Guy talk

This is a twitter conversation between Jory John and Mac Barnett.

I thought it was funny.

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A blonde wanted to travel to the sun...

True story. This kid is a barrel of laughs.

This was Paul's favorite part of the comic, so here it is a little bigger: 

All ye who write and illustrate children's books, I hope you'll look at Mac Barnett's Picture Book Manifesto for the sake of children (and their parents and weary teachers) everywhere.

Boring books are the bane of my profession.

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Citizen Kang: The Last Straw

Credit to Rob Delaney for inspiring this comic with the following tweet: "Revenge is a dish best served... BOLD." - I want to hear Taylor Lautner say this then throw a donkey at a helicopter."

I'm not big on Taylor Lautner (please note, the above is not a drawing of Lautner), but I'll throw a donkey at a helicopter any day.

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Let's all talk to Max Landis!

Meet Max. 

Max Landis hit the big screen last year with Chronicle (just released on DVD!) and has been swimming in work ever since. If you don't know his name yet, sit up and take a little notice because it's entirely likely that your next favorite movie will have sprouted from his brain.

Max carved out an hour to talk to me last week about his work, old and new. Proceed with caution, as some Chronicle spoilers lay ahead.

Sassquach: How many screenplays have you got so far?

Max Landis: I finished one today, so I'm at 70 [screenplays] now.. I want to get to 100 by the time I’m 30. I think I can do it, but we’ll see. I’m producing things now, so I don’t get to write my own stuff. I don’t know if I should count scripts I’ve produced as scripts I’ve written. I don’t think any amount of meddling can replace [writing]. It’s still a script someone else wrote. I would be horrified if I found out that one of my producers identified a script that I had written as one of their own. That would be like a nightmare. 

I wrote my first script at fifteen...shortly after I lost my virginity. I wrote my first script about a battlefield. It didn’t have much dialogue, but it was a guy who gets lost on this other planet after losing the big battle. He’s just wandering around looking at dead aliens. 160 pages.  Not a very realistic first draft. Everything I’ve ever written has a good idea in it, but saying everything I’ve ever written is good is a real stretch. Of the things I’ve written, I think…five of them are really good. Five or six. Okay, I’m gonna count that one. Six. Nine of them are good, maybe more than nine. The last bunch I’ve done are good. The rest of them have good ideas. 

Certain concepts get repeated again and again and again. Almost half of my scripts have characters with some sort of daddy issue or have the father as a villain. A lot of my scripts have people who are struck by lightning or shocked by electricity. Like a LOT of the time. Maybe half my scripts have major electrical malfunctions. It a theme I’m recognizing now because we’re talking about it. 

Sassquach: What's your writing routine like?

Max Landis: I write when I feel like writing. I don’t know where you heard about my work ethic, it’s a complete lie. I’m a lazy guy. I’m able to write quickly. I’ll get into a mode where I’d write 20-30 pages at a time. It’s never about time, blocking my time, and I’ve been doing worse and worse the more projects I have. I get sort of overwhelmed, but then I realized that in the last three months I’ve finished three scripts. Four, now. And also two shorts. At some point, I’m getting a lot of writing done. I’m not sure when. I have friends who are like, “I’m gonna write for five hours.” I can’t do that. I’m just on facebook the whole time.  When I wrote my script Mr. Right…it was sort of like being on mushrooms. I was lying in bed with my girlfriend at the time. She was watching me write it and I had to keep writing it so she could see what happened. It was one of those. A lot of the dialogue in there was things that we’d said to each other. That was my girlfriend at the time, this was almost five years ago.

Sassquach: The most vivid parts of Chronicle come from Andrew, the main character, and his high school misery. Did any of that come from your own experience?

Max Landis: I got kicked out of high school in my first year. I can’t say I really relate to Andrew because the reasons I got kicked out and the reasons I didn’t have any friends were that I was mean. I was a jerk. I was the weird, mean, sort of very smart jerk. Awkward and obnoxious and just sort of horrible. Andrew isn’t very smart and he’s not a jerk, he’s just sort of a piece of shit. He’s a victim for the sake of being a victim. I really don’t relate to anything happens to him in that movie, apart from the fact that I’d really like to be able to fly. The idea that your character have to be some kind of representation of yourself …I don’t think it’s right. I don’t think that’s what writing’s about. It’s taking things you know about and putting them into a structure that other people understand. I don’t feel like you personally need to have experienced any of it.  

(SPOILER AHEAD)

The wish fulfillment aspect of Chronicle, which most people got off on, wasn’t really the point to me. The point to me was more about the destructive power of loneliness. At that age you can make one mistake and feel like it’s the end of the world, like I’m never gonna get my life back. Honestly, Andrew just threw up, it wasn’t that bad. But then his friend died and his whole spin-out came from being emotionally vulnerable and making bad decisions instead of actually being evil or coming up with a quest for revenge. There are so many bail-out points where it could have gone fine and he’d have ended up being a superhero at the end of the movie. That’s very intentional. Up until Andrew says, “I’m an apex predator,”…that conversation, if Matt had said the right stuff, which he didn’t because he’s Matt, he could’ve talked Andrew down. That’s what Chronicle is about: the failure of judgment in the face of emotion. 

Sassquach: How does producing compare to writing?
 

Max Landis: It’s wildly different. Right now I’m juggling all these balls, eventually one of them’s going to drop and hit me in the head. I’m also directing something. It’s all tremendously exciting. I don’t know if I can compare writing to producing yet. It’s interesting. The Death and Return of Superman was sort of the first long thing I’d directed. It was tremendously rewarding. We’ll see. The game of my life right now is looking at all these things in my life that are causing me stress and trying not to be stressed out by them. 

Sassquach: You’re going to direct your first film soon?

Max Landis: I hope I get to do it. This business is so liquid. People don’t realize how liquid it is. Just because you sell a script doesn’t mean it’s going to be a movie. Just because you made a movie doesn’t mean it comes out. There are so many different layers to it. It’s stressful. I feel comfortable directing [this movie] because it's very personal. I know how things look in it, which is very different for me. It’s very different from how I usually feel. I have ideas about how things look in my head, but ultimately I wouldn’t know how to make it into a visual.  This is the first thing where I really feel comfortable getting behind the camera and saying, “You stand there, you stand there, the camera hits you.” Before this, I never had that sort of confidence. 

Sassquach: How do you deal with the stress?

I’ve got such a better appreciation for things when I’m outside my head. I was told that physical activity leads to emotional catharsis...but yoga stresses me out. I was boxing for a while, but all I’ve found is that I really don’t like getting punched. I knew that from before, but boxing illustrated that in the most perfect indirect way how much I despised being punched. 

 

There’s nothing like getting punched. You get hit and a number of things happen. The most startling thing is that it feels like your vision gets pushed this way [gestures to the side]. Your whole frame of reference is suddenly here [to the side] without you having to turn your head. That’s one of those things you don’t really think about. If you’re getting punched in the face a lot, it’s like an earthquake. Explosions, you have no equilibrium, it’s just terrifying. I threw up a couple of times. 

Sassquach: Currently, you're working on a Pied Piper script, is that right?

Max Landis: I love Pied Piper. I really really love Pied Piper. It’s sort of my…they don’t want to make it a musical, but I really wish it could be like a 90s Disney musical…but live action. It’s pretty much got that sort of feel to it. How do you describe it? It’s like a fairy tale but not in a revisionist fairytale way. It’s not like the Snow White movie that’s like a Lord of the Rings action movie. This Pied Piper is much more like Beauty and the Beast but live action with a really scary monster and a really fun plot set in this ambiguous story-book time. 1600s? Even though no one really knows. But [in the dialogue] everyone talks like it’s now. All the dialogue is very poppy. They jump back and forth and say things like, “Are you kidding me?”

Sassquach: Your storytelling career started with you telling crazy lies as a kid?

Max Landis: I would tell very elaborate made up stories about what had happened at school that day or things that had happened in history. I’d just make up all kinds of bullshit. Very little of it involved me. It was never like, “I did this, I went here” it was more like, “Did you know?” As I got older I began to realize that stories belonged in story land and real life belonged in real life land and there was a way to make real life sound like a story. I got better at that. I got better at making things that had actually happened to me sound rather glamorized. Then I started writing and realized, “Oh, this is where I can put all the stories from story land.” I had one…about the space program. There was another space station before they had the international space station, but they had floated too low in orbit, there was no way to get down from it, so the astronauts had to parachute from the low orbit around Earth. The thing was that when you’re going that fast they knew they wouldn’t be able to catch them. The parachute would come apart. They only had the parachute for the capsule. So they had these helicopters flying at very high altitudes with what amounted to a giant net. So they parachuted and were caught at cloud level and had to be brought back down to the ground. I was about 12.

I had other ones about how dragons existed, but they existed in this very zoological way. Some form of dinosaur that was a holdover, native to China or native to Europe and lived in some deep cave. A lot of dinosaur stuff. Some stuff that I later found out was kind of true. I made up this story about how, in Native American, ancient Wyoming, there was this massive explosion  like one made with a nuclear missile in the early 1800s. No one knew what the explosion was. I later found out that it kind of actually happened in the Tunguska event. 

Sassquach: You recently came back from the Dubai ComiCon [the first ComiCon Landis has participated in as a speaker]. What was it like to connect with your fanbase?

Max Landis: I love the fan rush. I get off on it. I enjoy being appreciated. I think all people do. Your story…knowing someone was interested in it. That’s a wonderful thing. When you’re a writer, any writer can tell you, you’re always showing it to your friends and saying, “Hey give me feedback,” but what you really mean by feedback is, “Tell me how much you like it.” You don’t really want feedback from your friends. You just want them to read it, like it, and talk to you about it. That’s what the fan experience is. It’s fantastic. I had this moment in Dubai on my panel where this guy said, “I just have this one criticism,” and I said, “I don’t really want to hear it.” It got all this applause, but it was true! I don’t want your criticism. I don’t care. I don’t know you. Unless I know you, I don’t care. If you liked it, I’m happy, but if you didn’t, go away.

It was really funny. That’s what the fan experience has been so far. People who have heard my story and it’s like YAAAYYY. Sometimes it gets a little in your face, but mostly it’s just GREAT. 

Sassquach: Are you going to do the rest of the ComiCon circuit?

Max Landis: I dunno, I don’t want to be Virgil Wrestling Superstar.I’ve been going to ComiCon for 12 years. ComiCon, Monsterpalooza, WonderCon, I go to all of them. I’m actually one of the people in the crowd at ComiCon which in my industry is hard because not many of us [attend]. Dubai was the only ComiCon I’ve done so far. They contacted me via facebook and said, “Fly to Dubai for free, be one of the hosts of our ComiCon,” and I was like YES. It was transformative. It changed my life. I can’t think of a single thing that I’ve done that I liked better than the Dubai ComiCon. It was so rewarding. I think I’m going to make a short about it.

I felt completely and totally self-actualized, like the person I wanted to be. Like everything was just going to be great.  

-Max Landis

Thanks again Max! 

If you haven't seen Chronicle yet, get on the trolley!It's a truly excellent story.

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Junkie the Cat

I had a conversation with Max Landis yesterday and was so enraptured with his feline that I thought it merited a comic all its own.

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