Interview (Part 1): Matt Altman & Dave Matalon

My conversation with the writing duo behind the 2024 Black List script Three Hitmen and a Baby.

Action Comedy is my favorite cross-genre, so I’m always happy to see a script represented on the annual Black List. Thanks to Dave Matalon and Matt Altman, Three Hitmen and a Baby made the 2024 List which led to our hour-long interview.

Today in Part 1 of a 5-part series to run each day this week through Saturday, Matt and Dave talk about each found their way into screenwriting, eventually teaming up as partners, and the inspiration for their high concept action comedy script.

Scott Myers: Congratulations on being selected to the 2024 Black List.

Matt Altman: It was very exciting.

Dave Matalon: It was fantastic. Thanks, man.

Scott: Let’s talk about your writing partnership. Let’s start with you, Dave. Where’d you grow up and how did you get interested in writing?

Dave: I grew up in Brooklyn. I always joke not from cool mustache Brooklyn, but Saturday Night Fever Brooklyn. I always loved film as a kid. I used to travel a lot with my dad in Europe and I used to go, while he was working, I would go sit in these piazzas and see movies screened on the old stone walls of buildings.

I just fell in love with movies from a very young age. Then I think it was around 16, I wrote my first script on an old typewriter my mom had. In fact, I think when I went to NYU, I didn’t even know they had film schools. Someone had to tell me that those things existed. I think the main reason I managed to get in because I’d written like four screenplays by the time I was 18 years old.

Scott: You discovered screenplays before film school?

Dave: Yeah, I actually discovered them because my dad brought home a script that someone wanted him to pass along to someone he knew in the industry. He said, here, read this, you love movies, and tell me what you think. I was like, I think it’s horrible. He said, well, then you can do better, write your own. I was like, OK, well. That’s kind of how it happened. Here I am.

Scott: I think that’s the inspiration for quite a few writers. As interns, they’re reading all these scripts and going, “Oh, this stuff is crap. I could do better than that.” Matt, how about yourself?

Matt: I grew up in New York City. Dave’s one of my oldest friends. We’ve known each other since when we were kids.

Dave: Been a long time.

Matt: Yes, long time for us, but my dad was the head electrician at the Barrymore Theater, so he was in theater. I grew up doing that as a stagehand. My first job when I was 12 was on Sesame Street doing props as a backup prop kid. Then I worked in comic stores. I was always into comic books, martial arts. I was deeply into martial arts, deeply into reading Sci-fi and fantasy.

I knew I wanted to be a writer of some kind, but I didn’t know I wanted to write movies until after college, actually. I did the honors English program at SUNY Albany and came back, worked in theater. Dave and I were hanging out, and I think I figured out eventually that I wanted to write movies, because I always loved movies too.

“Empire Strikes Back” is one of my favorite movies as a kid growing up. I think movies hit me first and then I was also a huge “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” fan and all that. TV also got to me around that time, I would say.

Scott: You were staying in touch with each other.

Matt: Yeah, he moved out to LA first. I followed years later, but we wrote scripts together from a distance before I moved out. Then he was also writing on his own. I was also writing on my own. I think I started having success in the contest world, I got the top 30 semifinals in the Nicholl Fellowship in 2008 which got me new managers after I had parted with my first managers.

And then I was a finalist in a bunch of other contests including American Zoetrope, which got me my current manager, Jim in, I guess, 2008, 2009. He encouraged me to move out here and I finally moved out in 2011. Dave had already been out here for a couple of years.

Scott: Dave, what were you doing in LA?

Dave: I was working, generally, and I was optioning scripts. I was doing the indie game a lot in those days and always trying to find a way in by hook or by crook. I was doing a bit of teaching tool writing, acting, and directing, stuff like that.

Matt: Yep. Our first, when I came out here pretty early on, we almost had a script get made that we had optioned with some producers who were friends of ours and they paid for a polish and we had a director, we had the cast and financing and then it fell apart a week or two before it was supposed to go.

Dave: One of many.

Matt: Yeah, one of those, but it taught us about the business.

Dave: If I had a WGA minimum for every script that didn’t go.

Matt: Yes. Right.

Scott: People think it’s such a glamorous gig being a Hollywood writer but scratch the surface of any screenwriter and we all have these stories where, this project was greenlit, then crashed, that project was greenlit, then went away.

Matt: My first big sale on my own was to relativity and they declared bankruptcy. I got the announcement on deadline. I was all excited. I was going to join the WGA and then I never got paid. Like a year later, after going back and forth with the lawyers for a year, they declared bankruptcy and we got the script back.

Scott: Let’s talk about something with a more positive spin, your Black List script “Three Hitmen and a Baby” which is High Concept-O-Rama.

[laughter]

Scott: Here’s a logline for the script:

Three of the world’s top hitmen must take on their most challenging assignment yet, babysitting an infant who holds the key to their survival.

Of course, this recalls the title of the “Three Men and a Baby,” the 1987 American movie, which is based on the French comedy.

What was your first connection with “Three Men and a Baby”?

Dave: We were kind of figuring out what our next concept would be. And we were just playing around with different ideas, ways to kind of take ideas and give them fresh twists that had been a very successful formula for us and for me prior. Then I think we just kind of came to it as we started running different ideas and…

Often we’ll pitch back and forth 20, 30 ideas and go, no, no, no, no.

Then you’ll find the one, you’ll go, that’s it.

Even then, even within those pitches, you’ll go, here’s our five that we like. And then you’ll find the one that you’re like, well, this is really the one we think has the most legs and we’re most excited about writing.

Matt: I think we were twisting comedy movie ideas. We were like, what if this was a comedy? What if this was an action movie instead of a comedy?

Dave: Action comedy, yeah.

Matt: Yeah.

Dave: Also interestingly, the first iteration of this is actually the “Three Godfathers,” which was a book, which I believe starred John Wayne, it was an old ‘’40s movie about three cowboys who get this baby. They’re bandits and have to…So, originally, it was an action comedy, funny enough.

Matt: We sort of brought it back to its roots.

Tomorrow in Part 2, Dave and Matt share their affection for screenwriters William Goldman and Shane Black who use scene description to help create a fun read.

Matt and Dave are repped by Paradigm and The Gotham Group.

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