Interview (Part 4): Michael Kujak

My interview with 2021 Black List writer for his script Follow.

Michael Kujak wrote the original screenplay “Follow” which landed on the 2021 Black List. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Mike about his creative background, his script, the craft of screenwriting, and what making the annual Black List has meant to him.

Today in Part 4 of a 6-part series to run each day through Saturday, Mike answers my questions about some of the story choices he made in writing “Follow,” both conventional and unconventional.

Scott: I’m always driving home this point to my students that movies and TV are primarily visual media. I want to talk to you about one particular visual in your script, quite an image. Hannah is at Vlogcon, which is like Comic-Con for vloggers. She’s in the hotel room with Millie.

The image starts on the roof of this hotel. Then we cut into the hotel room. There’s a “yelp,” followed by, “A dark shape passes the balcony window behind them. Cash drifting down past the window like snow fall.” It’s surreal. I’m curious, do you remember when you had that idea, it’s such a metaphor for everything that this thing’s about.

Michael: We had it very early on. That image that you’re describing was literally the teaser at certain points in the script, because it’s such a creepy image. I had that early on. The character that that moment is built around is based on a very popular influencer or personality that we don’t have to get into. That image was very early on, and something I always wanted in the script.

Scott: You mentioned the teaser. I want to talk to you about some of the choices you made as a writer here. One of them is that you begin the story like Sunset Boulevard or Double Indemnity. You begin the story in the present: Hannah is bound, clearly being held hostage. Talking to someone off-screen, but we don’t know who. Essentially, what you’re telling is an extended flashback. What was the thinking there for taking that approach to starting the story that way?

Michael: It can be a very cliché way to start a thriller, I know. But we really wanted to give the audience a little taste of something so that we could afford a slower burn in the first act. There’s other stalker movies that you know the person’s batshit crazy by page 10. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted people to empathize with Millie and build her up.

Scott: When Billy Wilder does it, you’re pretty much in safe territory, as long as you do it well. I thought, too, you’re dealing with not only development people, but potential audience members who are sophisticated, so with the opening you have in the script, you start thinking, “Well, wait a minute, maybe Millie isn’t the person that Hannah’s talking to in the opening. It might have been one of the sisters, or it may have been this or that character.” You plant some potential red herrings through the story before we really zero in on Millie. Was that intentional?

Michael: I wanted the audience to be confused by the teaser as much as they were frightened by. It does pay off at the ending. I don’t want to spoil anything but in the opener, you’re not even sure how much Hannah is acting.

You’re not sure if she’s being sincere, or if she’s being held at gunpoint or hostage, or if it’s all an act. Which is a question that repeats throughout all the videos that she shoots. How sincere is she being in this moment? How much of herself is she really showing?

Scott: She’s at Vlogcon. She’s being interviewed. She comes up with this bulimia thing, a confession of sorts to a big audience. Part of me was like, “She just made that up.”

Michael: Whether she made it up or not, the lack of hesitancy to monetize your personal trauma…There’s such a short road between having these traumas that happen in everyone’s life and being able to talk about them. All that’s great.

Then when you see it be accepted by the culture, how quickly someone will monetize a trauma that may or may not have happened to them. It may have happened in a lesser way, but then they amplify it. How easily she’s able to turn that into a moment, or a viral moment for the audience, and for the video later on.

Scott: I want to talk to you about another choice that you made as a writer. The perspective of the story, the point of narrative attack in virtually every scene is Hannah’s POV. Then, later on, there are a couple of moments where it switches to Millie. There’s a scene where she’s listening in on Hannah talking to her friend, Sarah. Where basically, Sarah says, “You got to cut this thing off,” meaning get rid of Millie. We’re experiencing that conversation, but from Mille’s perspective as she eavesdropping on the call.

Then there’s another one where she takes a phone call. They’re in some pitch meeting for a product. She said, “I’ll get that call.” It’s from her manager, Todd. I’m wondering whether that…First of all, whether you were even thinking about it. You were like, “OK, I’m going to have these moments where we’re seeing these scenes from Millie’s perspective.”

Or were you feeling like, “We’ve now gone far enough along in this story, we pretty much know where Millie’s head is at. I’m going to allow the audience to track with her what’s going on in the story”? Do you understand what I’m getting at there?

Michael: Totally. We had to play with it a lot, in terms of when to reveal it, and how much to reveal at different points. You watch something like Single White Female, and you break away from the protagonist’s POV almost immediately.

You see the stalker. She’s in her apartment. She’s got a voicemail. She deletes the voicemail. Right there, you know this person’s up to no good. We had earlier versions of the scripts where we revealed it on page 15, 20, or 25, those little moments into Millie.

But I wanted to keep us just in Hannah’s POV for at least half the script, so that we’re seeing Millie through her eyes before we started to break out of Hannah’s perspective a little bit.

By the time you hit that halfway point, and messed up shit starts happening, it’s almost too late now. Hopefully, the audience fell for Millie in the same way that Hannah has, in a way.

Scott: I thought it was an intentional move on your part. I just wanted to track the thinking on that. I don’t want to give away the ending. It’s quite dramatic. Did you always have that finale in mind?

Michael: Yeah. I did have that finale from pretty early on. We were building to that. There’s other stalker thrillers that it is a tribute to. Rupert Pupkin from King of Comedy and stuff.

I always wanted to build up to a big finale built around the more delusional fantasies parts of Millie to manifest itself in something physical at the end. It gets pretty messed up.

Scott: I think it fits. This is about social media and what a person’s real life is like in that. It blurs those layers. It reminds me of a moment in the movie Adaptation, where the screenwriting guru Robert McKee tells the screenwriter character Charlie Kaufman, I’ll tell you a secret. The last act makes a film. Wow them in the end, and you got a hit.” Your script has that feel, like, “OK, man, we’re going big time here with this finale.” Did you have that ending in mind all along, or was that something that you’ve played around with?

Michael: We did play around with some different endings for it. Again, through the writing process I feel for aspects of Millie’s personality. I wanted her, one, to stay sincere throughout it at all. Part of me, without spoiling anything, wanted her to win in a certain way, or at least for her ideology to win in a certain way.

While the audience can get mad at a lot of the stuff that Hannah does, “Oh, my God, how could she fall for all this?” I wanted it to be sincere that she would make the choice that she makes at the end of the day, even though it might seem crazy to people.

I also didn’t want to write a movie that was…the message that was technology is bad or cell phones are evil. I didn’t want to write something that was that straightforward. I wanted it to be a little more, hopefully, complex, and made people think about it more than just provide a simple moral.

Tomorrow in Part 5, Mike talks about the actual process of writing the script and the role his managers played in that story-crafting process.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, go here.

Part 3, go here.

Mike is repped by:

John Zaozirny (Bellevue)
CJ Fight (WME)

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