Roger Avary
Roger Avary | |
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![]() Roger Avary at the 2007 Scream Awards | |
Born | Roger d'Avary (dropped "d'" in 1992) |
Roger Roberts Avary (born August 23, 1965) is a Canadian-born motion picture director, producer, and Oscar-winning screenwriter.[1]
Biography
1965 to 1983: Childhood and early years
Roger Avary, is the son of a Brazilian-raised deep-shaft mining engineer and a German physical therapist. Avary was born in Flin Flon, Manitoba, Canada but grew up in Oracle, Arizona, the home of Biosphere 2. In the early 1970s Avary's family moved first to Torrance, California and then to Manhattan Beach, California where he attended Mira Costa High School. Avary, a cartoonist in the style of Sergio Aragonés and Tom Eaton, made numerous early animations on the 8 mm and Super-8 formats. In 1979 he began working at one of the first video stores in Southern California, Video Out-Takes, in Redondo Beach, California. The store was owned by the father of his childhood friend, and first collaborator, Scott Magill. The two had grown up making movies together, and experimenting in early Betamax videotape formats. One of Avary's early Super-8 mm films, The Worm Turns, won Best Film from LAFTA (The Los Angeles Film Teachers Association) in 1983.
1981 to 1986
When in 1981, Video Out-Takes co-owner Lance Lawson (a name that comes up repeatedly in Avary and Tarantino's films) left to open the now famous Video Archives. Avary went along, writing the store's database program with fellow 6502 programmer Andy Blinn on an Atari 800 computer and under the vision of Lawson Video Archives became a gathering place for an eclectic and unique group of film geeks, who became known as "Archivists". Among this group Avary met an odd and brilliant film enthusiast, Quentin Tarantino. The two became friends, introducing each other to their favorite films.
From 1985 to 1986 Avary attended Menlo College, in Atherton, California.[2] The school, "a West coast Bennington", laid the foundations for his film adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel The Rules of Attraction. Avary was quoted as saying that he and Easton-Ellis are very similar people: "Adapting Rules was natural for me because I feel very close to Bret. We're about the same age, we're both from L.A., we both attended affluent liberal arts colleges, we both grew up in the 80's, attending the same clubs, listening to the same music. We're both social satirists who view our subjects from the inside. It's quite possible we're the same person -- but we're not."
From 1986 to 1987 Avary attended the Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, California, with fellow future directors Michael Bay and Tarsem Singh. Avary left Art Center to take a job running projectors at Empire International Pictures. In the Summer of 1987 Avary took what money he had and "Eurailed across Europe until it dried up", an experience he would later fold into the screenplay for The Rules of Attraction.
1987 to 1994
Early in his career, Avary made a number of contributions to some of Quentin Tarantino's movies. He worked as a cinematographer on Tarantino's unfinished first film, My Best Friend's Birthday. He had at one point written an 80-page script called "The Open Road", which he described as being about the "odd couple relationship between an uptight business man and an out-of-control hitchhiker who travel into a Hellish mid-Western town together" and compared it to Martin Scorsese's After Hours. After moving on to another screenplay, a spec adaptation of The Silver Surfer, he allowed Tarantino to rewrite "The Open Road" to add enough length to bring it to a 120-page industry standard length. Tarantino did more than that, turning out a 500-page handwritten behemoth of a screenplay which Avary described as "the Citizen Kane of pop culture." Avary took on the producer's role, (Tarantino used the remainder as the basis for parts of his other scripts.) Working as producer, he and Tarantino tried unsuccessfully for several years to get funding so that Tarantino could direct the script himself. Eventually, the script was sold to French producer Samuel Hadida. Since Tarantino was busy prepping Reservoir Dogs, Avary was hired with Tarantino's consent by Tony Scott and Hadida to work as a script doctor on the material, a job which included bringing the length down, reforming the narrative to a linear fashion, and writing a more commercial ending where the Clarence character is not killed.
When the Paul Brothers, a pair of wealthy bodybuilders who wanted to get into the movies, offered Tarantino funding for his script Natural Born Killers on the condition he include a scene featuring them, he could not write it out of disgust, and asked Avary to write it as a favor. The scene, known as the "Hun Brothers" scene, was described by Oliver Stone as the best scene in the script. It was, however, cut from the final film because, as Stone is quoted as saying on the Natural Born Killers special edition laserdisc, "I fucked it up." Avary co-wrote the background radio dialogue in Reservoir Dogs (1992), and designed the "Dog Eat Dog" logo which appeared in the end credits.
Most notably, Avary contributed material which, combined with Tarantino's, formed the basis of Pulp Fiction (1994) for which he and Tarantino won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Earlier in their careers, Tarantino and Avary had planned on making an anthology movie comprised of three short films; one written and directed by Avary, one written and directed by Tarantino, and one written and directed by a third filmmaker, reportedly Adam Rifkin. When the third filmmaker never materialized, Tarantino and Avary took their respective stories and expanded them into full length screenplays separately. Tarantino's story became Reservoir Dogs, and Avary's story became "Pandemonium Reigns". "Pandemonium Reigns" ended up forming the basis of the "Gold Watch" chapter of Pulp Fiction (an earlier version of his website displayed an excerpt from "Pandemonium Reigns", illustrating the changes that were made by Tarantino when writing "The Gold Watch"), and other odd scenes Avary had written during his rewrite of True Romance were reworked and incorporated into the Pulp Fiction script, such as the accidental shooting of Marvin, and the scene in which the bullets fired at Jules and Vincent miss their targets. Tarantino and Avary got together in Amsterdam shortly after the release of Reservoir Dogs, and pasted each other's scenes together into a first draft, after which Avary left to film Killing Zoe, leaving Tarantino to continue subsequent writing of Pulp Fiction. Avary's bizarre 1994 Oscar speech (for Best Original Screenplay) consisted of "I want to thank my w-tch, a wife, who I love more than anyone else in the world...I'm gonna go now 'cause I really got to take a pee."
Beowulf
According to Avary's biography on the American "Killing Zoe" DVD, Avary directed a small, independent musical production of "Beowulf" for the stage in Paris in 1993. Little is known about the nature of the production, but Beowulf seems to have been a lifelong obsession with Avary. In the production notes of the same "Killing Zoe" DVD Avary is said to have given copies of Beowulf to the actors as inspiration for their character's motivations. Also, Avary co-wrote and executive produced the Robert Zemeckis directed $150 million dollar production of Beowulf in 2007.
Killing Zoe
Avary also wrote and directed the neo-noir cult thriller Killing Zoe (1994) which Tarantino executive produced. The screenplay was based in part on his experiences travelling through Europe (which he also refers to in Victor's European trip in The Rules of Attraction). Avary had initially intended to write a screenplay completely devoted to this experience, for which Tarantino suggested the ironic title Roger Takes a Trip. But when producer Lawrence Bender called Avary during location scouting on Reservoir Dogs asking if he had a screenplay that took place entirely in a bank so that they could take advantage of an inexpensive location they had no use for, Avary told Bender that he had such a script -- and quickly wrote Killing Zoe in under a week, using elements of his European trip as inspiration. While Killing Zoe takes place in Paris, the film was almost entirely shot in downtown Los Angeles locations, with only two days in Paris to shoot the opening credit sequence and two drive-by shots. The film was also an influence on Tarantino; according to Avary, Tarantino, while rewriting Pulp Fiction, added the heroin scenes after viewing a rough cut of Killing Zoe. The film was honored with le Prix très spécial à Cannes 1994, the very same year that Pulp Fiction won the Palme d'Or. It continued to win awards worldwide on the festival circuit, including Best Film at Japan's Yubari International Film Festival and the Italian Mystfest. The film was also celebrated by the Cinémathèque Française, who heralded Avary as "the Antonin Artaud of cinema" during their Cinema of Cruelty retrospective.
1995 to 2002
Avary briefly moved into work for television and made two pilots, neither of which was picked up.
His second directing effort, Mr. Stitch, was reportedly plagued by production problems, notably a conflict with lead actor Rutger Hauer[3], and ultimately went straight to video release[4].
During this time he also produced two films, Boogie Boy (1997) for Tarantino alumni Craig Hamman and The Last Man (2000), for frequent writing collaborator Harry Ralston. During this time Avary spent quite a bit of his energy working as a high paid script doctor and using the money to finance the development of his own projects, including a gestating epic on Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí.
Avary is notable as the first mainstream filmmaker to maintain a journal on his avary.com webpage, before there was such a thing as "blogging",[citation needed] although in late 2005 Avary closed his weblog with no explanation or notice. In a later interview with JoBlo.com, Avary mentions that "I looked around and realized that Brett Ratner, and Rosie O'Donnell, and Al Gore, and everyone else had a weblog, it just suddenly seemed uninteresting. I wanna do something different with the Internet."
In the late 90s, Avary was hired by Warner Bros studio to adapt Neil Gaiman's comic series The Sandman to the big screen. He frequently sparred with the studio over the direction of the film, with Avary wanting to adapt as close to the source material as possible. When he suggested that he would film a large part of Sandman like a Jan Švankmajer film, he was fired. After the incident, Gaiman and Avary became friends and started work together writing an adaptation of the epic poem Beowulf.[5]
Avary also contributed a commentary track on the special edition DVD of George Romero's Day of the Dead and for the Criterion laserdisc of John Woo's "Hard Boiled.
The Rules of Attraction
In 2002 Avary returned to cinema as a director with his adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel The Rules of Attraction, which he also executive produced. As of 2009, the film ranked as the twenty-seventh highest grossing college comedy of all time.[6] The Rules of Attraction was the first studio movie to prove reliable use of Apple's Final Cut Pro editing system for editing motion picture film.[7] Roger Avary became a spokesperson for Apple's Final Cut Pro product[8], appearing in Apple print and web ads worldwide. His film from within the film, Glitterati (2004), used elements of Victor's European trip and was shot on digital video. In 2005, he purchased the rights to another Bret Easton Ellis novel Glamorama, and is currently developing it for himself to direct.
In 2005 Avary, at the request of his friend, actor James Van Der Beek, played the part of a peyote-taking gonzo film director Franklin Brauner in the film "Standing Still."[9]
Silent Hill
In 2006 Avary wrote a screenplay adaptation to the hit Konami videogame, Silent Hill (2006), with French director and friend, Christophe Gans, and Killing Zoe producer Samuel Hadida. Avary and Gans being long time video gamers and fans of the Silent Hill series, collaborated on this game-based film. When Gans asked Avary to help him adapt the first game to film, Avary did so without hesitation. Avary has expressed interest in returning to work on future Silent Hill films.[10]
Beowulf
Avary and novelist Neil Gaiman's long gestating screenplay for Beowulf was finally produced by the pair in 2007 with Robert Zemeckis directing, utilizing the Performance capture technology pioneered in The Polar Express. Gaiman and Avary enjoyed the experience of working together, coming across as a happy team in Beowulf interviews.[11] Avary has expressed interest in working with Gaiman again.[12]
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
On August 3, 2007, id Software announced at Quakecon 2007 that a film adaptation of their game, Return to Castle Wolfenstein is in development with the writer/producer team of Silent Hill on board with Avary as director and writer and Samuel Hadida as producer.[13]
Manslaughter charge
On January 13, 2008, Avary was arrested under suspicion of manslaughter and DUI, following a car crash in Ojai, California where a passenger, Andreas Zini, was killed. The Ventura County Sheriff's department responded to the accident after midnight Sunday morning on the 19-hundred block of East Ojai Avenue. Sheriff's deputies allege Avary's wife was ejected from the car, but she is reportedly in stable condition. Avary was released from jail on $50,000 bail.[14]
In December, 2008, he was charged with, and pleaded not guilty to, gross vehicular manslaughter and two felony counts of causing bodily injury while intoxicated.[15]
Filmography
Director
- The Worm Turns (1983) (short)
- "Roger Avary's Day Off" (1987) (short)
- Killing Zoe (1994)
- Mr. Stitch (1996)
- The Rules of Attraction (2002)
- Glitterati (2005)
- "Silent Hill 2" (2010)
- Return to Castle Wolfenstein (in production)
Writer
- The Worm Turns (1983) (short)
- Reservoir Dogs (1992) (co-writer of background radio dialogue)
- True Romance (1993) (uncredited writer/script doctor)
- Pulp Fiction (1994) (story by)
- Killing Zoe (1994)
- Crying Freeman (1995) (uncredited)
- Mr. Stitch (1996)
- Odd Jobs (1997)
- The Rules of Attraction (2002)
- Glitterati (2005)
- Silent Hill (2006)
- Beowulf (2007)
- Driver (2008)
- "Silent Hill 2" (2010)
- Return to Castle Wolfenstein (In Production) (written by)
Producer
- Mr. Stitch (1996)
- Odd Jobs (1997)
- Glitterati (2005)
Executive Producer
- Boogie Boy (1998)
- The Rules of Attraction (2002)
- The Last Man (2003)
- Beowulf (2007)
Actor
- Phantasm IV: Oblivion (1998) - cameo
- Standing Still (2005)
Cinematographer
References
- ^ [1]
- ^ "Pulp Friction". LA Weekly. 2002-10-09. Retrieved 2008-06-24.
- ^
{{citation}}
: Empty citation (help)The one about that time i worked in a movie with ron jeremy. yes, that ron jeremy., article on Wil Wheaton's blog - ^ "Mr Stitch" plagued by creative differences
- ^ Kevin Kelly. "Comic-Con: 'Beowulf' Footage Screening, Q&A, and Party!". cinematical.com. Retrieved 2007-08-02.
- ^ Box Office Mojo
- ^ Final Cut Pro drives 'Blue Car,' 'Rules' films
- ^ [2]
- ^ Clint Morris. "Exclusive Interview : James Van Der Beek". Moviehole.net. Retrieved 2007-01-21.
- ^
Matt Withers (2006-04-20). "INT: Roger Avary". JoBlo.com. Retrieved 2007-01-21.
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(help) - ^ Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary: Shaping Beowulf's story, video interview with stv.tv
- ^ Tom Ambrose (December 2007). "He Is Legend". Empire. p. 142.
- ^
Gamespot. "Wolfenstein headed for Hollywood". [3]. Retrieved 2007-08-03.
{{cite news}}
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- ^ "'Pulp Fiction' screenwriter Avary arrested after fatal Ojai crash". Ventura County-Star. 2008-01-13.
- ^ Catherine Saillant (2008-12-13). "Screenwriter Roger Avary charged with gross vehicular manslaughter". Los Angeles Times.
External links
- Roger Avary official website
- Roger Avary at AllMovie
- Please use a more specific IMDb template. See the documentation for available templates.
- Roger Avary talks to Edge Magazine about Silent Hill
- Roger Avary Interview on Suicide Girls
- Webwombat.com Interview
- Screen-It deconstructs the sex, drugs, and violence in The Rules of Attraction
- JoBlo.com Interview on Silent Hill