We've long been taught that patience is a virtue. Hollywood screenwriter Todd Farmer — who'll run an intensive master class at this year's Gold Coast Film Festival — begs to differ.
"I was amazingly impatient," says Farmer (best known for My Bloody Valentine 3D, Jason X and Drive Angry), when asked how he got into screenwriting. "I thought I wanted to write novels. Once I figured out the story, though, I just didn’t have the patience to write four or five hundred pages. Then I saw a screenplay in a book store, it was a Quentin Tarantino screenplay, and it was a hundred pages long. I was like, ‘hey, I can do that!’ So it was just me being lazy, really."
Similarly, Farmer didn't have much time for creative writing instructor Robert McKee's notorious story seminar. "I found myself impatient with it," he says, "because he would tell me things and I was like, ‘oh, yeah, I do that’. It wasn’t like I was learning, it wasn’t like he was teaching me how to do things, he was basically just saying that I was doing the right thing.
"There were things I learned while I was there that were good, but for the most part, I don’t think there are any rules in Hollywood. I do think there are gatekeepers who will read a script, and if they don’t see something that’s a little bit familiar, structurally, they’ll throw it away. They’ll literally throw it in the can and you won’t get a shot.
"So I think when you’re trying to break into the business, you have to play by the rules. You have to do what is expected of you. It’s the same thing with Picasso! Picasso started out painting fruit in bowls before he painted his masterpieces. You have to start out with the basics to get your foot in the door. Once you’ve done that, then you can do whatever you want."
Farmer got his own foot in the door with Jason X, the tenth film in the Friday The 13th series (and the only one set in space, natch). It was something of an auspicious debut for a rookie screenwriter. “When I got out here [to LA],” he explains, “the guy who had written the ninth movie introduced me to the guy who controlled the rights, and I worked for him for about three years. He was embarrassed by horror, he didn’t want to make horror movies anymore. But after about three years of trying to make other movies and not being taken seriously, he was like, ‘well, alright, I need to re-fill the coffers, so we’re going to make another Jason movie’.
“I just happened to be the numbnut who was working there at the time, so he was like, ‘well, what ideas do you have?’ I gave him the idea, and that’s how it happened. At the time, I thought it was because I was a genius. I didn’t realise until later that there was a tremendous amount of luck involved. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”
Farmer took advantage of the opportunity that had landed in his lap. He went on to form a successful partnership with director Patrick Lussier that began with their blockbuster remake of My Bloody Valentine and continued with Drive Angry — perhaps the most insane Nic Cage film of all.
“We actually wrote it with Tom Atkins in mind,” Farmer reveals. “He was in My Bloody Valentine, and he was also in Halloween III, The Fog, just a whole heap of old 1980s movies, and we were big fans of his. We loved Tom, and we thought that after My Bloody Valentine, Lionsgate would come back to us and say, ‘hey, we made 100 million dollars off this movie, and we want you to do another one’. And we were going to say, ‘sure, we’ll do another one, but you know what? We want to make this little bitty car movie first. We want to make this movie, we’ll shoot it for $5 million in 18 days, and we want it to star Tom Atkins. That’s what we thought would happen, that we’d do this tiny little movie.
“But then Lionsgate didn’t want to do a sequel, for their own reasons, so we decided to just write Drive Angry anyway. We met with a bunch of producers… we met with Mike De Luca, and De Luca had just done the Ghost Rider movie with Nic. He sent it to Nic, and I think Nic signed on at the halfway point. He read half of the script, and he called Mike back and said, ‘I want in’. Suddenly we had a Nic Cage movie.”
Not only did they survive the experience, but they thoroughly enjoyed it, too.
“It was wonderful! The great thing about Cage is that he really is one part genius and one part completely insane. That’s what makes him brilliant. He has no fear when it comes to playing with a character. We wrote it with the idea that, you know, there were several influences from old car movies, but there was also the influence of High Plains Drifter. We never told anybody that. But when Nic came in, he started talking about how he was going to channel Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter. I mean, that was great, but we never told him to do that! We never told him that’s what we were thinking of when we wrote it. He just did that.
“Then there would be times when he would be shooting a scene, and there’d be dialogue coming out that he didn’t even know was coming out. He created this one scene where he said he wasn’t going to have another beer until he could drink it out of Jonah King’s skull. Jonah King was the villain in the movie. I never wrote that line! Patrick never wrote that line! But as soon as we said ‘cut’, we ran to Gary Tunnicliffe, who was our special effects guy, and said, ‘dude, can you make us a skull?’
“So Gary went back to his workshop and started making a skull so Nic Cage could drink a beer out of it. That’s the magic of making movies.”
With a string of successes under his belt, Farmer is now looking to bring his commercial instincts to Oz. "Australian writers and directors always think outside the box," he says, "and that’s a great thing! Their movies are often very artistic. The problem is they don’t tend to be very commercial.
"The thing about Australia is that the population doesn’t allow you to make a $20 million movie and get your money back in Australia. The population’s just not big enough to do that. So if you’re going to make movies of that size, they have to be commercially viable. You have to be able to sell to Japan! You have to be able to sell to the UK! You have to be able to sell to the States! And to do that, you have to have some commercial taste. That’s a challenge, but it can also be fun."
Todd Farmer will show you how to get your scripts made at the Gold Coast Film Festival from April 22-23.
