|
James
Robinson is the screenwriter of League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen (2003), based on Alan Moore's comic book series.
James has also written numerous comic books, including the 90s version
of the classic character Starman for DC Comics. He worked
on Justice League with David S. Goyer (the writer
of both Blade movies),and last year he directed his first
movie Comic Book Villains, which was based on his own screenplay.
U.S:
Where did you grow up?
J.R.:
I grew up in London, was born in Manchester. I spent most of my
time in London, from about eight years on.
U.S:
How are you liking L.A.?
J.R.:
I’ve lived here now for thirteen years, so this is pretty
much my home. I don’t have anything to go back to, so I’m
as much an Angelino as anybody else.
U.S:
How did you get started writing professionally?
J.R.:
I got out of film school in England, and I wasn’t really having
the success I was hoping for.
U.S:
Were you hoping to direct?
J.R.:
I don’t know what I was hoping for. I was kind of a naïve
kid, I was hoping for something more than what was out there at
the time, especially in England. I drifted into writing, I’d
never written anything in film school. I had always done other things,
directing or camerawork.
U.S:
What was the film school?
J.R.:
It was Polytechnic Central London, which always sounds so lame,
but it was actually the best degree course in England. I’m
not sure if it still is, but it was a big deal at the time. I got
out of there, and everybody kind of had their moment where they
go, “I’m gonna write.” I was that guy too, but
I happened to have that ability. So I was one out of hundreds (?)
that actually could write when they decided they were going to.
Although based on people that have read my work, I guess that’s
a very debatable claim.
U.S:
So, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen…Campian Bond had to
be cut because of the James Bond copy, right? Tom Sawyer was added
for a youthful lead…
J.R.:
No, Campian Bond wasn’t cut due to a James Bond copyright,
he was cut due to the mechanics of the story. In the course of writing
the script- I’ve probably written three different versions
of the film that were drastically different- and because of the
fact that Tom Rothman and Hutch Parker over at Fox hated (heard
of?) me, they kept me on the project. Normally when you’re
doing such a drastic revision of the work, you’re a new writer.
That’s just how they tend to be. So I was drastically revising
my own work, so originally it took place in America, the threat
was a sort of poison gas, it was 9/11, that was changed…
U.S:
Wasn’t there a whole political correctness issue with an Asian
Fu Manchu?
J.R.:
That was always a thing that I was told I couldn’t do. Instead,
originally there was a sort of neo-Nazi Prussian group, you thought
they were the main villains but they turned out to be the secondary
villains behind Moriarity and the twist that takes place in the
comic book. That is all changed now in the film. So along the way
story lines got changed, they got altered, minimalized, some were
brought up, brought down…I kind of lost perspective on why
a lot of those changes happened because so many have happened. But
I can tell you that Campian Bond wasn’t about the copyright,
it was about the mechanics of the story.
U.S:
What about the Tom Sawyer addition?
J.R.: That
was more a sense of, we’re going to spend a lot of money on
this movie…
U.S:
Get it to certain audiences?
J.R.:
Yeah.
U.S:
With all these hurdles, do
you think it was difficult to stay true to the comic book?
J.R.: Well,
I’m such a fan of Alan Moore, that I tried to stay true to
the spirit of the comic book. To some degree, I think that it does
stay true to it. The characters are not glossy white heroes at the
start of this movie. They will have their inner demons and their
conflicts, and the perception of them is all a bit murky, which
is true to the comic book. I haven’t made the invisible man
a rapist, and Quartermain isn’t an opium addict and all of
that…there were changes that were made to make the thing more
of a summer commercial movie, but at the same time I hope that I
stayed true to the spirit of what Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neal
tried to do. At least as far as Kevin O’Neal is concerned,
we succeeded in that. He was at the premiere and said he was very
very happy with what the movie had evolved into.
U.S:
Have you heard anything from Alan Moore?
J.R.:
No, but that isn’t an unusual thing. He’s very hard
to pin down on any of his adaptations.
U.S:
How did your experience as a comic book writer affect your ability
to adapt this particular comic book into a screenplay?
J.R.:
It was hard in some ways, because I think I wanted to be a little
truer to the multi-verse like world that Alan Moore had created,
with the arcane Victorian references, than perhaps the studio wanted,
only because they felt that with every second of film being a precious
commodity, referencing Ropal the Conqueror and Sexton Blake and
the like is a waste of time. So that was a problem, and also in
terms of being a comic book writer, the thing I was aware of is
that a comic book structure can be loose, and a film needs that
three act structure that you kind of have to adhere to. If you look
at the original graphic novel, it really doesn’t have that.
It takes four issues for the league to be recruited. And then everything
is resolved within two issues. So I knew I was going to have to
make some changes. But I also knew, because of my comic book background,
how resistant comic book fans are to those changes. I knew that
I was sort of damned if I did, damned if I didn’t.
U.S:
How did you personally make the leap from writing comic books to
writing movies?
J.R.:
Well, I reached a crux in my life where I was doing a lot of comic
book work, and I was frankly doing too much. I was burning out.
I noticed that writers I had admired growing up, and whose work
I had collected avidly, were now still in the world of comic books,
and they were sort of churning stuff out because they were burned
out. The comic book world wasn’t treating them very well.
I didn’t want that fight to be mine, so I actively tried to
develop a career in screenplays while still keeping one foot in
comic books. It took a long time because of the amount of effort
it takes to work in two fields at once. So for a long time I was
this comic book writer who dabbled in screenplays, then one day
I realized I was this screenwriter who was still doing the odd comic
book. Along the way I was very fortunate, I met a screenwriter called
David Goyer, and he really helped me.
U.S:
He works on the JSA’s,
right?
J.R.:
Well, I helped him get into comic books and he helped me get into
films. I’m sure I got the best end of that bargain.
U.S:
Tell me a little bit about your experiences on your first two produced
screenplays, Firearm and Cyberbandits.
J.R.:
Well, they were both pretty awful, frankly. Firearm was something
that was literally thrown at me. They had decided to do a movie
based on…an issue zero with a movie that was half of the story,
but because of the way that a comic book is produced and the time
and effort that were planned to put into the video, (and I’m
being sarcastic here,) it took lomger to produce the comic book
with art and coloring and everything than it did to make the movie.
So I wrote out a whole outline. I then wrote the comic book, which
is the second half of the movie. And then I wrote the screenplay,
so I kind of had to write it back to front. The end of this story
was written in stone, and then the first half I was told they had
x amount of money to make it, then they came back to me and said
“no, we have (like a quarter of that amount). We booked a
disused police station, so can you put that in twice?” This
was all told to me within a day or two of shooting. I had to completely
rewrite the first half, with the second half already written in
stone. It’s almost impossible to do that. When you’ve
got the tree already growing, and you’ve had to plant those
seeds, and suddenly you have to plant smaller seeds, does that make
sense?
U.S:
Totally.
J.R.:
It was a real mess. And then on top of that, there was no liaison
between the writer and director. Years later I realize that’s
the way things are meant to work on a low budget movie. Looking
back it wasn’t working that way in terms of the writer and
director working together. As a result, when this young director
came on board, he was a nice guy, but he had all these ideas, and
he took it off in his direction which I don’t necessarily
think was the best thing for the complete story. I’ve actually
now officially analyzed and spoken more about that project than
I have anything in my entire life. And probably more than the project
deserves. Although Firearm, as eighteen issues that I did, is something
I look back on with a great deal of fondness, that was not a very
happy part of it all.
With Cyberbandits, that was even worse, actually. That was the first
thing I ever wrote. It was for IRS, the record company had a film
arm at the time, run by this “genius” named Paul Colishman
(?). They had this idea for a series of films all set in a “Blade
Runner” version of Hawaii called “Pacifica.” Post-apocalyptic
island world. They wanted these sort of crime thrillers set in this
world. I wrote this thing, at the time it was called A Silent Tattoo.
And they loved it, they wanted to make it, they had a director on
board, his wife had a medical emergency, I don’t know…and
in the time that it was lying fallow waiting for a new director,
James Goldman, William Goldman’s brother who won an Oscar
for The Lion in Winter, needed money to research this project on
Trotsky or Tolstoy, one of the famous Russians that begin with a
“T,” so Paul Colligham said “I’ll tell you
what, if you do a polish on this, (thinking “we’ll get
an Oscar-winning screenwriter on this movie,”) we’ll
give you the money for your research.” So what the guy did
is, he turned in this appalling drek, which they then decided they
wanted to film. Even though the director, having read the original
version, wanted to film mine, they wouldn’t let him. They
were obsessed with the idea of filming this guy’s script.
So there isn’t a word of my original screenplay in that movie.
The guy ultimately took a pseudonym. That “Winston Beard,”
which is his pseudonym, who I ‘in theory’ wrote this
with, is actually this Oscar-winning guy James Goldman. The end
of this story is that much later I was having lunch with a guy at
Universal that used to work at HBO, and we were talking about how
they were having some pretty good HBO movies at the time. I mentioned
Citizen X being one of them. And he said “that was an experiment
we had where we got these old screenwriters who weren’t really
working much to come back and write screenplays, and it was pretty
successful. Except for James Goldman.” And I said, “why?”
And he said “well, we found out afterword that what he does
is he takes the money and then he gives it to some college student
to actually write the screenplay for him.”
So, it did read like a sort of 21-year-old’s wanna-be screenwrite.
I kept my name on it, and I really thought about taking it off,
because when it’s your first one, even if it’s a straight
to video piece of crap it’s sort of hard to take your name
off. Also, it got me into the writer’s guild, and that was
only because by writing it with James Goldman, it automatically
made me a writer’s guild member. So that was the good thing.
But then they got this young director, he was a nice guy too, but
I don’t think he was prepared for dealing with the challenges
of working with that company, and making the movie with the money
he had. On top of that, their casting choices: Adam Ant, Grace Jones,
Monty Kemp from Spandau Ballet…all they need to do was hire
Lamall from Kajagoogoo and they pretty much covered the 80’s
alternative rock scene. It was just a fucked up mess. And then they
called it “Cyberbandits,” which is just…
U.S:
Great title.
J.R.:
A great title, yeah…What that did get me ironically was the
WG membership, but then it also got me into the CAA. I’m a
very lucky guy, although when you see League you might not think
so. That got me an agent at CAA, and that got me a few more contacts
while I was still a comic book writer, and then I made the transition,
thanks again to David Goyer, over to Endeavor, where I’ve
been for five years.
U.S:
A lot of people seem to leave CAA eventually.
J.R.:
It was good in the very short term, but I did feel like the tiniest
little fish in the ocean.
Comic
Book Villains: Written and Directed by James Robinson
INTERVIEW
CONTINUES NEXT ISSUE
|
