How to Get Your Passion Project Made...in Only Seven Years

My first movie -- PU-239 -- took seven years to make its way from a short story I found in a bookstore in Greenwich Village to a deserted power station in Ploeist, Romania to HBO this Saturday night. The initial draft of the script, the first screenplay I'd ever written, was completed for Writers Guild minimum more than six years ago. People seemed very excited about it back then. It was different, it was unusual, it was dark and complicated, it didn't fit into a genre. Silly me, I thought these were tributes to invention. In reality, these are the gentle euphemisms the industry uses when something is deemed "unmakeable" and not "commercially viable." I thought I was writing a movie only to learn years later that I had produced something else called a "writing sample."

My writing sample wandered around town for five years and it generated a number of opportunities for which I am truly grateful. But even though it got me jobs, I was still unable to get it made. It made me miserable and I in turn made everyone I talked to about it almost as miserable -- this is what is called a "passion project."

Steven Soderbergh, who hired me to write something else after having read my writing sample, told me he would help me get the movie made. We wrested it away from the people who had first paid me to write it and took it to United Artists, where the movie seemed to find a home -- only to have that home purchased by Sony, which had little interest in making a dark, twisted tale about loose nukes in post-Perestroika Russia. We took it to other places...all of the other places. Months of "maybe" turned into years of doubt. Finally, I found myself at HBO talking to an executive who was familiar with my writing sample, and who said that maybe they would make it. Two weeks later he left HBO for Sony and the executive he entrusted it to also left before the movie was finished. But he gave the script to Colin Callender, who has built a brand at HBO by turning the "unmakeable" into entertainment.

Colin teamed with another one of the writing sample's fans -- Charlie Lyons of Beacon Films, to finance the movie. We did not have a big budget, or famous actors and we were not subject to the commercial imperatives of a theatrical release. Instead we went to Romania and Moscow and tried to bring to life a story that we believed ought to do more than just get me hired to write other stories. I am so very grateful to all my collaborators -- those who are credited in the film and those gave me credit for my persistence.

If the film exists now as a cautionary tale of what the Cold War has left behind, I hope that for those of you seven years into your own passion projects it will also function as a primer on not giving up. Perhaps the only thing worse than a movie taking seven years to get made is giving up after six and giving yourself over to the dispassionate act of writing what we have all already seen.

In a world where, as Yeats said, "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity," seven years is sometime what it takes to get to Romania and back.

Click here to watch clips, a trailer, and a featurette on PU-239, which premieres Saturday, November 17 at 8 pm ET/PT on HBO.

Comments

[andelman]

You might enjoy this audio interview with "PU-239" co-star Oscar Isaac: http://www.mrmedia.com/2007/11/oscar-isaac-pu-239-actor-mr-media.html .

[blooddoc]

Congratulations on your success. Writing fiction (novels or screenplays) is, and has been for the last 20 years or so, a major crap shoot. The people currently in charge of publishing or green-lighting a work of fiction are far more interested in marketability (read: name recognition) than in quality of the work. If you have the connections, chances are you may do well regardless of what you produce. That's why so many of the novels we buy and the movies we see are crap. Sour grapes? Guilty as charged. After five novels, three screenplays, numerous awards at writers' conferences, and multiple failed attempts at getting published, I just gave up and simply write for fun now. After so many hits upside the head, you finally learn to face reality. Hearing a story like Burns' is refreshing, to say the least.

[Hollywoodaholic]

This seems to be standard procedure for highly original scripts. Studios love the writing but always have some other project they've already spent major development money on that they want YOU to put your MOJO on instead. Course, those projects or ideas are usually lame. But you do your best thinking, "I can elevate this." But it never has the same sheen as your passion project, of course, and the studio is disappointed. You couldn't raise the dead. And your passion project is dead, too. So anytime one gets revived, the rest of us start believing in our own personal miracles again. Congratulations!

[Hubert]

Could've picked a better name for the movie- I can visualize the review: PU-239...i­t stinks!

[Hugo de Balsac]

my view on the Yeats quote is that both points of view are valid. i mean, if good writing is not based on wrong or bad, then what good is it?

[phansen]

Mr. Burns, I just watched the trailer for Pu-239. It looks like an interesting film, but I've heard your story before... it seems fairly common in Hollywood. So my question is, Why is that? Why if the story of the 'passion project' is so common does Hollywood not take notice, and realize that there is in fact a market for films like yours? That making a film for 20mil and watching it gross 22 is worthwhile? There do seem to be some new trends starting (I would cite Focus as an example of people making successful films that would not have been made 10 years ago), but overall, Hollywood seems tragically conformist. It always baffles me when some studio spends 100mil on a film that everyone realizes is garbage because it's so generic. Hopefully, the more films like yours that get made, the further the door will be opened for creative and innovative expression. Best of luck.

[FogBelter]

Mr Burns, congrats on your accomplishment! I look forward to seeing your film, it's great that your "passion project" was made.

I wrote one myself almost 8 years ago and it sits on my shelf. I open it and reread it, and can still say "wow, that's good.", but, I fear it exists only for my own pleasure now.

I hope you don't mind if I vicariously enjoy your success with PU-239. Cheers!

[rixhex56]

Mr. Burns,

"It was different, it was unusual, it was dark and complicated, it didn't fit into a genre. [...] not 'commercially viable'. [...] Yeats said, 'the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,' [...]"

Creativity suffers tremendously in our "vanilla" society. As you glance across the landscape of arts and entertainment in our nation, you don't see much that is striking or that really stands out. Everything is pretty much "pigeonholed" into categories from which those with the funds to distribute art refuse to stray very far.

"Copy-cat" is the name of the game, now; copy that which makes money for someone else rather than producing something worthy of production on its own merits of originality and thought.

I'm not sure I agree with Yeats' assessment, though. I think there are many examples of those with the most "conviction" not being the "best", and examples of the "best" having plenty of "passionate intensity" AND "conviction". Perhaps it's more the case that the AVERAGE lack both "passionate intensity" and "conviction", and that's why they tend so much to not appreciate the "best" so often.