GAVIN SCOTT: ACROSS THREE COUNTRIES

Gavin Scott is a writer, director and producer who grew up in England and New Zealand and who now lives in Los Angeles with his wife and three daughters. His film and television credits include ‘The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles’, ‘Space Rangers’, ‘Small Soldiers’, ‘The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne’,  ‘The Mists of Avalon’, The Battle of Treasure Island’ and ‘Earthsea’ with Isabella Rosellini and Danny Glover. AUSUS magazine spoke to Gavin about his transition into writing for film and television, how he learnt the art of screenwriting, and his relationship with the three countries he has lived in thus far. 

Q: What did you do before you became a writer, a director, and a producer?

I began my career as a journalist in New Zealand. My family had emigrated there from England. I worked for the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation as a reporter for a couple of years after graduating from journalism at university. And then my wife and I traveled overland across Asia to England. I joined the Times newspapers in the early seventies with the Times Educational Supplement . Then I joined BBC Radio and did two shows there - World of One and PM. I worked there for five years before I moved into BBC television, becoming a reporter for the program Newsnight and making longer documentaries whenever I got the chance. Then I went to breakfast television and I was a presenter for a while before becoming a reporter with ITN and Channel Four news. All in all I spent nearly twenty years as a journalist in New Zealand and Britain before becoming a screenwriter. 

Q: What prompted you to change careers?

Towards the end of that time my wife, Nicola, encouraged me to take up screen writing. I began to get bits and pieces of work, such as options on screenplays that I’d written or rewrite jobs, but I realized that in order to make a go of it I actually had to leave journalism. That made me nervous. I was forty at the time. But Nicola and out three daughters encouraged me and in 1990 I resigned from ITN. I was very fortunate that George Lucas wanted to recruit writers for a series he was creating about the young Indiana Jones I convinced my agent to send them a script and that got me a meeting with George Lucas. 

Q: That led to a job with Lucas?

Yes. After the meeting they said they’d get back to me. I had my leaving party from work and we went on holiday.  Whilst on holiday I got a call asking me to get over to Skywalker Ranch. So I became part of the young Indiana Jones Chronicle group and found myself going back and forth between London and the Skywalker Ranch in the US. 

Q: What script did you send them?

It was about Jules Verne actually. It was about him not making up ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea’ but actually experiencing it as a young man. It was analogous to what George was doing with young Indy. I was putting a real character, Verne, into his own fictional adventures and in ‘The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles’ George was putting his fictional character into real historical situations. And although I was never able to get the Jules Verne feature film made it was ultimately the genesis of the television series I produced later on called ‘The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne’.

Q: How did you learn to become a screenwriter?

Literally, I bought a paperback edition of William Goldman’s ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ and followed that as my model, which meant that my earlier scripts were not laid out properly because this particular edition didn’t look like a screenplay at all. It just looked like ordinary prose. But it was a really good model to follow because I think that William Goldman’s scripts actually set out to be literary documents. He obviously writes terrific movies, but he also writes terrific screenplays. That is to say they are very readable. They are elegantly written. I think many people are daunted about writing screenplays, and I previously had been, by the belief that you had to put in things like dolly in here, seventy five millimeter lens there, use particular light here, you know, all that technical stuff. But you don’t have to. What you do have to do is create on the page the atmosphere and the vision of what the scene will be like, which is a literary job, not a technical one. The screenplay is a blueprint, a technical document, but frankly in it’s earliest phases it’s got to be a literary document because people have got to want to read it. I think with so many screenplays it’s very easy just to put down the slam bam crash wallop sort of thing and not to try and make them an enticing experience in themselves. But because I was following William Goldman’s model I thought that’s what you were supposed to do. I thought that was what everybody did. I think that set me in good stead. 

Q: Do you enjoy more the process of producing or of writing and directing?

I’m not a producer by nature in the sense that I’m one of those people who are good at putting deals together. But in order to make things happen you’ve sometimes got to act like a producer. You’ve got to talk to people. So in terms of actually talking things up and networking I regard producing as part of the job though, as I say, it’s not my particular skill. My wife’s much better at it than I am! For me, the process of writing and directing are naturally linked. You direct a movie in your head when you write it. The natural thing to do is to carry that on and realize it by determining what the set and the location should look like, as well as what the actors should look like and how they should perform. It’s not easy to get in the position where people will give you millions of dollars to do that, but when it does happen this is the way it ought to be. 

Q: Did you study directing?

No. I just picked it up as I went along. As a television reporter I’d go out with camera crews and be making short news films every few days. So I learnt about camera placement and especially about editing under the pressure of news, which is considerable. So in some ways I knew the basics of it. In terms of directing actors basically it’s a matter of communication. They want to know what you want to see on the screen and the combination, hopefully, of what you’ve written in the screenplay and you’re communication with them allows them to do what they’re good at. You’re not going to teach somebody how to act. It’s a matter of creating the template which they can fill. Things like camera placement and moving the camera you just learn by doing. I’m sure you can learn it at film school too, but the reality for me was I didn’t have the opportunity to go to film school. Switching careers as a family man in middle age I couldn’t stop and not earn anything for three or four years. I just had to move on to the next phase where I could earn some money as a writer and then figure out how to direct once I got myself the chance. 

Q: How do you find your actors for these projects?

Through the usual casting process. We were shooting Jules Verne in Canada so a lot of the casting was done in Montreal. The rest of it was done in the US and in London. ‘Battle of Treasure Island’ we shot in New Zealand and most of the casting was done there. A couple of characters were also cast in England. And then I had the great good fortune that Randy Quaid became available to play the lead role of the pirate chief. The producers were looking for someone with a ‘name’ and his profile was perfect for this project. 

Q: What projects are you currently working on?

I’ve got a project called ‘The Great Sheep Rebellion’, which is the next film I hope to shoot in New Zealand. It’s kind of like ‘Babe’ meets ‘Animal Farm’. I’ve also been writing for National Geographic, who is starting to make feature films. I’ve been writing a film for them about the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 in Indonesia. It’s a big meaty romance set in an exotic land. That, I would think, will be shot in Indonesia. And I’ve written a medieval epic for a German company called “The Physician” which should go into production next spring. 

Q: Do you write projects specifically that you can direct?

It varies. I wrote ‘Battle of Treasure Island’ for me to direct. I do, however, write more projects than I could direct myself. I write plenty of projects that will be directed by other people, but there are some that I do really want to direct myself. An example is ‘The Great Sheep Rebellion’. It’s a very personal project. 

Q: Do you have a set writing schedule?

Sure. I work pretty regular hours. I start at nine in the morning and try to write ten pages a day. Usually I can get that done by around six o’clock in the evening. But if I can’t, I carry on. I might be working till midnight. I find that the discipline of there being a set amount that I will write everyday being a very useful one. There are times when I’m not writing a screenplay I’m, for example, developing an outline for a movie or I’m revising a screenplay and then that’s a different regime. But generally speaking I try to write ten pages every day. I take the weekends off because I find that allows my batteries to be recharged. 

Q: Where do you get the ideas for your stories?

It’s not hard. I tend to read a lot and listen to books on tape. I also listen to the radio and watch films and television. Ideas tend to pour in all the time. I’d never be able to write scripts from all the ideas I develop because there are too many! 

Q: Do you usually work on just one project at a time?

Generally speaking yes. But sometimes, for example, I’ll be writing a screenplay in the morning and if I finish writing ten pages then that will leave me free in the afternoon to develop an idea or read a treatment or indeed to read a book. I like to read a lot of history and biography and science writing. This is the research side of things which I love doing. 

Q: Do you have a preference when it comes to working in film or television? 

No. I enjoy them equally. Television is more likely to get made and film is bigger and more ambitious. Having a good story to tell, it’s not crucial to me whether it’s going out on the big screen or the small screen. The reality of it is that the story you write as a feature film most people are going to see on the television. The other thing is that because I do some of these ‘event’ mini series like ‘The Mists of Avalon’ or ‘Earthsea’, they tend to have premieres in cinemas and I get to see them up on the big screen. So there’s not a lot of distinction to be made, aside from the technical and financial aspects. But frankly, what I’m concerned with is telling a good story and this can happen just as much in television as in film.

Q: How would you describe the types of stories you like to tell?

I think the term that characterizes what I like doing is ‘high adventure’. It’s not gritty, downbeat stuff. It’s those big concept adventures, whether it’s boy’s toy soldiers taking over a town or the wizard of Earthsea battling the Kargides. 

Q: What attracts you to these ‘high adventure’ stories?

I suppose it’s my nature. I regard life as an adventure. I suppose I’ve also been influenced by the movies I saw as a child. The movies I remember seeing in the fifties were ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ and ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’. They were big, spectacular, spirit lifting adventures – the kind of thing I want to make. 

Q: Does this still require a lot of research?

Absolutely. For ‘The Mists of Avalon’, for example, I wanted to make sure that the story I was telling made sense in the context of when the King Arthur legend probably originated. That is, when the Roman legions were leaving Britain. The author of the original book had obviously gone into that period herself, but I went into it also to make sure that the adaptation I was doing was as faithful to those particularly unknown times as possible. There’s also a huge amount of research involved in ‘Krakatoa’, especially as it’s National Geographic who are very punctilious about accuracy. I just love the notion of taking a period of time and making it come to life. In terms of research one of the things I’ve been doing recently is writing a kind of Dickensian novel. I have published novels in the past, mainly thrillers, but I wanted to write a big, meaty novel of the kind that Dickens might have written. It’s set in the nineteenth century. That required a great deal of research,  and I loved it. 

Q: Does the writing process get easier for you as you go along?

As I’m able to do it more I waste less time fretting and figuring out what to do because I know the mental techniques of my own mind. I know how to make my own mind function and invent scenarios or fix faults in scenarios that I’ve already invented. It does become easier. It’s almost like developing a mental muscle after doing it for a while. Therefore, I can say that it’s not going to take as long to do this as it might have five years ago because I know how to do the basics. So I can spend my creative energies on hopefully making it better.

Q: Do you have a purpose with your work?

I think I  have a fairly  positive attitude towards life which I like to think comes across in my work. So much of modern mass entertainment tends to take a negative view of human nature. I know there’s a lot wrong with us as a species but at the same time we have wonderful potential. If you had to sum up what my work was about then I’d say it’s about the realization of human potential. That in any given adventure, in any given story, ultimately I want the people in my story to reach their full range or put themselves in the position where they can reach it. Because I think that that is a life affirming message that should be intrinsic to the story. People need that inspiration and affirmation and for me that makes it worthwhile. 

Q: Are there more things you’d like to achieve in your career?

Absolutely. I want to keep doing this as long as I’m physically able. I want to make more and better movies. I want to get better as a director and a writer. There’s a wonderful phrase that Robert Browning once wrote which was, ‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s heaven for?’ The concept that I can be better than I am now is what pushes me on. But I also take pleasure from the journey because what I’m doing is incredibly satisfying.

Q: Finally, Gavin, what is the significance to you of the three countries you have lived in so far?