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From Dead Broke to Box Office Success: Writer-Director David Hayter
by Rick Danenberg
(December 2002) |
At the December 14 Scriptwriters Network meeting, writer/director David Hayter was encouraging, funny and deeply honest. With his dark eyes, matinee idol looks and dangling black hair, Hayter looked every inch the actor that he is in addition to being the screenwriter of Fox’s megahit X-Men, which earned in excess of $294 million worldwide box office.
Hayter said something surprising to the assembled crowd. Just a few years ago, he confided, “I felt like a tremendous loser.” Reflecting on his rapid rise to one of Hollywood’s most sought after fantasy-adventure screenwriters, Hayter added that of the 10 years he spent struggling on the industry fringe, “not one second was wasted.” “
The experience and preparation that happens while waiting for a career break,” he explained, all “comes into play when somebody hires you.”
Hayter spoke of his struggle: “Three years ago, I had nothing. I was dead broke, I had just produced a little quarter million dollar film on my own, I was in serious debt, my acting career had fallen by the wayside.” Hayter admitted, “I was preparing to quit the business, when I got hired to answer the phone on X-Men.” He added with a twinkle, “I ended up writing the script, which sort of changed everything.” Hayter emphasized, “what I want you all to understand, is whenever you feel that you’re nowhere, you’re just as close as I was in 1999. I mean literally just as close.”
Hayter’s long-standing friendship with X-Men director Bryan Singer gave him the in, though he still had to prove himself. When Hayter suggested a scene, the director surprised him by telling him to “go and write it.” The rest is box office history. Hayter emphasized the importance of networking. “It’s very, very important to be near the people that are going places.” While Hayter advises that you don’t “want to suck up, and you don’t want to hang out with people you don’t like,” it’s important when you’re starting out “to recognize who the people are around you that are positive and optimistic and driven, and in whom you sense some sort of talent.”
Before writing X-Men, Hayter had been trying to set up different projects. “None of it made any money, none of it was particularly successful,” he explained. The audience was quiet enough to hear a brad drop, riveted by Hayter’s frankness. “But every one of those experiences taught me different things about the process, different things about what it is to draw in an audience, to create a story, to create a world, to create everything. I learned about effects, about pacing, music, shots, editing, color, everything.” Hayter reminded the crowd that things can happen fast. “I mean, it’s really just one opportunity, and if you are prepared, it can change your life instantly.”
Hayter spoke of the challenges specific to writing X-Men. “X-Men 1 was an extremely difficult process. We had to create a film wherein we could justify a world where there were thousands of people with abilities and powers. Our lead characters were made of I think, 13 super-powered individuals, so it’s not like Superman, or Batman, or Spiderman where you go through one man’s journey and figure out who he is, and get on with your story. It really took the whole movie to set up the world, to set up who these people are, and why they are.”
Hayter’s next big break was The Hulk. After X-Men, “that was really the first major film that I got offered. They had been trying to crack The Hulk for 9 or 10 years. “When X-Men broke and suddenly comic books were in vogue again, they asked me if I would take a look.” Hayter read what the other writers had done, but realized he’d have to start from scratch because most had treated The Hulk like a cartoon.
“I think comic movies were a little different before we proved that X-men could work,” he said. X-Men “took the genre seriously, that (its characters) had real problems.” With The Hulk, Hayter was determined not to fixate on battling the villain, but rather on the character’s inner struggle. As Hayter explained, The Hulk is “a guy whose inner anger is so devastating that when it rises to the surface, I mean literally, cities will fall.” But while The Hulk’s rage is larger than life, “it’s also the thing that every audience member can relate to. Everybody’s got that ability to see red.”
Hayter also stayed true to the history of The Hulk. “Because I knew comic books, I knew the interesting thing about The Hulk and Bruce Banner was that they hated each other’s guts.” They literally regard each other as two separate entities. Banner (The Hulk’s alter ego) “is literally a man at war with himself and his inner demon, which is manifested in this monster.” Hayter’s choice was to take the script in a direction more like Frankenstein. Despite The Hulk’s power, Hayter wanted to make sure audiences would feel for him, that he would be “pitiable.”
But Hayter is more than a hot screenwriter; he’s now preparing to direct a film based on the graphic novel series, Watchmen. He drew laughs from the crowd when he admitted that the problem in talking about future projects like Watchmen is “they’re all subject to confidentiality agreements. So I’m excited about it, but I can’t say how.” But he was able to describe how he got the assignment.
Watchmen, Hayter explained, “is an amazing series of 12 comic books that came out in 1985, and changed the whole genre. They’re incredibly well written, just a great story.” At a meeting with his agents, Hayter was asked ‘what is your dream?’ “Watchmen” was his answer. Watchmen is regarded by many fans as one of the greatest comic works ever created. A dark whodunit brimming with paranoia and moral decay, Watchmen is a brilliant, fascinating and sometimes horrifying work that many believe is on par with the 20th century’s greatest works of literature.
Hayter found out that producer Larry Gordon (Lara Croft:Tomb Raider, Field of Dreams, Die Hard) owned the rights. “I went to him and said I’d like to create and produce a six-hour miniseries, maybe for HBO.” Hayter sighed, admitting how nervous he was. “Larry is arguably the most powerful producer on the planet, and he’s pretty direct. He said, I don’t know about making it for TV, can you give me a movie? And so I thought about it, about what I could do to take this incredibly complex story – could I present it in two hours and still have it be satisfying, and still have it be what it is in the book?” Hayter felt that he could, but knew that “80 percent of doing it” would be how.
Hayter’s concerns were well-founded. Alan Moore, creator of the Watchmen series, has said he regards them as “unfilmmable.” Hayter knew that if he gave the movie to a director who didn’t understand what he had in mind, it wouldn’t work. His solution was simple – he went back to producer Gordon and agreed to write the movie, providing he could direct. Hayter emphasized it wasn’t just his “take” on Watchmen that got him the gig, it was his track record of turning comic books into successful movies that made him “a worthwhile person to cover the franchise.”
In preparing to direct Watchmen, Hayter has looked to such artists as Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson for inspiration. Hayter explained that Jackson’s biggest task in translating The Lord of the Rings into film, which like Watchmen, began as a series of “incredibly complex books,” was in “cracking the code.” Hayter hunkered down in his chair. “To give you an idea of what I’m talking about in terms of code, the reason that Lord of the Rings is one of the greatest stories ever told, and one of the greatest series of books ever, is because the smallest creature in that whole world is the only one who can take the ring of power.” Hayter added that the ring represented “ultimate destruction.” To understand the core code of the story, he explained, is to understand “what makes us attached to these characters, what’s at stake, what do we need to show (onscreen), and what are the important points of the storyline.”
Writing and directing aren’t Hayter’s only focus. He recently took the plunge into producing, agreeing to supervise two novice writers, Jason Harris and Zack Morrisette, who are turning their original comic into a screenplay for Men In Black producer, Barry Josephson. “(Josephson) had gone to ComiCon in San Diego and found these two guys that created a one-time knock-off comic book called The Bad Guy. They basically paid to put it together themselves, to make copies of their first issue and try to sell it as a comic book.”
With Hayter’s supervision, the script was readied for the marketplace. He explained the strategy that went into selling the film. “We took it to 11 studios, three offered to buy it, and Paramount won out. The interesting thing about Paramount is that they don’t have any big franchise movie, which is any movie that’s set up to be three movies. Basically, a franchise is sort of the crown jewel of the studio world. Paramount, just to give you an idea how things work with the studios, only has the Jack Ryan series, Ben Affleck playing Jack Ryan. But they don’t have any comic book movies they can capitalize on. Universal has The Hulk, Sony has Spiderman, Fox has X-Men, so we decided to go with Paramount because we knew that they needed a big comic book movie like this, they needed a big, fantasy action film. And so now these two guys who just took the initiative to put together a one-time, knock-off comic book, are now writing a 100 million-dollar movie, which is going to basically get made.”
Hayter paused with a smile, explaining that these two young writers still had other responsibilities. Hayter recalled how he had planned a script meeting with them and Josephson for 3 p.m. One of the two writers suddenly insisted on changing it, saying that his partner “needs to get there at 3:30.” This vexed Hayter, who already set things up and was busy with other projects. “Well, why!?” Hayter sputtered. Hayter imitated the sheepish writer’s response, ‘Well, because he’s working at Kinko’s.’ As the crowd laughed, Hayter quipped, “I’m like, well, we wouldn’t want to interfere with that.”
Returning to the subject of his own screenwriting, Hayter described his writing process. “I write every day when I’m in writing mode. The problem is you spend a lot of time in meeting mode, you know, when you drive around town meeting people and not getting any work done. When I sit down to write, I’m extremely dedicated and focused.” Hayter begins writing “around 10 o’clock in the morning, and works till about 6 straight through, just taking an hour off for lunch.” Hayter explained “I can do eight great pages in a day.”
Part of his discipline comes from what he earns. “They are now paying me significantly, and for that kind of money, you work that much harder.” Hayter admitted that “prior to that I wasn’t getting paid for working on a script, and it took me two years to finish it, to get to the end of the first draft. Now I’m like… the first draft has to be rewritten eight times. I’ll spend three months with the studio developing a 30 or 40 page treatment, and I’ll sit down and I can write the script in six weeks… then go through another four to six weeks for the second pass.”
According to Hayter, writing treatments are essential. “I like to give a treatment to the studio so they know exactly what I’m going to write before I go off and write it. Many writers don’t, because they don’t want to be assailed by the studios during the development process.” But putting things down in treatment form avoids a lot of problems, Hayter explained. “The most difficult and most dangerous part of writing scripts is the ending. If the ending isn’t great, and you don’t know what it is before you start writing…” Hayter’s voice trailed off as he shook his head. “I’ll put it this way, there are probably a thousand 70 page first and second act scripts that are unfinished for every one that gets finished.” Hayter brushed a dangling lock from his forehead. “I think you have to be a really, really good writer to start off blank and end up somewhere satisfying.”
For Hayter, if his future career is anything like the last three years have been with nine greenlit scripts, three projects as a producer, and a hand in some of the industry’s biggest box office successes, there’s little doubt things will continue to “end up somewhere satisfying.”
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