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.