Interview (Part 6): Ian Shorr

My interview with 2022 Black List writer for his script The House in the Crooked Forest.

Ian Shorr wrote the original screenplay The House in the Crooked Forest which landed on the 2022 Black List. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Ian about his creative background, writing a Black List script, and the craft of screenwriting.

Today in the final installment in this 6-part series, Ian offers advice on the craft of screenwriting.

Scott: You’ve heard this rule, you can only write in scene description what an actor can act or what the audience will see. You can’t comment or enter into a character’s inner state of being. You have lots of this in this script. Here’s a few examples:

“Rivka listens. Thinks of all she’d trade to shield him from the world. Knowing the world is resistant to such bargains.”

“’Because the person who owned this house was fucking crazy,’” Rivka thinks to herself.”

“She realizes: something does not want them to leave this house. Something wants them to stay so it can play with them.”

Those are all examples of what I call psychological writing. You’re using your narrative voice to comment on or dip into the characters’ inner world. Could you talk about your feelings about that, your philosophy of that?

Ian: Way back when I taking writing class in high school, I was told that a script is just a blueprint for a movie. That was probably the most poisonous piece of advice I could have gotten. A script is not a blueprint. It’s an invitation to collaborate. It’s you presenting someone with a story that they hopefully find so powerful that they’re going to dedicate the next X‑number of years of their life to getting it made.

In order for them to feel that, they have to connect emotionally with the writing. Which means, inviting them into the characters’ heads and putting things on the page that you can’t necessarily shoot.

The majority of my favorite writers will sprinkle this throughout their scripts. If you look at the pilot for “Breaking Bad,” Vince Gilligan does this with such artistry. He sets the gold standard for unfilmmables.

As soon as a writer realizes that their first priority is to make the reader feel something, then tools like unfilmmables become a major source of good in their script.

Scott: I tell my students, “You got to be judicious.” It isn’t like a novel. It’s not like you can just throw off 30 pages inside the character remembering some experience they had in Montana as kid. You can occasionally drop in and do that, to the point you were making.

The gold standard for me is William Goldman’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, because it does everything so well. I was reminded of that script. He’s got that whole cut‑to thing, but the way that you use individual lines to suggest camera shots and whatnot ‑‑ Goldman says that you’re not writing a refrigerator manual. It’s supposed to be entertaining.

Could you talk about the double dashes and the ellipses and the breaking up the paragraphs and your philosophy on that?

Ian: It’s been said that Bill Goldman showed that screenplays could be fun to read, and Shane Black showed they could be fun to write. In the script Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, Goldman wrote a line that completely reinvented the way I approach screenwriting.

It’s the part where Paul Newman kicks that guy in the balls. The way it’s described in the script is “As he finishes speaking, Butch lands the most aesthetically exquisite kick to the balls in the history of American cinema. Logan just stands there a moment, then makes an utterly indescribable sound, his face moving from disbelief to displeasure as he sinks to his knees.”

After seeing that ‑‑ just that little bit of editorializing there ‑‑ “the most aesthetically exquisite kick to the balls in the history of American cinema” — that changed the game for me. I realized that you were allowed to sprinkle in little bits like that, I started looking for ways to maximize the amount of fun a reader could have with my script.

When I’m writing a scene, I’ll focus a lot on scene transitions. I’ll look for the latest point in the scene to come in, and the earliest point to get out early. I’ll look for whatever the most arresting image is to begin the scene with, or I’ll think about how to guide the reader’s eye along the page so that information is being revealed to them line by line so there’s a sense of escalation.

For example, in the scene where we introduce our Nazi characters, we go into the scene pre‑lapping the sound of a tea kettle shrieking, so we’re already putting the audience on edge. Then we jump into this kitchen, tea kettle’s screaming, hand switches off a stove, pours hot tea into a mug, you see a little Nazi ring on the hand stirring the tea, and this unseen voice is delivering a monologue as this is happening. The reader’s now primed for whatever the big reveal is going to be. Whereas if I just started the scene by saying, “There’s five Nazis in a room with two hostages. One of them is making tea,” it wouldn’t read as cinematically on the page.

If you’re a writer‑director, you don’t have to work as hard at your scene descriptions. If you read a Judd Apatow script, there’s zero flashiness in his scene writing because he knows he’s going to shoot it himself and it’s going to look like what it’s going to look like.

But if you’re writing something on spec and the whole goal is to just give the reader a cinematic experience writing it, a lot of that is thinking about, “How am I guiding their eye down the page?”

If there’s a lot of staccato cutting and fast editing in the scene, you can use sentence fragments and dashes to create that rhythm. Whereas if something has a slower pace to it, you can use ellipses and gentler writing to illustrate that softness.

It’s really just about getting the reader to start playing the movie in their head, and once they’re doing that, you’ve got them. Because in their head, the sets always look amazing, the special effects are impeccable, and the acting’s always flawless.

Scott: Oh, that’s great. Goldman, of course ‑‑ I featured that scene you just talked about on my blog and went through it because it’s such a great scene. There’s another scene in Butch Cassidy where Rich is trying to get the bullets in the Bolivia cafe, and Redford’s ‑‑ there’s a 293‑word sentence.

Ian: [laughs]

Scott: It’s continuous action ‑‑ 293 words.

Ian: It’s pretty big.

Scott: No, no. It’s a 293‑word sentence just like dot and all these secondary…

Ian: It’s all one paragraph?

Scott: No, no. You would love it. It’s just the same type of writing you have. It’s just…

Ian: One little line here, one little line there?

Scott: If you got rid of all the cut tos, it’s just like shot, shot, shot, shot, or secondary slug or whatever you usually call it.

One last thing I want to talk about in your script, and this has nothing to do with the rules, but I tell my students, I think scene description ‑‑ better to think about it as poetry rather than prose. I mean that in the sense of strong verbs and vivid descriptors.

Your script just has these moments, like for example ‑‑ this is somebody getting shot ‑‑ “blows wine‑dark confetti out of Brant’s chest.” That’s poetic to me. I read poetry every day. That’s how I start my day, is rereading a poem.

“Viewed from a distance, they move with the molasses‑like torpor of a nightmare.”

“The house’s windows almost resemble eyes in a face’s cavernous entryway, a mouth locked in a scream.”

See, to me, that reads like poetry. I don’t know whether you are a fan of poetry or whatnot, or whether you even think that this is a legitimate way to approach scene description, but this idea of strong verbs, active verbs, and vivid descriptors ‑‑ does that resonate with you?

Ian: Oh, absolutely. All of my favorite writers tend to go for that type of style. You see it in Goldman, you see it in Shane Black, you see it in Scott Rosenberg. Even people with more minimalistic voices like the Coen brothers ‑‑ you’ll still see flashes of it in there.

Given that screenplays themselves aren’t naturally fun to read ‑‑ they’re blocky, they’re antiquated, each scene starts with a big, long sentence of all caps describing where and when we are ‑‑ they’re not designed to read smoothly the way that novels are. Anything that you can do as the writer to make that page inviting, to make the reader start experiencing your story inside their own head ‑‑ that’s how you get your reader to connect with you.

I’ve found that if that stuff doesn’t come naturally to you as a writer, if your voice is more minimalist, then that’s absolutely what you should lean into. The worst thing a writer can do is fake a style that they don’t have naturally.

Even a voice like Walter Hill, for example ‑‑ I was reading the opening page of his script Hard Times, where each sentence is maybe between three and six words long, but it’s all crystal‑clear and each word has such intent and power behind it ‑‑ that’s something that I think readers immediately respond to.

For me, especially if I’m writing something that people have automatic reservations about, like a horror movie about Nazis… if I can seduce them with language on page one and show them that they’re in the hands of someone who cares about their reading experience, then I can get them to go anywhere with me.

Scott: Well said. You sound like someone who reads scripts.

Ian: Yeah. I’ve been devouring all the “For Your Consideration” scripts this week. I just read “Banshees of Inisherin” last night. God, that ripped my heart out.

Scott: That movie. Yeah. McDonagh’s amazing. He’s one of the few people that even approximates to me what the Coens can do, where they manage to bring violence and comedy and pathos all together.

Ian: Oh, yeah.

Scott: Thanks. One last question, and I’m sure you get asked this all the time if you ever meet people in Hollywood or wherever that ‑‑ what advice do you have for people who are trying to break into the business, trying to learn the craft? What advice do you have for them?

Ian: Everyone starts their career writing for free. So when you’re thinking about what type of spec you want to write, the best advice I can give is, only write the things that you’re extremely passionate about. Focus on the things that bring you joy, the things that bring you excitement, because that excitement is going to translate on the page.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, here.

Part 4, here.

Part 5, here.

Ian is repped by UTA and Bellevue Productions.

Twitter: @IanShorr

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