Interview (Part 1): Greg Roque

My interview with 2022 Black List writer for his script Jerry!.

Greg Roque wrote the original screenplay Jerry! which landed on the 2022 Black List. I had the opportunity to chat with Greg about his creative background, writing a Black List script, and the craft of screenwriting.

Today in Part 1 of a 6-part series to run each day through Sunday, Greg talks about how writing became an outlet for him creatively and emotionally following a serious spinal cord injury.

Scott Myers: Congratulations on making the 2022 Black List. A few questions about your creative background. Where did you grow up, and how did you get interested in writing and comedy?

Greg Roque: I’ve lived in the LA area my entire life. I basically grew up in the harbor, so your Long Beaches and your San Pedros. Very port‑based, port‑centric parts of LA. Hollywood, even though it’s about 25 miles away, was a different land to me.

The LA that I knew was more working class, more Hispanic and immigrant based. I just grew up around a lot of, by the way, my parents are Mexican, but I grew up in a diverse community with a lot of Hispanic people, Black people and South East Asian immigrants.

That was the LA that I knew. The 405, the 110, and all the Hollywood-bound freeways were not part of my everyday commute. I was more a 710 kind of guy.

As far as my early inspirations, my parents always had the TV on. Luckily, I grew up in a time before streaming took over. A lot of channels, especially the Spanish channels, would have a lot of movies dubbed in Spanish, so I got a nice education through syndication. That’s how I started learning the cinematic vocabulary. From there, again, I fell in love with writing.

I’d say another pivotal moment was when I was 14, I had a spinal cord injury. Following that, I was at this crossroads where I was like, “OK. Well, essentially, I can do what I want now.” It was like, “What do I want to do with this? How do I center my life?” I figured writing dumb jokes was the best medicine. From there I was like, “Oh, let’s write dumb screenplays, and let’s see where that goes.”

Scott: Do you remember some movies or TV shows from your youth that were particularly memorable to you?

Greg: Yeah, so both my parents loved Westerns. Growing up, I saw Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy in Spanish. It wasn’t until later I found out it was an Italian production filmed in English. To me, so many of the early American Westerns, their frontiers frontier, I imagined in Spanish.

Then as I got older, I was like, “Oh, Clint Eastwood is an American actor from San Francisco. Go figure.”

Scott: You mentioned Steve Martin. Did you like some of those Steve Martin movies?

Greg: Oh yeah, yeah. For me, I’m trying to think of the first Steve Martin movie I saw in the theatre. I remember, “Planes, Trains & Automobiles.” Of course, that was the one that would show every Thanksgiving or around the holiday season.

I think I saw “Bowfinger”. It’s the earliest memory I have of Steve Martin. I discovered his comedy…When did I really start listening to…I think I might have heard “King Tut” when I was a teenager. I thought, “Steve Martin? The “Cheaper by the Dozen” guy? He was a comedian?”

From there, he was a wild, crazy guy in “Let’s Get Small,” and “Comedy Is Not Pretty.” Yeah, he was a big inspiration for me, especially in college. I saw that he did philosophy for his undergrad and I was like, “Oh, if it’s good enough for Steve Martin, it’s good enough for me.”

Just like him, I went to Cal State, Long Beach. Then I went to UCLA. Talk about imitation being the most sincere form of flattery. I figured, “I’m going to follow Steve Martin’s career path. Let’s see where that goes.”

Scott: You mentioned your spinal injury in a moving SoulPancake video. You said the hardest part was not the incident itself but “the reconstruction period” and having to re‑enter the world. Was the writing and comedy helpful for you in that process, reconstructing your life?

Greg: I think it was. That came eventually because I don’t believe in the trope that, “If you’re suffering or a sad artist, that’s when you make the best art.”

Obviously, it’s about repackaging that trauma, but repackaging that trauma and reforging it into something that’s worthwhile and pretty to hear or read or whatever. That comes from a meditative process that you get after you’re done with sorting out all your bullshit.

I never got the people who want to use stand‑up comedy as a therapy. It’s like, “No, you should go to therapy. Then once you get all that figured out, make sense of your life and stuff.”

I guess to answer that question, jokes, the idea of playful nonsense, was the only way that I found meaning in a lot of stuff following my injury and a lot of other stuff that happened in my life.

Scott: When you were at Cal State Long Beach, did you major in philosophy?

Greg: I did for a while, and then I was double majoring in philosophy and English, but I got sick one semester, so I took a year and a half off. When I returned, at that point, I figured I liked movies more than I liked thinking. I told myself, “All right, I’m going to drop the philosophy part of my double major and just do English. Then from there, it was onto screenwriting.”

Scott: Then, if I understand it, there was the MFA program at UCLA.

Greg: I graduated almost four years ago this summer.

Scott: What was that experience like for you? Because I know a lot of people say, “It doesn’t make sense to go to film school,” expensive, unnecessary. Thoughts?

Greg: My undergrad was just straight English, so I wanted to learn the classic rules of screenwriting. My undergrad degree wasn’t a specialized film degree or something in the discipline. I’d say film school was good for teaching me film history.

Prior to film school, I wrote short stories because that’s what I was into. In high school, I started seriously watching and collecting movies. I have a collection of a couple thousand movies. I want to say a little above 5,000.

I would say that film school was great in helping me focus. It helped me focus on what I wanted to do. I would say most of they were teaching I already knew outside of film school. UCLA is a decent institution. I’d recommend it for people who want to pursue this career path.

Part of wanting to be a writer is that the passion has got to start from outside. You can go to USC, UCLA, AFI, all the fancy ass schools you want, but if you don’t devote yourself to your craft outside of school, your script ain’t going to be worth much.

Tomorrow in Part 2, Greg reveals what inspired him to write an original screenplay based on the exploits of TV show host Jerry Springer.

Greg is repped by Bellevue Productions.

Twitter and Instagram: @gregroqueislame.

Website: gregroque.com.

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