5 Questions with C. Robert Cargill
And join a live Q&A with Cargill on Halloween weekend!
So excited that our first Q&A is coming up! C. Robert Cargill, writer of Sinister, Doctor Strange, The Black Phone, and more, will join a Zoom next weekend where YOU will ask the questions and he’ll provide insights from his years of experience.
The only way to join the conversation (or listen later) is to become a paid subscriber!
An ongoing series I’ll be running in this newsletter is 5 QUESTIONS WITH... an established TV or film writer. I’ve thought a lot about what questions would be most helpful to readers here. I landed on the questions below, but please let me know in the comments if you have different questions you’d prefer to see answered!
I’ve already received some terrific responses from these questions, and I want to start with Cargill’s, since he’s our guest of honor next week. If you follow Cargill on Twitter, you know that he loves movies, and he loves writers and writing and talking craft. As expected, Cargill’s responses are thoughtful and enthusiastic. These answers portend a killer Q&A next weekend.
1. What are you working on right now?
Scott Derrickson and I are prepping our next film, THE GORGE, starring Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy. In the meanwhile, we are producing a number of projects across both TV and film.
2. What challenges are you facing specific to your current writing project?
It’s a larger budget affair, which means a lot of moving parts, and solving larger production problems in ways that don’t involve just throwing money at it. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that there is never enough time and never enough money, no matter how big the film is, and sometimes that requires some old school “going to a quiet place to think” creativity. We’re in the early stages of pre-production, so there’s a lot of that kind of thinking going on.
3. What advice about the business of TV/film writing can you give to someone starting out now?
This advice is unpopular, but half your job as a starting writer is writing something great, and the other half is coming up with some very real, tangible, creative way of getting that work in front of the people who want to buy it.
There’s this Field of Dreams-like thinking that “If you build it, they will come,” but the reality is that Hollywood is built entirely on relationships.
There’s a sea of scripts out there, and you need to find a way to get your script to float to the top near someone looking for it. There are a myriad of ways to go about that, and you need to find the one that is best suited to you and your skillset.
A smart way I once heard it described is that making it in Hollywood is like breaking out of prison – once enough people have done it, they brick up the hole and you have to find another way to do it.
Whether you develop those relationships personally through internship, mentorship, or just hanging out in the right coffeeshop, or you do it by gaining attention via content creation through other mediums (Twitter, Youtube, Tik Tok), you need to be thinking about ways you can get yourself in front of the right people as much as you’re thinking about your next script or pilot. As many have been lamenting recently, a lot of the surefire ways to get into the staffing pipeline are drying up and now, more than ever, your creativity is needed to navigate the way in.
4. What advice about the craft of writing can you give to someone starting out?
The rules are not ironclad; they are guidelines based upon audience expectation. Learn them rigidly so you can break them fluidly. The rules can be used against your audience to keep them on their toes before you knock them off their feet. There is no such thing as “never” in a script when it comes to rules. You can break any rule you want as long as the result is something better than had you stuck to the rules.
5. What do you respond to most in a piece of writing?
A fresh take on an old idea.
When someone can take something familiar and spin it in a way I’ve never seen, that’s thrilling to me. I especially love it when in the first ten pages a script says “Hey you know this thing??” and I go “Yeah, yeah,” only to have it go “Well what if it worked this way? Or is crossed with this genre?” I love it.
Give me a heist movie set in a haunted house, or a car chase movie with a UFO. Shake it up and change the rules. Audiences see movies when they think they know what it is about. So give them the familiar element and then add something fresh they haven’t seen it with. I love feeling like I know what a film is, but then it offers me that thing I didn’t see coming. That’s the good stuff right there.
6. What are you watching/reading/listening to lately that’s getting you excited or inspired?
I’m buried in good genre television at the moment — The Rings of Power, She-Hulk, The Boys, The Midnight Club — but what has me really excited is what is happening in horror.
Hollywood doubled down on horror last year and the results are pouring into theaters this year. And it has been exciting. Genre-bending horror stories are not only opening almost every weekend, but they are doing incredibly well, often overperforming the very studio estimates that long doomed horror to basement. This year not one but two major studios attached Rated-R teaser trailers to their big four quadrant tentpoles. That never happens. And in both cases, the movies overperformed tracking and became the weekend darlings that saw slimmer declines than usual in the weeks that followed. It is a banner year for horror, and Hollywood smells money…from original films, not IP. This is exciting for everyone in the genre space. And I am LOVING it.
Don’t forget, if you want to join Cargill and me on next weekend for the exclusive Q&A where YOU ask the questions (or if you want to listen to it later), you’ll have to upgrade to a paid subscription. And you’re gonna love the next Q&A guest too!
By the way, Cargill won’t be the only guy on that Zoom who’s written Doctor Strange. Years ago, Acker and I got to write a Thunderbolts annual for Marvel. We thought it’d be fun for the villain in the book to be Strange, who’d gone crazy for some reason. Acker had the idea to start it out with Strange in his underwear, Breaking Bad-style.
Shocked this image hasn’t made it into one of the movies yet.
“One thing I’ve learned over the years is that there is never enough time and never enough money, no matter how big the film is, and sometimes that requires some old school “going to a quiet place to think” creativity.” From question 2 - how much of this is actually quiet place thinking opposed to bouncing ideas with the other main creatives? Does alone creativity require numerous options?