Lisa Carroll
She’s a “triple threat” creator in the industry — a screenwriter who has done horror television, a young adult film and now a thriller just out in the theaters called “Nerve.” Brilliant Jessica Sharzer (“American Horror Story,” “Speak”) takes a quick break with Moviehole to discuss Kristen Stewart, Dostoyevsky and being briefed by the FBI on the Internet.
MOVIEHOLE: How did you come up with the idea for “Nerve”?
Jessica Sharzer: I had met producer Ally Shearmur at a general meeting and she’d read a script of mine she liked that was a thriller. She said, “I have this project that was a young adult book, it’s an idea for a new franchise.” She optioned it through Lionsgate, they bought the pitch, developed it as a script and we brought on the director, Ariel Schulman. The book tended to skew a bit younger while the dares are more innocent — they were a little less dangerous and less high stakes, so we aged it up, made it a little more “Hunger Games.” We thought we could fit into that audience too as the studio already had the “Divergent” film.
The different thing was, we wanted to take on social media and the Internet; the way we are consuming social media and the way it controls our lives and the danger in putting too much information on there about our lives. Like the stories of kids being bullied on social media, it’s ruined lives. We wanted to speak to that in a Saturday night popcorn format, we didn’t want it to be too preachy, we wanted it to be moving that also had something to say to young people and a bit of a warning. Putting things on social media, it’s easy not to think about it in the morning, and it’s very hard to take it off.
We spoke to two special agents in FBI cyber-crimes — they said twenty years from now, people are going to look back at what we put on in horror. Like the information about kids, where you go on vacation, basically letting people know you are not home right now, you open yourself up for all kinds of things. Talking to them made us real paranoid, but that’s the feeling we wanted the movie to have.
MOVIEHOLE: Was it hard to adapt the book?
JS: I’ve done a lot of book adaptions and I wouldn’t say it was hard. The one challenging thing is that we didn’t want it to be a string of dares, it wouldn’t have any drama with one dare after another — the trick is, how do we tell a story with forward momentum, it had to build.
MOVIEHOLE: How did you get into writing screenplays? And how did you realize you were not right for studying academia?
JS: I went to film school at NYU (New York University) for grad school, but I had been studying Russian literature and I realized I wasn’t cut out for academia. I really wanted to part of a bigger cultural conversation; my world was very, very small and very insular. I wanted to have a bigger conversation with a bigger population of people.
I applied for film school, got into a diverse student body at NYU, and I felt my world got a lot bigger. I moved to L.A. and I had a lot of good, lucky breaks. I had a short film that did very well, it won awards and got me an agent. I started writing scripts right away, it took a lot of years of writing, pitching, getting jobs and not getting jobs. I’m now at a place where I developed skills and a lot of confidence, I now know what jobs I am right for and not right for.
MOVIEHOLE: What about those people who make it big with their first script?
JS: (Gladwell) book “Outliers” talks about 10,000 hours practice which is true, and if it’s one script it’s probably a fluke, it’s hard to repeat that. You need certain skills and certain stamina to repeat that success. You have to keep writing when you are stuck. I will pitch a writer about a problem I’m having and take them out to lunch. Every procedural TV writer I knew, I took them out to lunch about a case in a pilot and they all pitched me ideas, which I didn’t use but it was a great experience to have them walk me through the process.
As to new scripts, people don’t even spell check it. I’m a bigger believer in getting it as good as you possibly can. You really only have one shot. It’s a rookie mistake to send a script before it’s ready.
MOVIEHOLE: What has been your toughest challenge so far?
JS: Dealing with disappointment. It’s disappointing when you pour a lot into a job and don’t get it, or when you do get it and it doesn’t get made, or when they don’t want you around and replace you with another writer, or when no-one sees it or when it gets badly reviewed. You have to deal with rejection and keep writing. You have to love the process more than the payoff or the rewards, whether it’s financial or ego rewards, or you would never survive it.
More often than not, things are not going to go your way. Even the biggest TV writers have a success followed by a failure. You don’t know why things hit with the audience, it could’ve been the actor or the character, it may not catch on fire the same way. You only have so much control over it and it may not happen the second time out. You have to be prepared to have a lot of failures along the way. There’s a lot of parts you can’t control, the timing or the marketing.
MOVIEHOLE: Do you keep in touch with Kristin Stewart since she starred in “Speak”?
JS: I haven’t been in touch with her. I worked with her when she was 12 and her career took off in such a big way. I think of her a lot and it’s obviously exciting to see her career, it’s not surprising to me.
MOVIEHOLE: Who are your writing idols?
JS: I got to work for one of my heroes, Ryan Murphy. Also I worked for another hero, Lee Daniels, on his show “Star” for Fox. I am a big fan of “Veep,” “Silicon Valley,” “Homeland,” “Good Wife,” “Girls,” — I also like Dostoyevsky , Chekhov and Pushkin.
MOVIEHOLE: Do you have a writing method or technique?
JS: I don’t force myself to write if it’s not coming easily to me. I’ll go for a walk, go to a bookstore. Unless I’m on a deadline, I like writing to be easy or fun. Sometimes I’ll put myself on a deadline of x many pages a day, I’ll have a schedule like that, I’ll keep going for the day. I like to outline but outline very loosely so I can make discoveries or changes. I do think an outline helps. It gets easy to get caught up in characters where you wander off for 20 pages and characters take off on a life of their own.
I’m now writing a movie and I know at midpoint that I have to have a dead body in it, so what do I do between now and a dead body? I only know that with a deadline. I like to do both, but somewhere in the middle is the perfect balance for me, it’s enough so I don’t get lost in the weeds.
MOVIEHOLE: What do you advise new writers to break in?
JS: First of all, read a ton of scripts. A lot of people go in reading books and seeing films but you need to see how it’s formatted, how characters are described and about the action. Pick movies in your genre, read your favorite thrillers, watch the film while reading the script so you can see the changes. If I’m writing in a new genre, I’ll watch ten movies. I’m trying to get the rhythm of the genre, like with a thriller or science fiction. When I was working on “Young Elites,” I started watching in the vein of “X-Men,” science fantasy. I watched to understand how to put that on the page, to try and master the genre. That’s my first piece of advice.
My second piece of advice is that you battle-tested your idea with the input of friends and family before you expose it to anyone in the business. They will only read it once if you are lucky. You don’t have a second chance. Everyone wants to be kind and polite to a new writer. It’s hard to expose your writing to someone. And most people don’t want to ruin someone’s confidence and enthusiasm.
I always ask my friends if they show me their script, are you look for feedback or for a pat on the back? I taught film at NYU and ask people to tell me what is working and what is not working. Telling people what you like is not helpful. You can say “I know it’s a horror movie, but I think the set pieces could be scarier.” I can help make it better whether I like horror movies or not.
MOVIEHOLE: What are your upcoming projects, I think one is a remake of “Dirty Dancing?”
JS: The movie is a musical for ABC down in North Carolina. Debra Messing is playing the mom, Abigail Breslin is Babe, Bruce Greenwood is the dad, Penny is played by Nicole Scherzinger, a Pussycat Doll – also Billy Dee Williams and Tony Roberts.
It’s the same story although we expanded it, we gave the parents and sister a bigger story, and it’s a musical — we take a lot of songs from the soundtrack, some of it is period music from that time and there is a new music by a guy who did the music from “Glee,” Adam Anders. We worked trying to figure out spotting the script for music. It looked great on set, I can’t wait to see it, it will air next May.
I also wrote an adaptation of a YA novel by Marie Lu (”Young Elites”), I wrote it with Temple Hill producing. I’m writing a movie for Fox 2000 called “A Simple Favor.” Also a book adaptation, an adult book, with a “Gone Girl” theme – it’s an adult thriller about two women in suburbia and one goes missing. It has a sense of humor to it, a little bit like “To Die For.” I’m also developing a pilot for 20th Century Fox. It’s challenging as I juggle a lot of things, I like to multitask.
