Go Into The Story Interview: Jon Boyer

My conversation with the writer of the Black List script “Free Byrd.”

From professional snowboarder to commercial director to Hollywood screenwriter, Jon Boyer has had an interesting journey taking him from Canada to Los Angeles. I had the opportunity to talk with Jon about his background, his script “Free Byrd” which landed on the 2013 Black List, and his approach to the craft of screenwriting.

Scott Myers: You’re originally from Canada.

Jon: Born and raised. I lived in Vancouver, and Calgary, and a little bit on the East Coast.

Scott: That’s great to know because if things go all pear-shaped here politically in the United States, we can all just move up there with you.

Jon: Exactly. My wife and I call it our escape route. If everything goes south, we go north. [laughs]

Scott: That’s a bumper sticker waiting to happen! Talk about snowboarding. When did you get involved with that?

Jon: I came from a pretty athletic family. Like any typical Canadian kid, I grew up playing hockey and was a little junior ski racer. When snowboarding really first started gaining momentum, I saw this guy doing it at my local mountain. I just was blown away.

I was a little skater kid and I just thought, “Oh, my God. I want to do that.” My parents thought it was just a fad and wouldn’t get me a board, so I made one in wood shop in school. I learned on the hills in Calgary on this shitty home made board but I kept at it.

When my parents saw that I was really into it, they got me one for my birthday the following season. I just fell in love with it. It just came very naturally to me. It wasn’t long before I got sponsored, and I turned pro at a very young age. It took off from there and I traveled the world from the time I was about 17 till I was in my early 20s. I went all over the world as a pro snowboarder, competing, and filming snowboarding films.

Serendipitously, it was snowboarding that led me into becoming a film maker.

Scott: I read an interview where you said, “Hey, I could film these guys.”

Jon: Yeah. I was being filmed once. You know Warren Miller?

Scott: Sure.

Jon: I was being filmed by a crew like that and saw them using these cool 16mm Arriflex cameras. It was a deep powder day and the cameraman, he was on skis, he was having a little trouble following us boarders because we could go so fast in powder. I said, “Well, let me do it,” They handed me the camera and I did a few follow tracking shots it and I just fell in love with it.

I immediately thought “Oh, my God, I wanna do this. I wanna make films.” I just thought it was so cool and that was that. So shortly after that I got myself a camera and started to make snowboarding films.

I’m honestly surprised I lived through some of the stuff that I did, going to Alaska and Europe. Riding big mountains and in the back country. I’ve been buried in avalanches. I’ve lost friends in avalanches. It was just time. I thought, [laughs] “You know, I think I’m going to go stand behind a camera for a while. It’s safer.” It sort of took off from there.

After making snowboard films for a couple years, I started directing commercials for Burton Snowboards and for the surf clothing company, Quiksilver. From there, it sort of took me into mainstream advertising. I thought it was going to be really creative and exciting but as it turned out, I didn’t like it much at all.

I didn’t like that it was all about selling stuff. I came from this lifestyle, I came from this whole sport that was based on this way of life and this passion for just living life. Advertising wasn’t for me. Not to mention that the economy had just tanked and there was no work all of a sudden. I needed to make something happen and so I figured I’d do what I had always done. I’d just make a movie.

So I started writing. I had no idea what I was doing and had absolutely no concept of how to write a script. I wrote like three or four really shitty scripts. I mean really shitty scripts. [laughs] But I was reading as many scripts as I could get my hands on. I eventually landed on the idea of “Free Byrd,” and that’s the one that I was like, “Oh. I get it now. You’re supposed to write something that you’re really passionate about.” [laughs]

Scott: Let’s step back a bit. I’m assuming you were a movie fan when you grew up, too?

Jon: Definitely. I remember when we were young, we would go to this lake house and the small town had a drive-in theater. My sister used to sneak me into the movies I was too young to see.

I remember just being so affected by them. I remember one year they were replaying “Jaws” or something like that. I was a kid and she says, “We’re gonna go see that.” It scared the hell out of me, but that memory stuck with me forever. How something up on a screen can affect you so viscerally is amazing. Growing up seeing films like Star Wars, Raiders of the Los Arc. It was such an escape. Being so captivated by these characters.

There’s nothing else like movies that makes you want to be somebody else. You know what I mean? You want to emulate these characters. You want to be them. At least I did when I was a kid. It just affects you unlike any other medium in art, as far as I’m concerned.

Scott: Yet you went the writing direction as opposed to directing.

Jon: Yeah, I just figured the economy was collapsing and the jobs that were coming in in advertising were very thin. People weren’t spending money. I’m sitting there going, “Geez, man. I gotta make a living.” I always wanted to make a film. I always wanted to make my own, but, again, I never went to film school. I didn’t know how to do this stuff. I just learned flying by the seat of my pants.

I was struggling with that, but I just figured, “I’m gonna write and direct some small indie feature myself.” I went through a number of scripts that just were awful everybody goes through their first scripts, they are just horrible and meandered all over the place. I didn’t really know what I was doing.

I was always kind of the joker among my friends so I naturally gravitated towards comedy, but I quickly learned how difficult writing comedy is. It’s really hard, and I always ended up gearing toward darker subject matter. I would always end up writing some character crying in the bottom of a shower drinking from a whiskey bottle after having a wank. [laughs] You know, real funny stuff.

But during this process I was really falling in love with the craft of writing. It’s amazing how difficult it was, but how you could just keep getting better, and better, and better. It was sort of an extension of directing for me, because I would just see everything in my head so vividly of what I wanted to write. I just needed to keep writing until my skills caught up to my imagination.

Scott: You were reading scripts. Were you doing anything else to learn the craft?

Jon: At the time, no. That’s what I mean. I would start these scripts and I had a bunch of good beginnings, but I didn’t really know the craft. I went and looked at some [screenwriting] books but It just didn’t feel right to me. Also I hate how-to books. I was always that guy who built models without using the instructions. Then a friend told me of this program called Writer’s Bootcamp that this guy named Jeff Gordon was doing in Santa Monica.

I went and looked into it. It seemed really cool. It was more like a really intense workshop. I have a hard time with art and academia and didn’t think film school at this point in my life was n option. I just didn’t want to spend four years going to school. So I did the Writers Bootcamp program and I’ll tell you it was like the lights suddenly were turned on.

Finally, for the first time there was something that made sense to me. I learned about components of screenplays I wasn’t really aware of. Like, “What is a story beat? What are beats in a movie?” I learned things like that and just mostly how to economize my writing so I’m not just meandering all over the place.

The process they taught there worked very well with my thinking patterns of condensing everything. I have this whole thing now where I write when I’m developing a new story or a new script. I try to whittle it down so that I have this one sheet, a onepage thing of these very simple sequence statements. It’s basically the whole movie on one page.

If I can’t get across what this movie is on one page, I’m not going to be able to do it in 120. I’m going to go all over the place. If I can get it down to that one page where you read these 12 major sequence statements and it projects the character forward in every 10 pages. It finally clarified everything I didn’t understand and then it all clicked.

I know it’s not for everybody, but it really works for me.

Scott: Were you working on “Free Byrd” in the Writers Bootcamp, or was that after?

Jon: It was just at the end I came up with the idea. I was writing a bunch of really shitty ones, like I said, [laughs] One day I was meandering through the internet, blogs, some shit like that, and I landed on this photograph of a guy on a motorcycle. I actually have it on my banner on my Twitter page, but it was a photograph of some guy on a desert road standing up on a motorcycle seat in a Jesus Christ pose. This thought of this character kind of struck me then, what if Evel Knievel never existed? And over the course of coming up with the story I started to think: What is the footprint that we leave behind when we’re gone? I’ve always loved that. What are these things? What is that defining thing you do in your life that is remembered by more than just your family? Not everybody pulls that off.

I don’t know, a light came on in my head and I thought of Evel Knievel. But I didn’t want to write a biopic. So I just composited this character that went through many different iterations until it landed where it is.

Scott: Both of those themes are in “Free Byrd”. You’ve even got an image of a character, at one point, on the highway in the Jesus Christ pose. Right?

Jon: I do. It’s funny how an idea can come from anywhere and then you can keep at it until something very real is born from it. That one just clicked with me and I thought, “Oh, my God. This is the story that I’m going to finish, that I’m really going to work on.” It just came out so naturally out of anything I’ve ever written. It came out, just flowed out of me so effortlessly at times. I actually remember realizing the ending in the middle of the night and went to my desk and blasted out the ending, the last 20 pages, so fast. All the ingredients just fell into place.

Scott: I’d like to dig into the story, if we can, first, just so people can understand what we’re talking about. A plot summary for the movie Free Byrd. The protagonist’s name is Billy Byrd. It’s a riff off the old song, “Free Bird.”

Jon: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that song alone makes you wish you were alone on a highway.

Scott: The plot summary “After being diagnosed with dementia, a retired 50something stunt motorcyclist sets out to perform one last jump.” The script was a semifinalist in the 2012 Nicholl, is that right?

Jon: Yes.

Scott: Then made the Black List in 2013.

Jon: Scraped onto it, yeah.

Scott: You’ve already talked a bit about your inspiration for “Free Byrd”. In part, this idea of legacy, footprint, and then that idea of the motorcycle guy. It would seem like there’s a personal connection there. Snowboarding would be speed and danger, so…

Jon: Yeah, yeah. Like I said, my life, I honestly didn’t think I would live through a lot of the things I did. When I was a snowboarder it was different than it is now. Now it’s this professional, Olympic thing. People can make a real living at it.

I was really interested in the fact that everybody is really good at everything now. There’s these flying wingsuit guys. There’s the X Games, there’s the Motocross guys, there’s the skateboarders. There’s just so many people that are so calculated and so good at everything, but nobody will achieve what Evel Knievel achieved ever again. There will never be another guy like him. Ever.

That really stuck with me. I love that kind of character. He’s remarkable but he’s kind of an everyman. He didn’t do it necessarily to be famous, even though he kind of did. He got into that whole thing and he had this massive ego, but I just love the idea of a character who just did something because he couldn’t NOT do it. He was the only one. We don’t see that anymore.

But I needed an offset. There is that modern day X Games-style sport aspect with the other character, Cole Cash. I just liked the idea of there being these two worlds coming together, and with this very father/son type theme, which I love. I love stories of fathers and sons or even mothers and daughters. I like that passing the torch moment.

Scott: To set the stage for this character, Billy Byrd was this very famous motorcycle adventurist doing these crazy Evel Knievel type of things but had a horrific jump that he basically had died four times on the operating table, and his whole body was broken. Since that time this is many, many years ago has not done any more of this type of thing.

Jon: Right. He finally came to the point where he just gave up. It just beat him down. I like to think that his backstory is that it never really sat well with him, but physical circumstances prevented him from doing anything, so 20-some years go by and he’s turned into this grouchy, cantankerous asshole.

In the process he’s fallen in love with a younger woman and the world has gone on. I didn’t really want to say whether it was present day or not, because it could be almost like the inception of the X Games, but now there’s these young hot rods and hot shots that are doing things above and beyond what he ever did, but they still idolized him.

I just liked that idea of this younger character and him meeting, and there being this moment of just awe in this young character’s eyes of this man that he grew up looking up to.

Scott: Let’s jump to that character, Cole Cash. How would you describe him?

Jon: Cole is modern times. He’s like young people now. They all have this perspective of nothing is impossible, “I’m just going to do it.” but it’s also like he gotten lost in it. I see him as this character that, let’s use NBA basketball as an example:

There’s guys like Allen Iverson, or these guys that came out of these rough neighborhoods, and they saw basketball as an escape. I kind of thought Cole was something of that. He was escaping a shitty relationship with a father who was never there for him, and he found something that he was good at, and he just dove in. It was his escape.

That became his passion and then it turned into a career. I’ve seen it from my background in action sports. What starts as a passion, a way of life. You slowly become a product. Or a brand. That’s what happened to Cole. Instead of this leader in a sport that he loves, he became a product…

Scott: A commodity.

Jon: Exactly, he’s a commodity. He’s a commodity for the people that are around him, he’s a commodity for himself. It’s all about merchandise and its branding. It was sort of my poke at the way the world is now. Everything’s about branding. When did we lose that moment of passion for life? That inception of just wanting to do something because we had to do it?

Scott: Is it fair to say that Cole is on the edge of feeling, using psychological language , like he’s in an inauthentic existence. Then he sees Billy, who represents an authentic individual?

Jon: Exactly. It’s that authenticity that is lost. Like you said, he’s become the monster that we’ve all created. It’s just, “How much stuff can you sell? How many endorsements can you get?” You just become a billboard.

Scott: Not so great.

Jon: No. I was going to say that was something that was very personal for me because, when I was ending my snowboarding career, I was kind of sick of that. I loved traveling around the world, and being around friends, and meeting new people, and experiencing these incredible adventures.

Then, when it started becoming a job, I got a strong distaste for it in my mouth. I didn’t like the whole billboard aspect. Probably naively on my part because I [laughs] probably could have made a whole lot of money, but it just didn’t sit well with me. I just wasn’t that guy.

There are guys that just feed off of that, and they just want to become superstars. Everything’s a deal. I really wanted to have that moment with Cole where, through the relationship with Billy, he starts seeing what it’s all about again, and what matters. At the same time, Billy learned something from him. Like his lost youth. His zest for life again.

Scott: You mentioned earlier a father/son type of relationship, and it certainly does feel like that. Here’s Cole who had essentially been cut off from his own biological father, and Billy who’s never had a son. Yet, at one point, Billy says to Cole, “I see myself in you, a lot of who I used to be that did something.”

Does he see in Cole someone a more innocent or younger version of himself, or someone with the potential to do something?

Jon: I think so. I think it’s along the lines of that he sees that fire that’s in the kid’s belly. But also that it’s being lost. It’s being clouded by all the glitz that’s surrounding him. That started happening to Billy, as well. It’s along the lines of even Evel Knievel. If you remember, he started off as this young, handsome guy who captivated the world by doing something no one else had ever done. It was just insane the things that he did, but then it slowly became a monster. And then he was the monster.

He just became the monster that he created. It was like he crumbled underneath the weight of fame and notoriety, for the things that he did. He just had to one-up himself every single time, and it was killing him.

I think that he sees that in Cole. He just sees that he’s getting lost in this world of economics versus, “Why are you doing this?” Like, “Why do you do something that could possibly kill you?”

Scott: Yeah, it has a feel of almost like…It’s like a Western, the old gunslinger…

Jon: I love that you just said that because I just wanted it to have that feel of the Americana. It’s something that seems to be lost in today’s modern world.

Scott: …strapping it on one last time, and he meets the young kid who idolized him. Right?

Jon: Yeah. It’s funny because I’ve always wanted to write, a form of a western. I love Westerns. It’s something with my father that we shared together, and my dad loved old gun slinger movies. He was like an old cowboy. I wanted it to have that feel. Like “Shane.” That lone guy that comes out, and does something, and he’s enigmatic. I just love that about Westerns. You don’t find that in too many movies these days.

Scott: He has a moment where he says something after he starts getting back into the racing thing. He makes this public proclamation. He says, “Hello, my name is Billy Bird, and I’m a motorcycle stunt man. I believe that we were put on this good earth for a reason, and mine is to soar in the sun, living life to the fullest, the life God gave us.”

It’s a very interesting observation because you could say to him, “Well, you know, you had this accident and it stopped you from participating in the motorcycle activities. Would you believe that God did that to you?” I think he probably believes it was unfairly taken from him, and that his truly God given life is somebody doing the motorcycle stunts. Is that a fair assessment?

Jon: Yeah, I think so. I’m not a religious person, but I like the idea of who he was. He had this strong faith in what he believed in, and what he believed he did, and why he did it. Where we meet him, he’s at the stage of life now where after he’s been beat down and he hasn’t been doing anything that he did in his earlier life. He feels robbed. It’s like this whole story is his unfinished business.

That’s where his saltiness comes from, I think. He feels like he was let down by something that he truly believed in, that he truly lived by. It was like a code that he lived by, and it was taken from him.

That’s the thing. Nobody likes to be handed their hat. Everybody wants to leave the party on their own accord, and he never got to do that.

Scott: He’s put together kind of a parallel life with this girlfriend, Maggie, more of a domestic kind of a thing. Could you describe what Maggie her character, what she represents in the story?

Jon: It’s funny because that is currently evolving. It’s something, even where it sits right now, I’ve always wanted her to be that sense of future with Billy and what he should be having at this stage in his life. But, because he has unfinished business, he can’t see it.

At the same time, I struggled with this because I wanted her to be this strong character that was more than just like this, “I want a baby. I want a baby,” and it probably just comes across a little bit like that in the current draft which I want to address, but it was more than that. She wants to create something with Billy, but he just can’t see that at this moment.

I just wanted her to be this character that it’s right in front of him the whole time. We have this thing in snowboarding, and it comes from surfing, called chasing rhinos. It comes from big wave surfing. We’re chasing that thing that we don’t really know sometimes that it’s right in front of us, and in doing so, it can destroy you.

There’s all sorts of different metaphorical things that you can look at, but I just thought that she needed to stand for a new beginning, and a fresh start, and moving forward. Because he can’t see it yet, it’s kind of a little stagnant and there’s a bit of tension there.

Scott: It’s interesting, too, some of the choices you made in the story. One of them is really not having your prototypical antagonist character. I guess it’s really the dementia.

Jon: Yeah.

Scott: From a writing standpoint, that’s a net plus. I mean, it’s kind of weird to say that about dementia, but it gives the narrative a nice ticking clock, and then you actually see him devolving. When did the dementia idea come into play?

Jon: It’s funny because I looked at old notes from when I first came up with the idea, just actually recently, and I was laughing at this. It was all about money before and I felt, “No, let’s not leave that in.” He was broke and he was trying to get back all his money. Talk about a lame motivation.

But it’s really tough writing any story that doesn’t have that opposing character that’s the constant pushback. That antagonistic character that just stops you from moving forward. In this story, I tried having a nemesis. I tried having an old business associate or an old something, but nothing felt right.

I tried to have that and it just never fit, and I always thought that, “This guy needs to be his own worst enemy.” He’s the protagonist but, in some ways, his dementia, obviously. He’s also the antagonist because it is time, and nothing is more crushing to anybody than the passing of time when you don’t have any.

Scott: You mentioned earlier that he’d like to go out on his own terms and that, because of the accident he had, he had to hang up his guns, if you will. It’s once the dementia, that news, hits, that he basically sets into motion the inciting incident that, “I’ve got to get my act together,” because he says straight on to Cole. He says, “What do you want to leave when you’re gone?”

He’s asking that to Cole, but isn’t he also asking that of himself?

Jon: Yeah. It’s like him having to say it out loud for it to be real. There’s that confessional moment in the script too. You can think it, and think it, and think it, and we all do that. But, until you actually verbally say something, it doesn’t really land with ourselves. I definitely think that’s something that Billy is feeling right there.

He’s asking himself that, like, “What am I doing? What am I going to leave? What am I going to be remembered by? The crashes? Is that it?”

Scott: There was interesting bit of business where Cole goes online to look at his YouTube videos. He’s comparing number of views, and Billy’s got way more hits. Billy’s thought is that, in part, because he was living so close to the edge and so close to danger.

Jon: Yeah, because there’s legacy there. He’s a legend, there’s a big difference between fame and infamy, or legend. In any sport really. There’s basketball players like Michael Jordan, but there’s still all these new amazing basketball players, and everybody’s like, “Oh, my God. They’re amazing,” but there’s still never going to be another Michael Jordan. There’s never going to be another Wayne Gretzky. There’s never going to be another Tiger woods.

Scott: Yeah.

Jon: There’s always that one person that stands out and does things because they did it first. They didn’t follow anybody. They were the standard.

Scott: Using that kind of Jungian language, that legendary status is kind of a shadow hanging over him. He’s got to confront that, which is eventually what he does in the story, and in a very interesting way. Let me talk to you about that ending. I don’t want to give it away to people who haven’t read it, but you do a very interesting twist with Cole. That really surprised me.

Jon: It surprised a lot of people to the point where a lot of people kept asking, “Why? Why did that have to happen?”

Scott: I can understand why Cole would do it. I mean, I totally get why he would do it, so they’re asking it from the perspective of you as a screenwriter, why did you do that?

Jon: Honestly, I don’t know if I can completely remember exactly why I chose that moment to happen, but I think I wanted something so jarring that it not only jarred the audience, but it jarred Billy. Because he was ready to just give it up again and I needed him to be activated. I needed him to be activated to the point of no return.

You think he’s already got that halfway through the script, which normally, by screenwriting standards, you want that midpoint of “I’m not going to look back,” but I wanted that low point for him also to be this jolt forward like, “If I give up now, I’ll never forgive myself, and I’ll never be able to live tit down.”

Scott: That certainly contributes to that All Is Lost reversal at the end of Act Two.

Jon: Indeed it does.

Scott: Then you’ve got a very lyrical, poignant denouement with Maggie. How soon did that evolve, that you knew that that was where you were going to end the story?

Jon: I knew that ending before I knew the middle of the script. I’ve had this script compared to The Wrestler, and Crazy Heart, but with motorcycles. I’ve heard all these things. Remember, in The Wrestler, you don’t really see him land that rope dive? You just see him jump into the air and that’s it. I struggled for a long time before I wrote the ending, “Do you want to see him actually do this final jump? Is it that important?”

I kept asking myself, “Is that what’s it’s about?” It’s not about that. It’s about the intention. It’s about him learning what really matters in his life, and everybody else around him also learning that about themselves.

I just wanted that ending to leave you with this…You know that pit in your stomach that sense of longing, but happiness and sadness all in one? I really wanted to achieve that and I think I did. [laughs]

Scott: You provided a nice segue there into the business side of things. When this made the semifinals at the Nicholl, were you repped at that point, or no?

Jon: No. I didn’t know anything about how the business worked. I just was trying to write something small I could direct. Everybody always asks, “How did you get an agent?” It’s that same old chestnut which I don’t know how to answer. I was aware of screenplay competitions, but I had never once thought “I’m going to be a screenwriter.” It wasn’t really my goal. Like I said, I initially just wanted to write a small movie I could direct. But I didn’t know how I was going to raise the money. Then one day my wife comes home from work and says a coworker tells her about this screenplay competition called the Nicholl Fellowship done by the Academy Awards.

I looked into it but the deadline was in a month and at that time I literally had a first readable draft. I thought, “Maybe I’ll try to do a rewrite. Maybe I can get a rewrite in and fix some things that I felt were problematic in the script.”

I struggled, and tried to get it done, but maybe got halfway through the draft. I didn’t get it done. I went, “Ah, this sucks. I’m not going to do it.” But my wife tells me, “Whatever. It’s 50 bucks. Just enter it.” So I did and forgot about it. Then, some months later I started to get emails from the Nicholl saying my script had advanced.

I got to admit it was really exciting. It’s not that that I was looking for validation but, without a better term, it was validation that other people have read this and it’s connecting with them, so I was like, “OK, I think I’ve got something.”

I didn’t really understand what it meant until they asked if I minded if they included my name in the list of quarter finalists they send out to managers, producers, and agents. Within four days, my inbox was filling with tons of emails from managers, and producers, and everybody asking to read the script. That’s kind of how it happened.

I’m literally that guy that people who are struggling to become a working screen writer hate. [laughs] I just had that one thing that got in the right hands at the right time. I don’t know what alchemy made that happen, but it landed with a bunch of people. Then my manager, Jeff Belkin from Zero Gravity, he called me and said, “I love the script,” and that was that.

Scott: It’s a testament to something I think most professional screenwriters would tell aspiring screenwriters: Focus on the material. If you get the story in good shape, then the rest of it pretty much will take care of itself.

Jon: Yeah. It seems corny, but it’s so true. It really does matter that, if you’re writing to chase markets, you’re going to fail every time. You have to find that thing that you love and that you can’t not write and write that. I mean, that was “Free Byrd,” for me. It landed in my brain and I couldn’t stop writing. I loved writing it.

If you write something that you just absolutely are passionate about and love, it’s obviously going to be better. And it will connect with people.

Scott: Right. Then you start doing the bottled water tour, and the script gets around, and…

Jon: Yeah. They brought it in and Mark Williams, who’s a producer at Zero Gravity, he read it and attached to produce. Also his brother, Eric Williams, who is my other manager, he read it and wanted to rep me as well.

When we started talking about what to do with the script I told them how I wrote it to direct it. But I was smart enough. I thought, “OK, I’ve got two young children at this time now,” and I’m thinking, “I need to be smart here and not be that guy that goes, ‘I’m making this. This is my movie,’ and alienate everybody.” I thought, “I want to direct it, but I’m not saying that I have to direct it.”

It’s still something that I would like to do and maybe could still happen, but I’m not really focused on that. Then after about a few weeks, my manager called to tell me that Mark took it to the producer, Gil Netter and asked him to read the script.

Gil Netter, if you’re not familiar, he produced, “Life of Pi,” and “The Blind Side.” He said he loved it, that it really landed with him. He wanted to come on board and produce as well. As soon as he came on board, he sent the script it to all the agencies. Next thing I know I have meetings set up with all these agents.

Then came the bottled water tour. Which was really bizarre if I’m being honest. I chuckled the whole time because of how complimentary they were in these meetings. Agents, they want to sign you. They are actually ALL trying to find new talent. It’s funny because everybody asks, “How do you get an agent? How do you get an agent?” Seriuously, there is no one way.

If you write that one good thing, they’ll find you. I really believe that. They all want to find that next great writer, or great script. The next great anything, they want to find that.

I went through that whole tour, and I landed with my agents. They were really great guys, and I loved what they said about the script as a movie. It wasn’t all about, “We’re gonna do this for you.” They kept talking about Free Byrd and how much they loved the project and wanted to make sure it got made. That meant something to me.

Scott: What about when the Black List, when you found out…

Jon: The Black List was crazy because I was completely unaware. I thought, “Oh, very cool.” I remember that day. I’d just recently got back on Twitter. I’d never really been the Twitter guy, and I watched the whole thing and I was cracking some jokes just because it was fun. I was sitting there drinking coffee, watching all the announcements. Then, all of a sudden, I saw my name.

I didn’t know what it meant but was pretty excited. It’s an amazing thing. I know there’s a lot of people that say good things about it, people that say bad things, whatever. I think it’s a very cool thing what Franklin has done. As soon as that happened, then, obviously, a lot more people start calling.

I actually had to tell my [laughs] managers at one point, “Can you stop setting me up with meetings?” It sounds so awful to say that, but those meetings, literally one after the other, and it just shoots your entire week. Then, the next thing you know, you haven’t written anything.

But everything helps. Right? It makes people want to know who you are and what you’re writing, what else you’ve got, what you’re working on, any ideas you have. More than anything, they just want to meet you and see if you’re somebody that they actually want to spend a year of their life working with. That you’re not some socially awkward hermit who they can’t discuss projects with.

Scott: What’s the status on the project now?

Jon: Without getting into details, because I can’t, they’re just basically penning all the deal right now. It’s being optioned with a very big star attached, and they’re just doing all the business side of it. I can’t say who, [laughs] but hopefully he’ll stay on the project, you know how these things go. But I think sometime in the new year, we’re going to have something to say.

Scott: OK, great. It’s definitely a story worth getting made into a movie, and I sure hope that happens for you, Jon.

Jon: Thank you. I really appreciate that.

Scott: Let’s jump into some craft questions. I always like to start with this and it’s funny because, when I do, oftentimes the writers will say, “God, I’ve never even thought about that.” How do you come up with story ideas?

Jon: From many different places. Like I said, this has been my third career. [laughs] I was a snowboarder, then a filmmaker/photographer, and now a writer. I have this deep love for photography and images. I get a lot of magazines and books. I used to have a bad magazine fetish, all these different photography books or magazines.

I have tons of photography coffee table books. I honestly flip through them all the time, still. A lot of times that just inspires something. Just an image. It can come from that. That’s where Free Byrd came from. I have another one that I’m writing right now that was inspired by a winter picture of a lone cabin with a single light on.

From that, I looked at it and went, “Ah, there’s a movie there.” I had to reverse engineer and come up with this entire story, character, everything, but that’s a big part of it. The imagery, like a photograph. A really great photograph is very inspiring to me. I also love history. I really love history and conflict, world global conflicts of whatever kind, something that is of note.

For instance, I was very interested in war photojournalists at one point because I was fascinated by a character, this person who would choose to run toward something that most people are running away from. And with absolutely no personal gain. All they want to do is find the truth. Something like that is really interesting to me.

Also I try to draw from just being an observer of human nature. I think the best thing you can do as a screenwriter is understand human nature. Everything of why we do or don’t do something all comes down to human nature.

Scott: You mentioned this one sheet, this one page that you’ve got with 12 sequence statements. That’s interesting, so basically every 10 pages or so, something significant happens?

Jon: Yeah. That’s something that I learned from Writers Bootcamp. I was kind of working on that before that, but once I saw how he laid it out with his tool set, I was like, “Oh, my God.” It just gets rid of all the crap, all the things that I’m over thinking. Once I land on an idea that I want to explore, I start with a premise statement, and it’s always a when, then, until track.

When this happens, then this happens, until this happens. The until is usually a low point. I guess you could call it a logline, but I prefer to call it more of a premise line. You look at, say a script is 120 pages, and there’s roughly 10page increments. The first act is in this set of tools. The first act is the first three. The second act is the next six. Then the third act is the final three.

I would just make every statement, the first one when this happens with the character, then this happens, until this happens. When I do that for every single sequence statement, it helps keep momentum going for the character, and it helps you find the dead spots in your story pretty quickly. It also helps you stay focused on your character’s intention where they want to go.

Throughout those, each sequence, to me, means something. There’s the inciting incidence sequence. There’s the introduction to the character in the world sequence. The inciting incidence sequence. The dynamic character introduction Who’s that character or that thing that’s going to push or pull your character through the story?

Jon: These 12 sequences, I just find that in trying to keep it down to very simple, pithy statements, it really helps you trim the fat off of your story, and find all of your holes, and find the true intention for your character, and be able to plot it out in a much cleaner way without it being too confusing.

Scott: Talking about it, you just mentioned character. How do you go about developing your characters?

Jon: I steal from everything. No writer is original. We’re all a bunch of thieves. If I find one person or a group of people that I meet and just take little bits from each one, and I do sometimes write a bit of a biography. I just ask questions.

I think the best way to find the truth to anything is ask yourself questions like, “Why does she do this? What does she want to do? Why does she wear leather pants?” You find your character that way.

I also do this thing where I write 50 windows into my character. 50 things my character might do that illustrates who they are. And then 50 moments that my character might find themselves in. I keep it simple and rough.

You might not get 50 but, in doing that, you will learn pretty quick what and who he or she is, I think. A lot of it is, if your character needs to be a misogynist, what does a misogynist do? Let’s try to write 50 things that they might do, or 50 instances that your character would get into that could define who they are. That’s one thing I do.

Scott: Interesting. What about theme?

Jon: Oh, God. [laughter]

Scott: I know, right? Because it’s one of those things where nobody really quite has a handle on what theme even means.

Jon: No, I agree. It’s really hard. Theme is something that I think every writer struggles with. I think the biggest struggle is most of us, myself included, you kind of start in this hoitytoity land of getting way too airy about it all, and trying to have this deep meaning, and it being so profound, and that’s where I think we as writers can get stuck. And I do it every time.

When I meet aspiring writers or people that ask me about this, theme is always a point of struggle. And we commiserate about it. [laughs]

I always try to think of a good example that I try to give is Spiderman. It’s an easy one. We all know the character. In the first Spiderman, ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’ That’s a great theme, and it’s really simple. It’s a good one to reverse engineer into your own story.

Sometimes it’s just a simple thing, like with Free Byrd it was, ”What’s our footprint? What do we leave behind?” I think that makes it a lot easier if you try to simplify things. But fuck, theme is a struggle, man.

Every single script I write, and I know you know that too, that it’s so brutal. You can see it pretty quickly if there’s no theme. If there’s nothing in the script that gives us as an audience, something to universally connect to, it becomes apparent pretty quickly and then you go put your head in the oven. [laughs]

Scott: Yeah, you don’t have that emotional meaning. The stories can lack that.

Jon: Yeah, and whether it’s an ensemble piece, or a single character, or two characters, I think you just have to find that one thing. The 50 moments exercise I do, what my character goes through, doing little exercises like that with your characters can help find theme a lot of times. Sometimes you might not even see it.

Like, “What does your character want? Where do they want to go? What’s their goal?” Those things can help find theme, I think.

Scott: What about writing a scene? What are your goals in writing a scene?

Jon: That it doesn’t suck.[laughter]

I always try to come from a point of character intention. I think of that great scene in 21 Grams, where Sean Penn, his character, he’s sleeping in the car outside of Naomi Watts’s house and she sees him. She comes out there and it’s this two minute scene that is just absolutely astounding.

You look at something like that and you think, “Each one of these people want something different than the other one. They’re trying to make the other person see that. Then the other one is trying to stop them.” It’s a push and pull.

You can look at it as simple as that. One person wants has something, and they don’t want to give it to the other person, and vice versa. That other person just has to get it from them.

Scott: Just by looking at and framing a scene, saying, “Somebody wants something. Somebody has something. Somebody wants to get something,” now you’re in the realm of conflict.

Jon: Yeah. The obvious way to look at it is: One character has a gun; the other character doesn’t have a gun; that character needs to get that gun. You can do that same thing with anything. Someone loves someone else. All they want is that person to say, “I love you” but no matter what, that other person doesn’t want to say it. you can come up with some pretty interesting moments in a very economical way with something like that. I think it’s just important to focus on it’s a push and pull throughout in every scene.

Not every scene is like that, obviously. If it’s just one person by themselves, and it’s just a quick window into something, again, just make it mean something. The thing that I notice the most about scripts that I read that are very underdeveloped is there’s a lot of scenes that have a lot of pretty dialog, and it sounds good, but it doesn’t mean anything. It’s a waste of a page.

Every actor will look at that, and the first thing that they will ask a writer or director is, “What does this character want here?” If you can’t answer it, then the actor’s not going to be able to find it. That’s the thing. Every scene, there has to be a goal.

Scott: So let me ask you, what do you love most about writing?

Jon: [laughs] That’s a loaded question, man. Love most about writing? Well, I guess, like everybody that writes, I love it at times, and I hate it at times. I think the thing I love most about it is that making something up out of nothing is really hard. But when you have those little victories, as a writer, nothing feels better. I think that is one of the big things for me, is just being able to create something out of nothing that may one day entertain, inspire someone, horrify them, or make them laugh or cry. Being able to achieve that is pretty special.

Scott: Let’s end with this. It’s a question I always ask. I’m sure you’re asked about it all the time, too. What advice can you offer to aspiring screenwriters about learning the craft and breaking into Hollywood?

Jon: I think you nailed it when you said learning the craft. People are either good storytellers or they’re not. I think the best thing that you can do is try to have a really good barometer of your own talent or your own skillset. There’s a lot of people that want to be screenwriters or directors or actors and they just don’t have it. It’s a tough pill to swallow, especially when you love movies, but to identify with your skill, or lack thereof, is paramount.

Also I’d advise to not worry about breaking into Hollywood so much. Obviously, that’s your hope. But, if that’s your goal, I think you’re going to slow yourself down. I feel the best thing is just to try to hone your craft and learn the process of writing as best you can.

Read a ton of scripts. I can’t advise that enough. Read as many scripts as you can get your hands on. Find the movies that you love, and then watch them, and then get the script and read it. Even read it while you’re watching the movie. Pause it. Look at how they did that. That taught me so much.

I think things like that are…I don’t know, I’m meandering along here, but I just think hone your craft and focus on writing as much as you can. Eventually, once you write that one thing that’s really great, it’ll find a home. I don’t know how, but it will.

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