Fresh out of film school, Greg Marcks made the trek to Los Angeles as so many other aspiring filmmakers do. At the time, he had no idea that his little student film, “Lector,” was going to win a student Oscar and that doing so would afford him the opportunity to write and direct his critically-acclaimed, first feature film, “11:14.” Now, with a second feature, “The Gift,” under his belt, he's fast becoming a filmmaker with whom to be reckoned.

On a beautiful, southern California day, Filmmaker.com sat down with Greg to discuss all things film. What strikes you most about him is his intellect, his passion for movies, and his uncompromising honesty – the marks of a consummate artist and professional.

FM.C: Where are you originally from?

GREG: I grew up in a town called Chelmsford, which is in Massachusetts, and it's about forty minutes north of Boston, closer to the New Hampshire border. It's a suburb of maybe 35,000 people, and it's kind of the inspiration for the background of “11:14” -- my first film.

It's also where I started screwing around with video a little bit because there was a public access station in my high school; so I ended up as a sophomore in high school starting TV production classes, and by my junior year I had a sketch comedy show I was doing on a semi-regular basis.

I guess growing up in the suburbs there was a lot of boredom, and instead of vandalism and alcoholism, I chose filmmaking. I was lucky -- there was a group of guys, that I'm still really close friends with, and we all worked together on various video projects. It was nothing serious, but it was where I became infatuated with the moving image and doing that as a profession.

FM.C: After high school you went to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh.

GREG: It's known for both its technical [college]. . . and on the other hand, for the College of Fine Arts. There's a great number of successful actors who come out of the Carnegie Mellon theater program. I was neither.

I was in the humanities department, which was the creative writing program. I was an English major, and I had a film and media studies minor.

When I looked at colleges, I looked at communications programs [and] production programs. I, at the very last minute, changed my focus because I kind of felt like I was going to end up as the camera man on some evening news program, and I didn't really want to do that.

So I decided to get a writing degree, and there's really only a few undergraduate creative writing degrees in the U.S. So I went to Carnegie Mellon for that. I wanted to write for “The Simpsons” -- having no idea that the show would still be on the air when I could actually do it.

Once I went there my interest in television waned, and I got more interested in short films. There was an organization there in Pittsburgh called “Pittsburgh Filmmakers,” a non profit, and for $200 I had access to all their equipment and all their editorial facilities.

So I started making a lot of shorts on 16mm work prints, black and white, silent mostly. And I got into film instead of video, and that was sort of accidental really. Carnegie Mellon has no film program… I didn't think I would originally get a masters degree, but I kind of realized that I hadn't gone to film school the first time around. I wanted to go on and make some better films than the ones I had made in college.

FM.C: So you decided to go to Florida State?

GREG: I think I had made like four or five short 16mm films [before film school] and it went like black and white silent, color silent with voice over, then it was like black and white sync sound, and when I got to FSU, at the time, the first project was 16mm sync sound, color; so it was a nice stepping stone for me.

Whereas everyone else, seemed to me, hadn't ever made a movie before. I had started on Super 8, and I was cutting on a Steenbeck. I had probably one of the last experiences of going through every format leading up to 35mm.

FM.C: Was your thesis film,“Lector,” shot on 35mm?

GREG: No, that was 16mm. I didn't even do 35mm in Florida State. “11:14” was the first 35mm experience I had. Paul Marschall shot “Lector” and a couple of other shorts I had at film school. He did a great job.

FM.C: Once you did “Lector”, did that open up a whole world of opportunities? . . . I know from there you won a Student Academy Award.

GREG: Well, that was the big turning point for me. I mean it won a lot of festivals and went to a lot of festivals, but none of them really had the cache that the Student Academy Awards had.

I didn't even win gold. I got the bronze, but just being in that group of people and having your name published in the trades brought me a little bit of attention and got some requests for the short and for production companies to see it. There wasn't really interest in the film specifically because it was a very specific short that didn't have a lot of remake potential for commercial purposes, but it did get me attention as a writer. So I used it as a springboard to get people to read “11:14.”

FM.C: What did you learn from making “Lector”?

GREG: I was thinking about it the other day. It was a fun film to make because there were so many shots of an inanimate object -- trying to give it a sense of ominous presence in the room. In a way it was a good learning experience because there was really no dialog, so you had to tell the story visually.

FM.C: So after “Lector” and film school you came to L.A. Were you working and doing something else when you initially got out here, or did you just make that transition from student filmmaker to “11:14”?

GREG: No, I was a temp. I moved in with Paul Marschall . . . we had an apartment over in Los Feliz. I remember being invited to a poker game, and I had five dollars that I could play. We were playing with quarters; and I was like knocked out within an hour, and I had to go home.

I had no money when I moved out here. I was sleeping on a crib mattress that I bought from Goodwill that was like four feet long. I had nothing. I drove out here in my Toyota Corolla with all my shit in the trunk and that was all I had.

So in that early period I signed up with some temp agencies. I ended up working for like six weeks with Disney, but not Disney proper. I was working at like the food delivery service for Disney, like Doctor Soda or Mister Soda, or whatever they call it.

But it was actually a good gig because I was answering the phone for somebody who had taken a sabbatical -- they were gone -- so I never met the person I was working for, and no one was calling because they were in Paris. So I literally just sat there and wrote during the day, and I was getting paid twelve bucks an hour to write. I had free photocopy services; I was stealing office supplies -- so it was a good deal.

That was in 2001, and there was a looming writers strike that everyone thought was going to happen, and I ended up getting a job right before that, sort of anticipating that all the temp stuff would dry up.

I got a job as an assistant to an agent for a below the line agency -- an agency of one person. I did that for not that long -- three or four months. And I really didn't like that job because it was over in Santa Monica. I was in my car three hours a day, and I was exhausted and not writing.

And it was during that time I won the Student Academy Award . . . which was kind of funny because I remember on Sunday night I was talking to Randy Quaid and John Toll and all these people and being celebrated at the Academy and . . .

Monday morning I was back in my shitty job with my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and I was thinking, “This sucks, and I got to get out of here,” and that's when I started writing “11:14.”

FM.C: Did you quit the job first?

GREG: I outlined it while I was still there. I quit my job in August of 2001; I had a months rent saved up. Went to Los Feliz public library; started writing the script. September 11 happened; I was like just knocked on my ass for a week. I didn't do anything.

Then I was like crap I'm going to run out of money . . . I got to finish this script. Finished “11:14,” and I sent it out.

It takes about a month or two for people to read anything and then during that period I worked as a script supervisor on some DV movie – just making ends meet.

Then “11:14”-- some managers liked it, and I did end up signing with a manager near the end of the year. But I didn't have any money. So I was like trying to produce the film, but I couldn't take a job.

I thanked my grandmother in the credits for “11:14.” Her name was Irene Hilbert. She died that November, and I basically lived off of what she left me for the nine months it took to get “11:14” set up.

And then I actually got paid -- my first time ever getting paid as a filmmaker -- and since then I've been extremely fortunate. I've been able to make a living either writing or directing. I haven't had to have a “B” job since. It was a short period by Hollywood standards, but whenever you're going through it, it seems like a long time because week to week you worry a lot about money, like how you're going to pay the rent and all that stuff. So I was fortunate that things worked out the way they did.

FM.C: So it took you nine months to get “11:14” off the ground?

GREG: I quit my job in August of 2001, and by August of 2002, we were shooting. So it was pretty fast. I wrote the script and less than a year later we were making the movie.

FM.C: How long did it take you to write the script?

GREG: I wrote it in a month. I didn't have any more time than that. I did sort of a polish at one point during prep. But that was actually what was so crazy about the script -- it felt so raw. In many ways it was very tight. In other ways I really didn't revise it. So I guess one of its strengths was that the dialog was what came out of my head the first time. I didn't have a lot of time to screw around with it.

FM.C: It was the first feature film that you had written?

GREG: It wasn't the first feature script that I had written. I had written a few others. Actually, my senior honors thesis for Carnegie Mellon was an adaptation of “Beowulf” . . . but I wrote that, and I've written a few others: a thriller, a road comedy. But this was the first thing that I could seriously make, and wrote with the intention of trying to make on my own.

FM.C: Were you trying to go the independent route with “11:14”?

GREG: When I wrote “11:14,” the thinking was I would scrape together fifty grand, go back to Chelmsford, Massachusetts, and shoot it with my friends. That's why it was written for that environment -- it was written for that town. And I wrote it at night, originally thinking I would steal all the locations while everyone was sleeping -- never thinking about how hard it is to light at night.

And then I was lucky because people responded to the script, and we ended up getting actual movie stars for this little, what I thought of as a guerrilla movie. We ended up, instead of doing it for like fifty grand, we did it for about five million dollars, which is kind of unbelievable.

FM.C: Instead of Chelmsford, you shot somewhere in California?

GREG: We shot in Altadena, and in Piru, which is like 30 minutes outside of L.A. proper. We were limited in the studio zone, which if you go more than thirty miles, you have to put up the crew [in a hotel]. So we would go like 29.9 and then pick a location ‘cause we didn't have the money to put up a crew, but this wasn't supposed to be California and [Los Angeles] doesn't look like New England.

We did a good job, not necessarily making it like New England, but definitely making it look like small town anywhere U.S.A.

And at the time I didn't realize what sort of a luxury it was to make a movie in Los Angeles . . .
It seems like nobody gets to do that anymore.

And we also shot in Moorpark. …We did the driving stuff in Porter Ranch, up in the Valley.

FM.C: What were some lessons you took away from your first feature experience?

GREG: There's the stuff that you learn as a filmmaker, and there's the stuff that you learn as a career builder. As a filmmaker I really learned how to move the camera on that show because I had a steadicam, and I had a ten-minute scene in a convenience store -- all dialog.

And it's the joke that that was the only scene in the movie because like everything else in the movie is someone running from this point to that point. But that [scene] was like two people talking in a room, so I feel like the challenge -- the assignment for that -- was to move the camera. In this last movie I just did, the assignment for me in my mind was blocking the actors.

I was still shooting the movie [“11:14”] when one of the producers came up and was like, “What's next? What do you got next?”

And I feel like the tricky thing about making movies is always sort knowing what you're going to do next while you're still working on the last thing… I tend to be a bit of a “uni-tasker.” Like I get these blinders on to the world, and I want to be working on the movie that I'm working on, and I can't think about anything else – least of all me. So the lesson in a way was: try to know, even if you don't have the script ready, what you want to do next, so you can answer that question when it comes up, because it only gets asked for a window of time and then suddenly you're back, more or less, where you were.

But it was also a great experience. I got to go to Toronto with that film; I got to go to Deauville, France with that film; I got to travel to Sitges, Spain; Mexico City. The aftermath -- the festival circuit was kind of nice. It's fun. You get sick of the film after awhile, but one of the things I like about “11:14” -- I still enjoy watching it.

I did a screening of it the day that I found out I was doing “The Gift.” It had been like five years. Rachael Leigh Cook came and Shawn Hatosy came . . . got a bunch of people to come out and watch it. And it was strange watching it with a little bit of distance cause I looked at the movie -- all these choices I wouldn't make now. Cause if you're around the development process or anything, it changes the way you think about things. I was looking at this movie -- man it's such a bizarre, bizarre movie. Even having made it, I don't really know where it's going . . . it's such a strange movie. It was funny to look at it. For a first film, I think it kind of stands up.

FM.C: What about this next film you're doing?

GREG: It's called “The Gift.” It's a title I always assumed was going to change because of the Sam Raimi movie of the same name, but it's starting to look like it may actually go the distance with that title.

FM.C: No conflicts?

GREG: Only in the sense of audience confusion. Maybe it's not a bad thing; maybe, people have to refer to it as Greg Marcks’ “The Gift.”

FM.C: How did you get attached to this project?

GREG: I didn't write this film. It came to me as a script that was still being rewritten that was being shepherded by Dark Castle but being financed by a single Russian investor. It’s kind of a technological thriller with a sort of political subtext to it.

It was funny to me because it wasn't the kind of movie that I was ever being offered, so I was excited to have the chance to deal with what seems almost like, on the face of it, a cold-war spy thriller.

So I went in to pitch “The Gift,” and I remember saying, “We've got to have a car chase” and they said, “Okay,” and I was like, “Really?” And then I got the job, and [I thought], “Oh my god, I get to do a car chase . . . This is unbelievable!”

I got to do a car chase in Moscow with the stunt coordinator from the “Bourne Supremacy.” So it was a really interesting experience. We shot in Bulgaria; we shot in Moscow; we shot in Prague, in the Czech Republic; we sent a unit to Thailand.

I look at the credits of this movie, and I can't believe that I was at the head of that unit. We had over 300 visual effects shots. I had one visual effects shot in “11:14,” and I have over 300 in this film. So I learned a lot about that department.

FM.C: What else did you learn by making “The Gift”?

GREG: I think that as a filmmaker on this one, the things that I learned to do was filmmaking without a net. By which I mean, I didn't storyboard everything; I didn't shot list everything. I probably would've, but I didn't have the time. It was such a grueling schedule.

I learned how to be the guy who shows up on set, drinks his coffee, walks the set with the DP, fixes all the problems with the art department, brings the actors in, and then figures out how to cover the scene; and I wasn't that director before this film. And it was nice because I realized, in doing that, that I wasn't going to fall flat on my face -- that I would figure out a solution under pressure -- exhausted, I would figure out the right choice for the scene.

And I was one of the only Americans on the crew, so that was interesting: shooting in a foreign country with a predominately foreign crew. I was once in a van scouting, and there were six languages happening around me. This was like a truly international production.

I was gone for four months and dealing with a different way of working. They don't have unions, but they have different regulations on how they work and etiquette and all that stuff . . . and the language barrier.

But it was cool -- I got to shoot a walk-and-talk in Red Square, which is a dream – I couldn't believe we were able to pull the strings to do that. And it was also interesting how this particular film was sort of a blend of independent and commercial. It was independent in its financing and in its setup – you know, how we approached making the movie.

But its marketing and its cast – it was always intended to be commercial. Especially in post production – we finished it at Warner Brothers, and even though it's not a Warner Brothers movie – it felt like a studio film in the sense that we were right there on the lot, and the producers worked very close [by].

A lot of different influences. We had a meeting of the Russians and the Americans. The money and the expertise so to speak, and I was in the middle somewhere. And I learned to read Cyrillic.

FM.C: You learned Cyrillic?

GREG: I had to find my way home, and I couldn't read the street signs; so I had to learn how to read.

FM.C: How long did it take you to do that?

GREG: I sat in my hotel room for like an hour, and I memorized the alphabet just through repetition. It's phonetic, so once you know it, it's not that hard.

I had this shirt I bought from the Salvation Army [years ago], and for ten years I never knew what it said. And one day I just read it: Party Perestroika, Party Revolution. “Wow, I can read this shirt. It's crazy.”

FM.C: You're still in post with “The Gift.”

GREG: We're essentially done, but we have a temp score. So we need to hire a composer, and do the music. But other than that, it's essentially done. [The producers are] in Cannes right now selling the movie.

FM.C: So what’s the next step? Are you going to do the festival circuit to secure distribution?

GREG: Personally, I don't know if we're going to do the traditional festival model for this film. Technically, that's what [the producers are] doing. They're not actually in the festival; they're in the market selling foreign territories and then domestic as well.

Right now a lot of what happens next for me depends on what kind of deals are made with respect to the movie. Hopefully, it will get a proper theatrical release in North America.

One of the things that happened to me on “11:14” was that I got a little too involved in the fate of “11:14” and trying to insure it got a domestic release, which it never did. It did get one, but it was very small, and you know that took years. And I could have, and should have, spent that time getting the next project going. So right now, my focus is on writing again, which is always kind of weird.

It's funny that we're talking today because I literally have been working on “The Gift” for a year solid, and it was like today I went shopping. I hadn't actually done anything like go the grocery store in like a year, and I was like “Wow, I actually have to start living my life again.”

When you switch back over to that – suddenly, you go back into the cave and start writing again – it's a very solitary thing after being the nucleus of a very busy unit.

FM.C: What types of projects are you working on now?

GREG: I got a couple of things that I'm working on. I was able to option a novel by Jonathan Lethem called “You Don't Love Me Yet,” so I'm working on an adaptation of that. And that would be a small indie movie. It's about a band in Silver Lake, and it's kind of a romantic farce. And I like it cause it's about the Los Angeles that I know and the people that I know in Los Angeles. I'm hoping that we can get the funding to make that.

I got a couple of other things I've been working on. I co-wrote a script with a guy from FSU, C.J. Julian, about professional bull riding that I'm still trying to revise. Basically I got a few things that I need to sit down and start working on again.

And on top of that, I take meetings and try to do it through proper channels. Though it seems to me I find that jobs at a certain point start coming as much through your own personal obsession or your contacts or whatever than they do through your agents or your manager.

FM.C: Being both a director and writer . . . do you prefer one to the other, and how do you juggle those responsibilities?

GREG: You know I get asked about whether I'm a writer or director and which I like more. I really like the term filmmaker, and it's a really nice thing that this site's called Filmmaker. People also use the term storyteller, but I prefer filmmaker because the more I direct, the more I realize what a collaborative medium film really truly is. And writing and directing seem sort of like a right-brain, left-brain thing, so I don't know how I would do one without the other.

On this last film I was directing, I didn't have a writing credit, but I was involved in all of the dialog in the scene, and I had an influence in the development with the writer who was re-writing it. And so, in a sense, I did write the story in conjunction with other people, and by the same token, when I write something, especially something like “11:14,” I write it as a director. I wrote [“11:14”] to make a specific kind of movie, so it's a difficult thing to separate.

Now, I've done writing jobs straight up, and I wasn't entirely satisfied with those scripts. And I feel like perhaps the reason I didn't necessarily do my best work was because I wasn't invested as a director. Also that I didn't have the sense of “I'm going to have to figure out how to solve this problem.” And you can sort of follow the path of “Well that's somebody else's problem” or “I can leave that.” And I think when you sit there, and you think about, “I'm going to have to be called to task in six months to defend this in front of a bunch of people,” you work maybe a bit more thoroughly.

It's funny when I think about whether I'm a better writer or a better director. I kind of flip-flop on that. I guess it depends on the subject matter really. I think there's certain areas where I'm a better writer, and maybe I haven't even explored those areas yet as a writer. . . .I feel like I still have to take some more risks as a writer through character and all that and put more of myself on the page.

And then as a director, the thing about directing is that you get to practice your craft relatively infrequently. This was five years between films. I must've learned some stuff in between, but it wasn't really by doing. So the more I can work, the better I'll become.

So I think one of the main differences between who I am now and who I was five years ago is that I'm more likely to take a job that maybe isn't necessarily a genre that I would think of myself for, just simply for the opportunity to stretch and flex certain muscles that I haven't used before and try to find a way to do it.

That said, the hardest thing is knowing what you're good at – what kind of a filmmaker you are, ‘cause that's the whole game. 'Cause everyone's trying to, not necessarily pigeonhole you, but brand you as a certain kind of filmmaker so that you can keep making certain movies.

So in the case of this last film, I always thought this was a great opportunity because I didn't know if I'd ever work in this genre again. Were the film to become a huge success, suddenly that'd be all I was doing . . . you never really know. I think you can guide your career, but you don't really get to choose. Nobody knows what's going to be a success ever, and that's really going to be what ends up determining who you become as a filmmaker because they end up telling you to do more of that.

FM.C: Were you happy with the way “The Gift” turned out?

GREG: More or less. I think the one thing that they can't teach you in film school is all the politics that takes place, and I think it's up to the individual to figure out how you're going to deal with that – what your comfort zone is in terms of what you do and don't do.

The interesting thing about when I think about doing a thesis film at Florida State: I had final cut, and I was still angry about having to take notes from people. [Even though] I actually had the ability to say “no.”

You know, I don't have that [now]. Without final cut, I can argue, but at the end of the day I have to resign myself to choices that may or may not be mine. That doesn't necessarily mean that the film gets worse. Sometimes it gets better for that, and that's maybe the hardest thing you have to accept as a filmmaker. “Okay, for this particular movie this is the right choice.” I mean it may not have been my instinct but that works. So when I look at the film there are things about it that aren't necessarily my instinct, but they seem right for the film. So it'd be interesting to look back at that one in about five years and see what I think.

FM.C: Some people say that the second film is harder than the first. Did you find that to be true?

GREG: It's hard, yes – the first film is hard – but every succeeding film is also hard because you have to continue to find some sort of upward mobility, which is really tricky the more expensive the movie gets.

FM.C: You said earlier that being in the development process changes the way you think about things as a filmmaker . . . what did you mean by that?

GREG: It's a question of expectation and familiarity. You come to expect certain things from a movie of a certain genre. And I think I didn't understand genre for the longest time, until years after “11:14.”

Genre is just a set of rules that you agree to abide by. If you're making a romantic comedy, they're going to get together at the end of the movie. You can break that rule, but it's at your peril and chances are someone's going to spend some money and fix that at some point. You have leeway within the rules of a genre to reinvent the genre; you can even try to invent a new genre, which is possible, but very rare.

But I think I've backed off a little bit on my desire to completely reinvent the wheel every time. I think when did “11:14” – I think I had aspirations to create some kind of story that was about nothing. It's like the “Seinfeld” of movies in a way. The sort of “meaninglessness of meaning” movie for me, which didn't end up being that for anybody else.

Everyone else looks at that movie and thinks how everything happens for a reason. You can interpret it however you want, but I guess what I realized is that narrative has its own laws and you can't really break them.

In other words, the whole reason we as human beings tell stories in the first place is to imbue meaning in a chaotic universe. So if what you want to do is portray a chaotic universe, you can't really do that through a story, because it goes against the whole purpose for doing it and nullifies it. So I gave up on that. Now, I'm trying to tell stories in an interesting way, and I'm more interested in character now than I used to be.

A movie is a reflection of whoever you are in your life at that time, and I'm probably a very different person now than when I got to L.A. almost eight years ago. [A movie] reflects the priorities that you have in your life at a given moment, which is why you have to try to finish the movie in a relatively short period of time.

FM.C: I know you said your fate sort of depends on what's successful at the box office. Are there specific genres that you prefer to work in?

GREG: Yeah, I feel like I reverse-engineered it. I like amoral characters with sort of a dark sense of humor, and so I basically just said, “What genres can I place the characters that I like in?” And it sort of led me to crime, heist movies, thrillers, which is interesting ‘cause I haven't done a lot of that – I guess “11:14” is kind of a thriller/dark comedy – but I'm not a romance guy. Actually, I kind of would love to do a romantic comedy, only because I feel like there's a huge opportunity to reinvent a very tired kind of formula. Also, I don't understand romance at all, so it would be a very different kind of love story.

In a way that's one of the reasons I'm excited about “You Don't Love Me Yet” because it's a love story, but it's more truthful and messy. And I hope that I don't screw that up. I'm trying to transpose the novel into the movie, and not have it fit in the genre but still [enough]. . . You know, the lead character is a woman.

FM.C: Have you written a lot of female characters?

GREG: I seem to, for some reason, keep being drawn to female protagonists. Partly because I want to cast good actresses, and there's not a lot of roles for them. I guess the lesson that I learned from “11:14” was that money chases actors and actors chase good scripts. So being a writer, I can try to create good scripts and rather than go for money, which then leads you into development, which then leads you into hell, I go straight to the actors.

Especially actresses I feel like are sitting there waiting for the script to come along, so I try to write stuff for them. It doesn't necessarily mean that I'm even particularly well-suited or good at writing female characters, but I'm trying.

FM.C: How is your process as a writer and director different?

GREG: The big difference is that somebody tells you where to be when you're a director. You wake up in the morning and then like every moment of your day . . . it's weird . . . you're in charge, but every moment is dictated by other people. You're under a barrage of questions and needs from other people. You get up in the morning. You go to work, and you stay at work a long time and then you go home and pass out and then you repeat that.

When you're writing, you wake up, you think about writing . . . and then you go watch some TV instead . . . and then you go back to writing.

I think that everybody's different. I try to be a little more flexible now than I used to be. I used to be a fascist about sitting in the chair; and sometimes even sitting in the chair, you wouldn't do anything, or you wouldn't feel like writing. It's not like any other job. It's not a 9-5, 40 hour a week, punch-clock kind of a job. Sometimes it's 11:30 at night, and you have that inspiration, and you go and write. It's hell on your personal life 'cause it's kind of unpredictable.

And not only that, but I also feel like you go through what I call “creatively fertile” periods, where it's like, “If I can only write twenty four hours a day, I could get out six scripts at once” . . . but then that period is over, and you can't do anything for months or years . . . and you can't necessarily control that either.

What you can do is have discipline. That's really all you can do. You try to make sure when it's there, you're mining the goods.

So my process, . . . whatever process I have, is completely eradicated every time I do a film. Because there's so much rigid schedule to a film, and then like I get out of it, and here I am just sort of gorging at like not having anything to do again.

I'm trying to structure my day again. And eventually – give it another week – I'll have a structure again. And sometimes [not having a structure] can be very liberating too, ‘cause you'll go off and do something, and it'll lead you to something; and even when you're not technically doing anything, you're still usually mulling something over.

When I'm working on a project, if I'm working by myself, then I try to establish a schedule. I usually can't write for more than six hours before I start to go crazy. I usually get up in the morning and then I do like phone calls and business, e-mail crap 'til 10 o'clock. Then I'll try to write from 10-1, eat lunch, take a break, and then I'll write from like 2-5. That's usually about what I can handle. Then I'll just do some more e-mails and phone calls and that's my day.

A year and a half ago I decided that I was going to write a script a month and that was like, “I'm not going to talk to anyone. I'm going to go crazy. I'm going to become a monk and I'm going to sit in my room and I'm going to write a script a month.” And I did that for maybe four months. I wrote two scripts, a play, and I co-wrote a script. So I wrote four scripts and then I was like, “I need a break.”

I'm thinking about actually – ‘cause it's coming up on June, and I have a bunch of projects that I need to do – I'm thinking about going back to the script-a-month thing, which is great ‘cause it's completely arbitrary and totally insane. It's a stupidly optimistic, ambitious deadline, but any deadline is useful.

And the ability to separate yourself from the person who makes deadlines for yourself is really important because you have to try to really honor them. So it's hard and a lot of people struggle when they get out of film school ‘cause no one's telling them when things are due anymore, and that's what you have to do. You've got to be like, “Shit has to be done by this date, or you're in trouble.” And you have to believe it somehow.

FM.C: Say you write these twelve scripts a year . . . at some point you're going want to go back and revise . . . is revision a big part of your process?

GREG: Revision is where the work is. It's the hardest thing in the world. I avoid it like the plague. It's what separates real writers from dilettantes. Revision is where it's at. I think what I've been doing is not trying to fall into the position that I fell in before where somebody said, “What's next?,” and I literally had nothing.

So right now what I have is four projects that I can talk to people about, but they're still problematic. If I tell you about one of them, and you go like, “Oh my god, we've got to do that,” I'm going to make it priority one and fix that script. When I haven't actually written something it's harder for me to concretely talk about it, and [that’s] sort of a liability.

Because in Hollywood what you're supposed to do is have the ideas, know them all, talk about them. Then somebody will pay you to do one of them, and then you go off and write it. But like, for me, it's in the writing that I figure everything out, so I have to go through that process.

So the script-a-month thing, in a way, was to build up a bit of a library, but more than that, it was to overcome what had infected me, which was this developmental fear. Which is that I would talk myself out of trying things – I had become a much more risk-averse person, which is just terrible for any artist.

My biggest problem was deciding where to commit my energies, and I would spend months just trying to figure out which script to work on. And I realized that if I had just picked a script, I would have been done with it already. Maybe it wouldn't have been “the script” but it didn't matter because I was no better off for having thought about it and worried, “Well, would this be right?”

So it was almost like, if on the first of the month I start a project, and on the 31st I was still finishing [the] project, I'm not going to have time to worry. I'm literally going to go to the next project on the list and [be] like, “This is what I'm doing this month. . . . And if it sucks I'm going to be done in a month,” so that was kind of the idea.

The much harder point which you bring up is going back and actually making something good out of it.

Nobody's going to write a perfect script in a month. I still think that “11:14” – the fact that I was able to do that in a month – was kind of an anomaly, in the sense that it does work. It's sort of tied together, but there's very little character development or anything in that movie. The subtlety isn't really there.

So what I'm trying to do [now] is not be a closed loop anymore. I'm trying to bring other people into the process, to get the opinions of people that I trust – preferably people who do not. . . [have] an agenda commercially.

And I'm starting to collaborate with people – I'm starting to co-write things with people. Because writing is such a solitary thing, and it's becoming harder in a way to really get excited about spending that much time by myself everyday in my house – especially in the summer when it's about a million degrees. But yeah, revision. And now that I have some distance on it . . . I feel that time is the key to revision. It's so much easier to look back at a script that you were working on six months ago and take your red pen and be like, “This goes,” and “This goes,” . . . than [it would have been] at the time.

I am now in a position – I just have to actually to commit the time to start that revision process. And this time around I’ve promised myself that I'm not going to be as self-critical. Because I've written about a million first acts, and I've always gotten to a point where I said, “This is a disaster,” and just gave up. And that's like the worst thing you can ever do.

You just got to finish it. Follow through. At the very least you're going to learn something for the next project.

FM.C: Do you find it different collaborating with others on a script?

GREG: The difference for me is working with somebody else forces me to articulate the story far more specifically than I force myself to do on my own. It's sort of like when you work out on your own versus when you work out with a trainer. . . It's like when there's someone watching, you can't skate by.

I do outline. And every time I've outlined I write like, “Max goes to the bank.” And it's sort of “Alright, I know what that scene's all about.” But I really don't know what that scene's all about. I'm leaving it until the day that I write it, and then [that day] I sit there and stare at “Max goes to the bank” for an hour, and then I come up with the most lame idea of how he goes to the bank, and I write that. It's like “Alright, I really didn't do that correctly.”

And when you're working with somebody else, and you're writing the “Max goes to the bank” scene, you talk about “Well, how's that going to work?,” and you end up going through one or two revisions within the scene. So I think you get a much more refined first draft out of a collaborative relationship. The revision process can be complicated at that point, but the first draft is very helpful.

The advantage when you're writing on your own – if you can force yourself to have that schizophrenic conversation with yourself – is it's all coming from your brain at a certain point, and that can be gratifying too. But I care less about that right now, especially if it's something I want to direct. I almost welcome having another influence at the script stage because as a writer you have your own bag of tricks that you always go back to, and it doesn't really challenge you as a director or a writer to always be going back. If somebody else is like “What if they did this, or what if you structured it differently?,” and you're like “Oh, yeah, we can do that!” – it forces you to stretch a little bit.

FM.C: Do you recommend having the script in hand before you pitch then?

GREG: It's certainly not the business model. I mean the business model is like, “You're being paid to write, so why would you do it for free?” I've always felt like when it's on the page then it's as clear it can possibly be until it's a movie, and even then two people will look at it and see two completely different movies.

If I pitch you the story, the chances of it being the generic version is so much higher than if the script is already written, depending on the kind of movie that you're trying to make. In trying to not make the most generic kind of movie, it's more helpful to have the script written, but you have to invest time, money, and energy into creating that document first.

I personally am going to try to produce more of my own stuff, and be involved in that aspect as well. So having that script gives you more control over a physical, tangible property. It gives you creative and legal control – and I guess that's another lesson I learned from “11:14” – because otherwise you're an employee of somebody else, and you're writing their script. And at a certain point they're going to buy your script, but [already having the script] tends to ultimately give you more leverage, and it's specific: it's beat to beat tonally. Tone is the thing that people think of differently in their mind more than anything – and you can express tone in writing very, very clearly if you're a good writer.

So that's what you try to do. And then people – they read it, and they get it, and then you actually go and make that movie. Or you don't. Or they read it, and they go, “I don't want to make this movie,” and you know from the beginning that you shouldn't be making that movie with them.

The worst thing that you could ever do is start making a movie with somebody and then realize halfway that you're making two completely different movies, and you're not the one that has the ability to say “no.” So you're going to make their movie. I mean that's a terrible situation for a filmmaker.

FM.C: So are there filmmakers who influenced you or whom you draw inspiration from?

GREG: Yeah, in a lot of different ways. I've always admired Steven Soderbergh's career, in some ways more than his actual films. You know, just the choices that he makes, and how he's managed to navigate dangerous waters and get certain movies made; and I always held him up as the “one for me, one for them” model. Although, as Dan Waters said recently, like “You start out thinking you're making one for me, one for them – and then you realize you're just making all of them for them.”

I mean it varies from career to career. It really depends on how much money you make. If you're making money, you can kind of do whatever you want. George Clooney is doing amazing things because he makes money consistently enough that he can.

I think, you know, as a filmmaker, stylistically I go back to the Coen brothers a lot. I just like their sense of humor. I like their visual style. I like their taste in movies and their affection for genres that aren't really that popular anymore, and trying to revitalize those with a twist. Usually, they take some old genre, and they put some completely preposterous character in that [main] role, and that's the movie. And it's kind of an interesting formula that they have.

I love Peter Weir. He's like the filmmaker that I most admire that I'll probably never ever be. You know it's like I think every filmmaker would love to be some filmmaker that they actually don't have any real way of – it's like completely opposite of their aesthetic – but they really admire. I just find all of his movies to be so emotionally brave, and they always work. And they always get me on that fundamental level, and so few movies do that – these days especially. So yeah, there's tons . . .

John Huston was such an amazing guy. The fact that he would go off and make “The African Queen” in the river. I love that about him. Sometimes you separate the person from the films. Like more and more I'm beginning to admire how people went about making the movies.

Hitchcock is a guy that I never really appreciated until recently. More and more, I feel like, as a filmmaker, there's a lot I have in common with his really weird sense of humor, but he managed to anchor it . . . He was very smart: he was a producer and a showman.

Spielberg and Hitchcock: these are guys who are successful in the long term because they're not just great directors; they're also producers; they're also self-publicists. They manage to embody all the skills that are necessary, and they understand the kind of movies that they make, and they don't stray too much . . . but they still push the boundaries within that. They take risks – they make “Psycho” and everybody thinks they're crazy.

You know, so you try to draw lessons. I guess now I'm thinking more about the lessons of the choices in between the films, [rather] than necessarily of the film themselves. I still love the films, but it's like, “How do I manage to eke out a career?”

And I always saw myself as an independent filmmaker, and now, as I look at the independent movement, I'm starting to feel like, you know, independent movies have become a genre in a way.

If you want to continue to make movies, you need to be careful not to tie yourself to a genre that dies on the vine over time. Sooner or later you have to find a way to make interesting movies for a mass audience – you know. I guess the way that you do that changes constantly. You can't change who you are, but . . . you can't be completely out of sync with what the popular trends of the day are either. I try not to think about it too much because I feel like it's the path to not making good movies at all.

You have to do what you want to do, but you also have to do it in a way that kind of jibes with the time. Some people are incredibly talented, but they're like either ahead of their time or behind their time. So as if it's not hard enough, you also have to find that sweet spot and have your moment . . . and even then if you have ten years, you did pretty well.

It's crazy when you think about the period of like '68-'75, arguably the best period of American cinema. That's seven years; I've been here eight years. You know like literally if that period were happening right now – and maybe there is a Renaissance of sorts going on right now, and we'll recognize that in retrospect – then that's already elapsed. And how many films does an individual filmmaker make during a Renaissance? Like three, four, maybe five? . . .And that's it . . . and you're onto – now it's the eighties – and let's go onto crazy comedies, and John Hughes is the king.

By the way, …I admire John Hughes a lot. I always thought that was a guy who was really good at what he did, and Judd Apatow right now is in exactly the same position. The guy's on fire. He's so good, and he manages to put some humanity back into a genre that had become extremely broad. He keeps the broad comedy, but there's always a scene in every one of his movies where it's like, “Wow, he really did something I didn't expect with that character.” So there's a lot to learn . . . There's things you can try to take away from all kinds of different films and filmmakers.

FM.C: What words of advice would you have for people getting their start in the film industry?

GREG: Try not to become too intimidated by the machine, by which I mean that there's very little difference between what I do now and what I was doing in my public access studio at fifteen years old. It's just that the stakes are higher, in the sense that a lot of people are trying to make money.

And so you, as the individual filmmaker, have to figure out where your overlap is as a part of the machine. It's very easy to be intimated by Hollywood – by the agencies, . . .by people who have done it for longer than you. But at the end of the day, all you're really doing is trying to entertain people. If you can do that, then the other stuff is not unimportant, but less important.

I think that the mistake that most people make is that they come out here, and they try to learn how to be agents – and some people want to be agents . . . But if all you really want to do is to make movies, then you have to find a way to learn the system so that you can exploit the system but not let the system corrupt whatever motivation or inspiration you bring with you that made you want to do it in the first place.

And that becomes progressively harder and harder over time. Because you get cynical, and you get jaded, and you have to find a way to keep that flame alive within, or you just become somebody else paying the mortgage and turning out crap. So how you do that, or what you consider crap, is up to the individual.

It's really easy to be too judgmental of Hollywood. By which I mean, that even the most grossly over-budgeted, widely marketed movie is incredibly well done on a technical level at least . . . [especially] when you realize how hard it is to actually make a movie.

I think the mistake that people fresh out of film school can make is . . . having a lot of reverse snobbery towards bigger movies. I'm certainly guilty of that, and all you really do is prevent yourself from learning different aspects of things.

One of the great things about movies is that [they are] kind of egalitarian. There's all kinds of movies. You may only make, and probably should only make, a small subset of those, but there's value in all kinds of movies. And you want to sort of be open to learning from [those] as well, even if you're never going to make that kind of movie yourself.

I think those are the things.

FM.C: What are some things that you've learned personally from your years in the film industry?

GREG: You just have to find away to keep yourself grounded – especially if you're coming to LA, and you're not from here. Just living here will change you and your outlook and priorities. And then on top of that, if you're trying to draw upon yourself to tell a story, you need to know who you are to do that. And if you don't know who you are when you get here, the danger is that you'll draw upon who you think you should be to make movies, and that isn't necessarily the best way to go.

I don't think I necessarily knew who I was when I got here, and I think I'm still trying to figure that out. But I know that my writing has improved the more I continue to try to go back to what I really know from experience, and not when I try to mimic the trend of the day, which is what your representation may tell you to do.

That's the final piece of advice – there's an obsession with getting an agent or getting a manager – feeling like you're now in the system. . . . It’s an enviable position to be in because theoretically you're being put up for jobs and things like that, and you're completely grateful for that. [But] just because you haven't worked in the industry doesn't mean that the advice that you get from your own representation or someone working in the industry is necessarily correct.

You have to always consider the source of the advice because everybody has an agenda, and the agenda of an agent or an attorney is different from the agenda of a filmmaker sometimes. There are overlaps, but you have to know and articulate your own agenda and then you have to separate that from what other people are telling you. A lot of times those are going to be in alignment and then sometimes they're not going to be, and when they're not, you need to be aware of that . . . because when you're only getting your information from one source, whether it be an agent or manager or whoever, that's a singular point of view.

You're trying to learn and figure things out, but always trust your gut and make sure that you're doing the kind of work you want to be doing. And I say that in conjunction with the reverse snobbery thing, because you can take that [philosophy] too far and be like, “Screw you, I only want to make art films,” and it's not like an agent's going to be able to help you that much in making art films because they work for a large corporation.

So you have to understand the game that you're playing and understand that there are a million people trying to play the same game that you are, and you just have to find your niche and then know yourself enough to know where you fit. Because otherwise you're going to waste a lot of time chasing somebody else's dream.

FM.C: What inspires you to continue to make good movies?

GREG: I loved "Michael Clayton." I absolutely loved "Michael Clayton". . . I can't believe this was [Tony Gilroy's] first film: it's so smart; it's so consistent; it's so beautifully photographed; it's so well acted. Those kinds of reactions are more and more rare. Not necessarily a sign that movies are getting more and more lousy – it could be just a sign that I'm becoming more and more critical. But either way, when you have a reaction like that to a film – that's inspiring. It reminds you that it's still possible.

You lose hope when you start to feel like they don’t make movies like that anymore. The truth is you could never make movies like that. There were just incredibly courageous people who managed to make them, and it was actually harder to make them then.

But on the flip side, I'm actually really excited to see “Indiana Jones” when it comes out, and I'm praying not to be disappointed. I have that same feeling I had in 1999 when the new “Star Wars” movies were coming out: “Oh my god, this is going to be amazing.” And then I was like sort of crushed. I was like, “No, no, this isn't what I remember.” I'm either naive or optimistic enough to believe that it's going to be different this time, and I think that, in some ways, is the reason to keep going – because you continue to believe in that sort of magic, for lack of a better word, in the movies.

As frustrating as it is to not have a hobby that doesn't involve movies – because I still enjoy watching movies in my spare time – watching movies is inspiring. I still spend a lot of time watching obscure movies – looking for the gems – trying to see some shot or something.

The nice thing is that the more you know about [movies], the more varieties of ways that you can learn [from] and be excited by an individual movie. And you can also be disappointed by them on more levels too, but you try to focus on the positive. That's what I look for in a movie.

FM.C: What personally inspires you to persevere in a very difficult industry?

GREG: There are a lot of times where I fall victim to real cynicism . . . The hardest thing is not knowing if you're going to make another movie. There's no law saying that you get to keep working, and I went through a real hard time – it was five years between movies. It was probably only two or three years into that period before I began to think: “My career is over and nobody's told me that because they are never going to tell me that, but secretly they're all agreeing that I'm never going to make another movie. And I'm just wasting my time, and I should go home.”

I haven't given up because it just happens to still be the most important thing in my life. And in a way that's good . . . It has to be the most important thing in your life in order to break in because it's so hard.

But then I think, on a certain level, you have to loosen up a little bit and bring in other aspects of your life, or you're not going to be a very interesting filmmaker. You're going to have nothing to comment on besides movies. You're going to be very derivative and post-modern, and that's the sort of the trap that you can fall into.

So you have to love really living your life also. So, in a way, I try to be inspired by movies in the sense that I'm trying to be much more excited about trying things in my life that I can bring to movies. Everything that I do feels like research, but in the best possible way. Even the worst conversations with people that I don't want to talk to become like a way for me to study human behavior, and everything is fascinating on some level, so . . . I find that inspiring.

And I just try to work on things that I want to be working on, or I'm interested in at the time. Hopefully, if you choose a subject, or you can get hired for a job, there's something about it that is really, really interesting to you then that will self-generate enthusiasm. There's nothing worse than being on a project or signing up for something that you know that there's nothing that you like about it. Maybe the hallmark of professionalism is finding something you like about everything that you do so that you can work consistently.

You got to surround yourself with artists . . . That's the main thing. There was a period where I was hanging out with too many business-minded people and that's when I was at my most cynical.

Now I've pulled back from that and try to surround myself with more creative people who are really doing it, and who inspire me, and who I'm proud of – [who] make me feel like I can do it too, you know? And I think that's the main thing: you want to look at other people and be like “Well, they're doing it!” . . . and feel like you're part of a creative community in a city that can feel very fractured and alienating.

It's nice once you've been here long enough – you can find those people and make sure that you're in regular contact, and you help each other, and you go support each other . . . and everybody's doing their thing and that feels good.

No matter how long it takes in between, if you have a support system like that, you're not going to give up.

FM.C: Thank you.