Interview (Part 1): Max Taxe

My interview with 2022 Black List writer for his script Ripple.

Max Taxe wrote the screenplay Ripple which landed on the 2022 Black List. I had the opportunity to chat with Max 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, Max talks about his growing up in Los Angeles, going to film school, and the importance of structure when it comes to writing screenplays.

Scott Myers: You’re from the Los Angeles area, yes?

Max Taxe: Yeah, I have the most boring backstory. I’m from LA, then went to USC, and stayed here. I lived vicariously through everyone else.

Scott: BFA in screenwriting?

Max: Yeah, I went for undergrad. I was in the screenwriting program. We had 24 people in my class, and you’re with those same people for all four years, so you all get pretty close.

Scott: Are you still in touch with them?

Max: With a good amount of them. I was lucky to be in a class of just kind, low-key people. We all started at a weird, interesting moment in the world and in the industry. My freshman year was in 2007. So we had the writers’ strike, right as the landscape was changing. Then in 2008, the financial crisis changed everything.

We were, I think, the last class that went into film school…not naive, but with a little more of the idea that you can go to college and explore and figure out if you even like this, if this is right for you, whereas now… I don’t know if I would’ve jumped right into this incredibly specific film program, if I would’ve taken that very, very expensive gamble, just because I loved to write and loved movies. If I started college, like, two years later, who knows if I would’ve felt that freedom to take that risk.

Scott: I think if I’m not mistaken, wasn’t Tom Benedict one of your instructors?

Max: Yeah! I had him my sophomore year. He taught the class where you wrote your first full‑length feature. He was the best, he taught me everything — all the fundamentals I know about structure and sequences and all of that come straight from him. I think I bugged the hell out of him too. I remember meeting with him outside of class once, asking him like “let’s get deeper into this, let’s break down everything I did wrong in that script” and he was like “you’re 19, this is your first script, give yourself a break.”

Scott: Tom was the first screenwriter I met in LA.

Max: Oh, no way.

Scott: When I sold K‑9, I got an office at Universal, and his office was down the hall. Actually, his brother, Peter Benedict, was my first agent. Tom and I have known each other ever since.

Max: He’s fantastic.

Scott: Of course, he wrote the movie Cocoon, which is amazing.

Max: Perfect.

Scott: In addition to film school, were there any other resources you used to learn the craft?

Max: I feel like I’ve tried everything and anything. When I went to film school, I immediately felt behind. I loved movies, I loved writing, but… These were all people who had been writing scripts for years already, who knew what they were doing, and I felt so out of my depths. They sent this list of movies to watch before freshman year, and I had seen, like, ten of them. So I spent all summer watching movies, three a day, running to Hollywood Video every single morning to get more. Doing that was my first real resource, just watching everything.

I don’t recommend it, but I read every book on screenwriting, every book on structure. I was desperate to figure it out. You quickly realize you can disregard everything those books say, but each one had one or two things that stuck with me, that felt right. I took what felt right, tossed the rest. Your book would’ve been a godsend during that stretch.

But the main thing I did, I think my main resource, the most informative one at least, was breaking down movies. I still have all these documents where I outlined every movie that I loved, and movies that felt like research for whatever I was trying to write. It forced me to really look at why the movie was put together the way it was, how it was paced, how they doled out plot, and character, and everything in between. It was a great way to dig into structure. I did the same thing with scripts that I was able to get my hands on at the time.

I could keep going back to those documents while writing my own stuff and go… Why did that work, but mine’s a mess? It let me be a bit academic about the whole process, which made it feel graspable.

That’s something I still do, to an extent. I’m not breaking down a movie scene by scene, but… Every time I start a new project, I feel like I’m starting from scratch, I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing, that I’ve never written before, and if I don’t figure this out fast, they’ll realize they paid the wrong guy. So I still watch movies, study them, read what I can, give notes on friends’ projects, and try to keep learning. I don’t think there’s ever an end to that.

All that just buys me freedom in the end. I end up working on the structure, the big picture stuff, in that same academic way, so that I can really mess around, play with the characters, and not worry about the whole thing coming undone.

Scott: When William Goldman says, “Screenplays are structure,” there’s truth to that. Like you were saying, once you can get a handle on that, then you can immerse yourself in the lives of the characters.

Max: For me, it’s almost a safeguard for me to not spin out, because it’s like once I have the structure in place, well, that’s what I have. That’s my playground. That’s why I get obsessive about structure theme. I still like to give myself the latitude to be wrong, to follow paths that end up leading me to the entirely wrong place, but…

Once I’ve made the decisions, and put down the parameters, here’s the structure, here’s the theme, here are the characters, all three are bound together, then I don’t have a million other decisions to make. I have ten decisions, I have five, I have… You’re in this box now. So explore that. Some of it is just to keep myself sane, of course, and drive myself insane later when I decide to take a sledgehammer to it, but… It’s helpful early on to give myself some internal rules to follow. Otherwise, I could chase stray ideas and thoughts forever and never write an actual draft.

Scott: That actually reminds me of there’s an anecdote about Igor Stravinsky, the great neoclassical composer, who would break all sorts of compositional rules.

He was teaching a class and one of the students said, “Maestro, don’t you feel restricted by composing on the piano, the eighty-eight keys? Doesn’t that inhibit your creativity?”

He said, “No, it’s the exact opposite. That gives me the structure. I don’t have to worry about anything beyond that. I’ve got those eighty-eight keys and that within that playground, like you were saying, I can do anything I want.”

Max: Yes. My parents were big on Billy Wilder, and those… His movies aged so well. And they’re so perfectly structured in a way that let him be free to go to some surprising places that still felt of the piece. You never look at The Apartment and go like, “Man, they really had to rein it in.” You’re like, “No, they used the form perfectly and went to some dark places, went to some great places.” It’s because of that mastery that it just felt so natural.

All of his [Wilder] movies, even look at the ones that were more overlooked, like Ace in the Hole and those kind of movies. You had to be a master of that craft to get into the nuance they had, and that was 60, 70 years ago in some cases.

Scott: Yeah, they’re doing a retrospective here in Chicago at the Music Box Theater, which is our beautiful old theater. They’re doing a Billy Wilder retrospective. In fact, on New Year’s Day, I went to see The Apartment…

Max: Oh, that’s so nice.

Scott: My favorite movie.

Max: Mine too.

Tomorrow in Part 2, Max talks about some previous projects, then background on his 2022 Black List script Ripple.

Max is repped by Entertainment 360.

Twitter: @taxe

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