody who can point out the ridiculousness, which is what a lot of the audience is doing. It’s a way of keeping the audience grounded in that world. They’re like, “Oh, there’s one guy who’s reacting to this the exact same way I would react to this.” That was my way in to the Max Albrecht character.

And then there’s the Junkie Nazi. I’d always been fascinated by the amount of drugs the Third Reich was taking, how they were giving their soldiers prescription meth. I was like, “You’ve got an army of people taking lab-grade stimulants on the regular, so I bet there was a speed freak in every squad.” And I started wondering what that guy would be like, feeding his habit while trapped in an increasingly scary situation.

Scott: It’s funny, you mentioned the thing about this Albrecht character, Max, having that sort of cynical, wise‑ass aspect. Literally, as I’m going through the script on page 100 where he’s having his final to‑do with Schroeder.

“I’m the ranking Officer now, Private. These are my orders.” Max says, “Just say our experiences with witches is somewhat limited.” I went, “Ah.”

Ian: [laughs]

Scott: Then this final line actually of his life is great too. Anyhow, it’s interesting to hear you talk about that process. Now let’s talk about these three other…I don’t want to get into “The Origin Story” about these guys. But these three other creatures, I don’t know how you’d refer to them.

Ian: I just call them “ghosts.”

Scott: Ghosts, OK. There’s the Half‑Man, the Long Girl, and the Scarred Man. Again, you don’t have to reveal the secrets of this, wait for the movie to come out. But where did they come from? Were there some images you saw, or nightmares you had? You’ve got a dark imagination. What was going on there?

Ian: Within the mythology of the house, you’ve got this overlord figure Vormelker who was a practitioner of an ancient occult belief system. He thought that if you tortured somebody enough in real life, they would become your slave in the afterlife. If you did enough things to physically, spiritually, and emotionally break them while they’re alive, they become your property after death. Thus, the three ghosts inhabiting the house that the victims he tortured to death. Their physical appearance still reflects the torment they went through.

I did a bunch of research about what kind of horrifying shit was going down during the Spanish Inquisition, what kind of ways they were disfiguring people with machinery back then, and I made a list: top five things I never want to have happen to my body. Then I created the ghost characters based on that list.

Whether I’m writing action, sci‑fi, or horror, my goal is to give the audience at least three to five things that they’ve never seen on a movie screen before. In this script, the ghosts were my opportunity to do that. For example, we’ve seen movie characters who have been put on a stretch rack and had their arms and legs stretched out. But I’ve never seen a version where everything was stretched — the jaw, the fingers, the neck, the ears, where everything pulled like taffy. How terrifying that would look glimpsed in the shadows?

If I’m asking an audience to pay money to watch a horror film in the theater, it’s my job to show them images they’ll never forget. That’s the contract a horror filmmaker makes with the viewer.

Scott: Wow. You’re getting in touch with your inner Cronenberg and Clive Barker in these characters.

[laughter]

Scott: There’s so many twists and turns in the story. It’s enjoyable. When I hit on that moment I realized, wait a minute, now the Nazis and Rivka and Hugo are both on the defense.

They’re both stuck there. That was such a great twist. There’s a moment where Captain Kaizer has this, the light bulb goes off, and says, “I’m saying the attack didn’t originate from outside. Someone’s hiding in the house.” Of course, that just brings to mind When a Stranger Calls.

Ian: Yeah, absolutely a direct reference to that. The audience has been waiting for him to have this realization the entire movie. That’s the explosive moment that we’ve leading up to. Once the bad guy realizes that there’s somebody hiding inside the house, the rest of the movie is on rails. You can’t slow down once he’s figured that out. A lot of the challenge of the script was delaying that moment for as long as possible so that it can happen at the top of act three.

Scott: A lot of the present things about the script honestly, Ian, one thing is I’m going to bring up Pixar here because they’re masters of this. They keep creating challenges, the twists, reversals, and obstacles. You do that. In every scene, you’re making it harder for people to survive. Is that an instinct? Is that a conscious thing like, “I want to push this?” Is it a combination of both?

Ian: All good genre storytelling has that feeling that audiences love, which is, “Oh, my God. How the hell are they going to get out of this?” It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about a horror movie like this, or an adventure movie like Raiders of the Lost Ark, or you were saying, a Pixar movie like Up. There’s always that sense of one-damned-thing-after-another being thrown at the character. That’s the kind of ride I’d sign up for.

The more you can torture your characters, the better. I don’t mean actual physical torture, necessarily; but anything that you can do to make their life harder, then harder, and then even harder after that. It’s going to make it even more satisfying when they find a way out of it.

Joe Hill said “Good horror isn’t about extreme sadism. It’s about extreme empathy. You don’t watch so you can see people get hurt. You watch to see how they escape.”

Scott: It reminds me of that Janet Fitch quote. “The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, then we torture them. The more we love them,” that’s that empathy you’re talking about, “The more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story.”

Ian: That’s 100 percent it.

Scott: Your script, I have to say, man, you’re talking about a wild ride. It’s like a massive roller coaster through this specific realm of horror. It’s intense.

Here’s a question. How fucking hard was it to write this thing?

[laughter]

Ian: This was one of the harder ones I’ve ever done. One, it’s outside my wheelhouse. I’ve never written a period movie before. I’m good with world creation, but most of my world creation is stuff that I get to make up — the future, other planets, other dimensions.

If you’re writing something rooted in historical reality, there’s a lot of research that goes into that. Even more so when you’re dealing with something as loaded as The Holocaust. You have to come in from a place of respect. You can’t come in there having only gotten stuff from other movies. You have to hold reverence for the real people that went through this stuff, even if you’re just doing a crazy‑ass haunted house movie like this. Being respectful to history without turning it into a history lesson was the first thing that made it challenging.

The second is… you ever heard the term ‘gorilla in a haunted house?’ It’s a screenwriting rule that means “don’t double up on antagonists.” Being stuck in a haunted house is scary. Being stuck in a house with a gorilla is scary.” But if you combine them, one bad guy cancels out the other. The audience doesn’t know if they’re supposed to be afraid of the gorilla or the ghosts.

HOUSE IN THE CROOKED FOREST is, by design, a gorilla in a haunted house movie. Just replace the gorilla with Nazis. I had to figure out how to create a scenario where the two horrible antagonists didn’t cancel each other out, and it didn’t become just The Ghost Show or just The Nazi Show, but created a constant sense of escalating threat for the heroine.

So yeah, this was one of the harder ones.

Scott: Congratulations, it’s quite a piece of work, I’ll tell you. It made the 2022 Black List, but I should note, you made the Black List in 2011 with “Cristo,” 2013 with “Capsule,” 2017 with “Infinite,” 2019 with “10‑31.”

At this point, is it old hat to you? Like on Monday, the second Monday in December last year, were you paying attention to the rolling out of the Black List or not?

Ian: So much what we do as writers is invisible. It never makes it into the trades or the press, or gets any attention on social media. So anytime you get to see your name in the paper, that’s a fun day.

My experience with the Black List is if you get on it with a genre project, it lends your script an extra layer of respectability. Which makes it a lot easier to get a cast.

Whereas when we send the script out to people, we’re asking actors to commit X number of weeks to their life to a low budget, hard-R horror movie that’s going to shoot in some Eastern European middle‑of‑nowhere country in the dead of winter, for a fraction of the payday they’d get on a studio movie. So anything that can give the script a little extra attractiveness, it’s good to have that in your corner. Having it pop up in the Black List definitely does that.

Scott: Thanks again for the conversation about your script. I appreciate that. I want to get into some craft questions here because your script does certain things that are against the so‑called screenwriting rules. I always like to spotlight those because it’s just, I don’t like for people…I tell my students this, rules restrict, be creative.

For example, right off the bat literally the first paragraph. “Darkness blacker than the inside of your fist, all we hear is our own panic breath like being trapped in a coffin.” That’s great first couple of lines and immediately to that, you can’t use we see, we hear and all that stuff.

In the first page, “Our jittery POV. We hear heavy footfalls, our breathing gets stifled. Someone clamped a hand over our mouth to stop our scream and turns toward our hiding spot.” To me, that’s effective writing because you’re pulling the reader into that experience.

Maybe you could speak to that rule in general or what you were trying to accomplish by going in that direction of using we and our and on.

Ian: When I was teaching screenwriting, the thing that I’d always ask tell my students is: “What are you afraid of happening exactly? Are you afraid that if you write the words ‘we see’ that Syd Field is going to show up at your door with a gun? Will black helicopters besiege your house with Robert McKee coming down on a fast-rope if if you don’t type ‘fade in’ at the top of the page? I think that newer writers have a tendency to fetishize rules because it makes it seem less scary and random as a business. It means that if you follow enough rules, then someone will deliver you. And the thing that I wish I could tell every young writer is: a script that has wit and verve and audacity is always going to get more attention than a script that follows all the rules but puts the reader to sleep. That’s my soapbox speech for rules there.

To your point about that opening page, the intention there was I was saying earlier that I wanted to explore what it would be like to experience this horrible thing as a child since the movie is a two‑hander between Rivka and Hugo. I intentionally started the movie where the camera is the kid. We’re in Hugo’s point of view hiding with our mom in this ventilation duct and getting that sense of intimacy, like we’re being held and our ears being whispered into, and that there are these towering dangerous figures in the room outside of us who could spot us at any moment. I wanted to put the audience in the shoes of someone who is helpless, and I wouldn’t have been able to do that as effectively if I didn’t use things like “we see” and “we hear.”

Scott: First of all, when we run this as a series on the blog, I’m going to absolutely highlight that quote, because that’s what I tell my students all the time, same thing. Don’t be afraid. Audacity is a great choice of words there. Also too, that you’re speaking about emotion.

I had this conversation with Franklin Leonard. Franklin says, “People don’t go to movies for plot, they go because they want to feel something.” You used bold and italics and underline and any tool at your disposal, any of those typographical tools possible to highlight action, but also to highlight emotion. Could you talk a bit about that as well?

Ian: Absolutely. I’ve yet to use any emojis in my scripts.

[laughter]

Ian: I use a lot of bold, italics, underline, caps, double dashes, ellipses. I’ve been told that my scripts look like they’ve been vandalized. The thing that I’ve discovered is that a lot of those tools can be effective for creating emotional temperature.

In any given scene that I write, I ask “What do I want the audience to be feeling in the beginning, middle, and end of this scene, and what tools do I have at my disposal to guide those feelings?”

If I’ve got a scene that is supposed to be one of silence, stillness, and underlying tension, I’ll ease back on some of those stylistic tricks, but if I’ve got something that is supposed to be shocking, jarring, and full of kinetic energy, then I’ll play with any tool I’ve got available.

Scott: Again, it’s like those are tools that we have. Those are assets, and to say, “Well, you can’t do that because there’s a rule.” It just diminishes our ability to do things like that.

Here’s another one. You’ve heard this rule, you can only write in scene description what an actor can act or what the audience will see. You can’t comment or enter into a character’s inner state of being. You have lots of this in this script. Here’s a few examples:

“Rivka listens. Thinks of all she’d trade to shield him from the world. Knowing the world is resistant to such bargains.”

“’Because the person who owned this house was fucking crazy,’” Rivka thinks to herself.”

“She realizes: something does not want them to leave this house. Something wants them to stay so it can play with them.”

Those are all examples of what I call psychological writing. You’re using your narrative voice to comment on or dip into the characters’ inner world. Could you talk about your feelings about that, your philosophy of that?

Ian: Way back when I taking writing class in high school, I was told that a script is just a blueprint for a movie. That was probably the most poisonous piece of advice I could have gotten. A script is not a blueprint. It’s an invitation to collaborate. It’s you presenting someone with a story that they hopefully find so powerful that they’re going to dedicate the next X‑number of years of their life to getting it made.

In order for them to feel that, they have to connect emotionally with the writing. Which means, inviting them into the characters’ heads and putting things on the page that you can necessarily shoot.

The majority of my favorite writers will sprinkle this throughout their scripts. If you look at the pilot for “Breaking Bad,” Vince Gilligan does this with such artistry. He sets the gold standard for unfilmmables.

As soon as a writer realizes that their first priority is to make the reader feel something, then tools like unfilmmables become a major source of good in their script.

Scott: I tell my students, “You got to be judicious.” It isn’t like a novel. It’s not like you can just throw off 30 pages inside the character remembering some experience they had in Montana as kid. You can occasionally drop in and do that, to the point you were making.

The gold standard for me is William Goldman’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, because it does everything so well. I was reminded of that script. He’s got that whole cut‑to thing, but the way that you use individual lines to suggest camera shots and whatnot ‑‑ Goldman says that you’re not writing a refrigerator manual. It’s supposed to be entertaining.

Could you talk about the double dashes and the ellipses and the breaking up the paragraphs and your philosophy on that?

Ian: It’s been said that Bill Goldman showed that screenplays could be fun to read, and Shane Black showed they could be fun to write. In the script Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, Goldman wrote a line that completely reinvented the way I approach screenwriting.

It’s the part where Paul Newman kicks that guy in the balls. The way it’s described in the script is “As he finishes speaking, Butch lands the most aesthetically exquisite kick to the balls in the history of American cinema. Logan just stands there a moment, then makes an utterly indescribable sound, his face moving from disbelief to displeasure as he sinks to his knees.”

After seeing that ‑‑ just that little bit of editorializing there ‑‑ “the most aesthetically exquisite kick to the balls in the history of American cinema” — that changed the game for me. I realized that you were allowed to sprinkle in little bits like that, I started looking for ways to maximize the amount of fun a reader could have with my script.

When I’m writing a scene, I’ll focus a lot on scene transitions. I’ll look for the latest point in the scene to come in, and the earliest point to get out early. I’ll look for whatever the most arresting image is to begin the scene with, or I’ll think about how to guide the reader’s eye along the page so that information is being revealed to them line by line so there’s a sense of escalation.

For example, in the scene where we introduce our Nazi characters, we go into the scene pre‑lapping the sound of a tea kettle shrieking, so we’re already putting the audience on edge. Then we jump into this kitchen, tea kettle’s screaming, hand switches off a stove, pours hot tea into a mug, you see a little Nazi ring on the hand stirring the tea, and this unseen voice is delivering a monologue as this is happening. The reader’s now primed for whatever the big reveal is going to be. Whereas if I just started the scene by saying, “There’s five Nazis in a room with two hostages. One of them is making tea,” it wouldn’t read as cinematically on the page.

If you’re a writer‑director, you don’t have to work as hard at your scene descriptions. If you read a Judd Apatow script, there’s zero flashiness in his scene writing because he knows he’s going to shoot it himself and it’s going to look like what it’s going to look like.

But if you’re writing something on spec and the whole goal is to just give the reader a cinematic experience writing it, a lot of that is thinking about, “How am I guiding their eye down the page?”

If there’s a lot of staccato cutting and fast editing in the scene, you can use sentence fragments and dashes to create that rhythm. Whereas if something has a slower pace to it, you can use ellipses and gentler writing to illustrate that softness.

It’s really just about getting the reader to start playing the movie in their head, and once they’re doing that, you’ve got them. Because in their head, the sets always look amazing, the special effects are impeccable, and the acting’s always flawless.

Scott: Oh, that’s great. Goldman, of course ‑‑ I featured that scene you just talked about on my blog and went through it because it’s such a great scene. There’s another scene in Butch Cassidy where Rich is trying to get the bullets in the Bolivia cafe, and Redford’s ‑‑ there’s a 293‑word sentence.

Ian: [laughs]

Scott: It’s continuous action ‑‑ 293 words.

Ian: It’s pretty big.

Scott: No, no. It’s a 293‑word sentence just like dot and all these secondary…

Ian: It’s all one paragraph?

Scott: No, no. You would love it. It’s just the same type of writing you have. It’s just…

Ian: One little line here, one little line there?

Scott: If you got rid of all the cut tos, it’s just like shot, shot, shot, shot, or secondary slug or whatever you usually call it.

One last thing I want to talk about in your script, and this has nothing to do with the rules, but I tell my students, I think scene description ‑‑ better to think about it as poetry rather than prose. I mean that in the sense of strong verbs and vivid descriptors.

Your script just has these moments, like for example ‑‑ this is somebody getting shot ‑‑ “blows wine‑dark confetti out of Brant’s chest.” That’s poetic to me. I read poetry every day. That’s how I start my day, is rereading a poem.

“Viewed from a distance, they move with the molasses‑like torpor of a nightmare.”

“The house’s windows almost resemble eyes in a face’s cavernous entryway, a mouth locked in a scream.”

See, to me, that reads like poetry. I don’t know whether you are a fan of poetry or whatnot, or whether you even think that this is a legitimate way to approach scene description, but this idea of strong verbs, active verbs, and vivid descriptors ‑‑ does that resonate with you?

Ian: Oh, absolutely. All of my favorite writers tend to go for that type of style. You see it in Goldman, you see it in Shane Black, you see it in Scott Rosenberg. Even people with more minimalistic voices like the Coen brothers ‑‑ you’ll still see flashes of it in there.

Given that screenplays themselves aren’t naturally fun to read ‑‑ they’re blocky, they’re antiquated, each scene starts with a big, long sentence of all caps describing where and when we are ‑‑ they’re not designed to read smoothly the way that novels are. Anything that you can do as the writer to make that page inviting, to make the reader start experiencing your story inside their own head ‑‑ that’s how you get your reader to connect with you.

I’ve found that if that stuff doesn’t come naturally to you as a writer, if your voice is more minimalist, then that’s absolutely what you should lean into. The worst thing a writer can do is fake a style that they don’t have naturally.

Even a voice like Walter Hill, for example ‑‑ I was reading the opening page of his script Hard Times, where each sentence is maybe between three and six words long, but it’s all crystal‑clear and each word has such intent and power behind it ‑‑ that’s something that I think readers immediately respond to.

For me, especially if I’m writing something that people have automatic reservations about, like a horror movie about Nazis… if I can seduce them with language on page one and show them that they’re in the hands of someone who cares about their reading experience, then I can get them to go anywhere with me.

Scott: Well said. You sound like someone who reads scripts.

Ian: Yeah. I’ve been devouring all the “For Your Consideration” scripts this week. I just read “Banshees of Inisherin” last night. God, that ripped my heart out.

Scott: That movie. Yeah. McDonagh’s amazing. He’s one of the few people that even approximates to me what the Coens can do, where they manage to bring violence and comedy and pathos all together.

Ian: Oh, yeah.

Scott: Thanks. One last question, and I’m sure you get asked this all the time if you ever meet people in Hollywood or wherever that ‑‑ what advice do you have for people who are trying to break into the business, trying to learn the craft? What advice do you have for them?

Ian: Everyone starts their career writing for free. So when you’re thinking about what type of spec you want to write, the best advice I can give is, only write the things that you’re extremely passionate about. Focus on the things that bring you joy, the things that bring you excitement, because that excitement is going to translate on the page.

For my interviews with dozens of other Black List writers, go here.