Interview (Part 4): 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 4 of a 5-part series to run each day this week through Saturday, Matt and Dave discuss the importance of answering this question when writing an original screenplay: “Why them, why now?”

Scott: Were there any movie comps you were thinking about? Because several come to my mind “Raising Arizona,” “Austin Powers.” There’s a little bit of that. “Killing Eve.” Were there any movie comps?

Matt: I don’t think we were thinking movie comps for this one. I think we were just trying to make it…

Dave: I mean, there were elements of “Mission Impossible” and “John Wick” here and there early on. But it became its own thing.

I think one of the hardest things early on, at least for me, is that’s just the way I write is I have to hear it and see it in my head, and so literally, it’ll start to play out here.

Until we get those first few pages where we start to get the tone and the characters, it can be a bit of a struggle.

And once we find that, then it’s like a fire. It just starts going, but keep moving..

Getting those, establishing, really figure out what your tone is because it’s different every movie. Even if it’s action comedy, it’s a different tone of action comedy from script.

Matt: Yeah, this is a much different tone than “Level Up” that we did. We had another script we did, which is a romance. It had a very different tone as well. Even though they’re all action comedies, they’re just tonally slightly different.

Scott: So these three guys get the baby Millie. The first half of act two is largely about dealing with the baby, like just being fish out of water. Did you brainstorm? Dave, I think you’ve got kids. I don’t know about Matt, but knowing…

Dave: They’re taking a bath in the bathroom right now.

[laughter]

Scott: OK. Because there are those scenes, like, shopping for diapers and stuff like that. Did you brainstorm a list of parent-baby activities you could possibly exploit in the script?

Matt: We brainstormed. Dave had a lot of stories.

Dave: Set pieces first. We started, we were like we know this is going to be a good bit. You know, that’s a good bit. We’ll do have list of different bits.

There was at the point, especially during this rewrite, where my daughter was nine months old now, so I’d be like “Hey — she just headbutted me in the face — we’re putting that in.”

Matt: He took a lot of anecdotes from real life.

Dave: That scene where Tom goes shopping for the baby stuff —

Matt: Yeah.

Dave: We thought that’d be a lot of fun. We love the idea of how do you weaponize baby stuff because it’s also so not designed to be weaponized

Matt: And yet, you’re like, but it could be.

Dave: You get pureed beets in your eyes, that’s going to sting.

Matt: That’s not going to be fun.

[laughter]

Scott: Oh, yeah. You literally have a pram in danger moment.

Matt: Yeah.

Dave: Yes.

Scott: Baby in the pram in danger, I was remembering that scene in “Battleship Potemkin,” the 1925 movie.

Dave: That was part of our inspiration.

Scott: Oh, wow. OK. True cinephile.

Dave: That’s film school.

[laughter]

Scott: These hitmen, what they’re good at, they’re good at killing people.

Matt: Right.

Scott: But as fathers, it’s exact opposite. It’s about protecting people. And so it’s very simple and clean and works beautifully when you’re talking about the respective transformations of these characters.

Matt: Thank you. Yeah, that’s what we’re shooting for.

Dave: I would say that’s always the biggest thing that we harp on is once we set it up, what is the arc and how do we make it as clean as possible, but also the old “Why them, why now” is one of our big first questions we always ask and then, how do we make sure that that plays through the whole thing?

Matt: That was another way we picked these characters too is why are these the ones?

Dave: What do they each need to learn from? What is the baby going to teach each of them?

Matt: Right.

Scott: Yeah. The baby’s a change agent.

Matt: Yep.

Dave: The catalyst. Yeah. Exactly.

Scott: Awright, I’m saving the most important question for last. Why use bolded slug lines? I mean the audacity!

Matt: The controversy all over Twitter.

[laughter]

Matt: It just makes it easier to read for me, at least.

Dave: I think anything you can do as a writer to make it easier on the reader, the more you do in my experience in this business, the more you find not everyone wants to read a long script, not everyone wants to read it all. If you can find ways to get people to look at the page and engage with the page, that’s a great challenge.

Matt: Again, there’s no rule. You do what you whatever works for you.

Scott: Well, particularly if they’re reading scripts on their phones or iPad.

Dave: Have you ever seen that script for “Nightcrawler?”

Scott: Oh, yeah. Dan Gilroy.

Dave: I love what he did on that. Genius.

Scott: Oh, I use that all the time with my students. I said one of the rules, you can’t [inaudible] .

Dave: And, really, going back to Goldman, he broke the rules also. He used caps for emphasis all the time.

Scott: I show my students, he has a 293word sentence. It’s just action, action, action, action, action, action, action when they’re at the shootout thing in Bolivia. 293word sentence.

Dave: Yeah. Love that.

Scott: Well, so you write the script. How long did that take, do you think, between the concept and then getting it to the point where you’re sending it out on the town?

Matt: By the time we sent it out, I don’t know, 9 weeks, 12, 10 weeks. I’m talking about getting it out to town because we did some rewrites of rest of it.

Dave: We did a couple of notes passes for them. So, yeah, I think that’s about right.

Scott: Yeah. About nine weeks. That’s pretty tight.

Matt: We’re fast.

Dave: Our first draft was four to five weeks.

Scott: Wow.

Dave: Here’s the thing. I often run into this. I was talking to Matt about this. There was a podcast about this one where they were saying how Tom Stoppard was hired to rewrite “Shakespeare in Love.” He did it in 10 weeks and she [podcast host] was sort of joking how he kind of phoned it in.

I’m like, why? Why would it take you that much longer to do a dialogue pass on a script? Because if you put in six, seven hours of work a day and you generate 10, 12 pages a day, then you should get to 100 page script in about 10 days. Really, the hardest thing for us is just the story is the outline, the structure building. Once you have that…

Matt: And it’s just putting it down.

Dave: Seems doable, and that’s just how it’s been for us.

Matt: We’ll write for hours and hours.

Dave: Exactly.

Scott: Well, that didn’t seem to bother John Hughes who would knock out scripts in a week or two, even a long weekend.

Dave: Exactly. Exactly.

Tomorrow in Part 5, Dave and Matt answer some craft questions and provide advice to aspiring screenwriters.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, go here.

Part 3, go here.

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

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