Working on his latest feature script The Seventh Daughter, one which for the time being the filmmaker has laid aside to return to at a later time, Wood attended last year’s first annual AFF Screenplay Competition. As the competition entry dates draw closer for the 2008 round of participants, we reflect back upon Wood’s experience with his mentors, how his script developed in revision after revision, how his characters changed and grew as he went along.

SM: Looking at the logic of your work, I’ve noticed these themes: it’s based in research; it’s also very detail-oriented, almost, not to a fault, but to a hyper-perfection. There’s always something very visually interesting, whether it be the archival footage from Hell’s Highway or the production design of Psychopathia Sexualis. So, those are two components I assume were also inherent in this screenplay, along with elements of the fantastical, that darkly, innocent playfulness as well.

What do you see as the essentials of your logic, and when you were working with [AFF Screenplay Competition Workshop mentor writer-director Doug Sadler], how did you go about expressing to him, “Well, this part of the logic isn’t working. How do I change that?” Is it hard to give up what you see as your own inherent narrative logic?

BW: I’ve learned to do that just because I’ve had scripts that didn’t work, and the hardest part is to either put one aside and just abandon it, or to totally change what it’s about. This one, The Seventh Daughter started out being about something totally different. It was about a circus high diver who was in an abusive relationship with a minstrel performer, and it was called The Sparrow & the Crow. She was the sparrow, and he was the crow. Then it evolved into something else, and it became about this young girl who’s trained as a psychic who slaughters this houseful of people. The whole point of the movie was her massacring all of these people. Now, I’ve realized that’s not the ending for this story.

That was hard, as a writer, to learn, how to cut off one of your arms so that another one will grow out that’s a little more proportioned to your body. You fall in love with scenes; you fall in love with visuals that are so perfect, but then logically they don’t make sense, or thematically they contradict what the rest of the story is saying, and you have to let go of them.

SM: In that redefining and honing process with your stories and styles, what evolutions do you see your work taking so far?

BW: Me in a nutshell is: I don’t like contemporary stories; I don’t like comedies. That’s not the cinema that I am passionate about. I’m passionate about traditional, classical film, and so I’m always going to be making films from that mindset, whether it’s a documentary about someone who made films in the 50s and 60s, whether it’s a film set at the turn of the century or whether it’s another project which I’ve been working on about someone who’s making film in the 60s and 70s.

On one hand I like films that are about film, but also I like films that borrow heavily from another traditional filmic language. Silent film I pay homage to. It’s not that I’m trying to mimic silent film or make a specific reference, but I just love that style of language. It’s a poetry that no one speaks anymore. I love it so much that I try to keep it alive. I think it’s very powerful, and if it’s done right—and it’s not done in an academic way—if that language of cinema still has life in it, it can move an audience, frighten an audience and intrigue an audience. To me, it’s like if I were a writer—I’m a writer, I know—and everyone was only writing with this certain vocabulary, but there are these other words that no one uses anymore, and I knew the meaning of these words, I would want to infuse my work with those words and keep them alive because they are words that say things these contemporary words don’t say.

Writers should try to have the widest vocabulary possible, and filmmakers should have the broadest cinematic vocabulary possible. Everyone copies; no one is an original, visionary filmmaker. Everyone’s visual language is derived from some precedent, whether it’s Tarantino, Scorsese, Kurosawa, D.W. Griffith or classical painters, even cave paintings. It all started somewhere, and people shouldn’t deny that or be ashamed of that. Paul Thomas Anderson, I think, is a really talented filmmaker, but you look at his films, and he’s so heavily indebted to Scorsese. That’s okay because you’ve got to learn the language somewhere, and that’s where he learned it.

My soapbox would be that people should look deep into film history because there are all sorts of visual stylists and people who constructed drama in ways that no one really does anymore.

SM: A while ago now, I had this same conversation with [Noelle Vaccese], an animator and visual artist who said that during undergrad she struggled with the idea that she had to be original, and interestingly enough for her, she has an identical twin, and her twin is also an animator. They work together quite a bit now, but when they were growing up, people would always say, “Why do you guys always do the same thing? Why don’t you do something different?” So, that struggle of being original became that same struggle of the two being twins. The two are very successful artistically now, and what Noelle ended up realizing was that there was no point in refusing to acknowledge influences. She just had to realize that she was pulling from those places and then try to expand upon that vocabulary.

There are very few artists who’s vocabulary you can’t expand. There are some that are so esoteric that it’s like—

BW: Where do you go from there?

SM: Exactly. I don’t want to pinpoint any examples because as soon as I do someone will come along to reinvent that, but that’s my long-winded way of saying that you’re right. I think that’s an important point.

Part of looking back at older cinematic languages, particularly the nods to German Expressionism in your work, also makes me think of their roots, in the case of Expressionism with the fairytale. So, that’s another element of your work that struck me…There’s a dark playfulness to the work, and it’s not hard to identify. It’s only hard to synthesize.

BW: And, it’s hard to find that tone when you’re making it. Creating something that has an air of mystery about it is really tough. You can beat people over the head and shock them with images, but it’s really hard to mesmerize someone. It’s really hard to make someone slow down and get in a proper mood to get into the film.

A lot of people had problems with Psychopathia because either I was unable to get them into that state, or they didn’t have the patience to get into that state. A lot of people really dismiss the film outright as either boring, not sexy enough, not scary enough. Other people have been mesmerized by it, have taken the time to be absorbed in that world.

SM: The film’s got a particular rhythm that you’ve got to get used to. It’s basically staccato segments of different, loosely connected narratives that are built together, and you’ve got to get through at least the first 15 minutes to begin to understand that rhythm, that storybook quality to the film.

When we see storybooks brought to life now in film, I feel as if they are always geared toward children, even if they have morally dark content. Pan’s Labyrinth is the most recent example I’m thinking of. So, because we have these filmic tropes of the metaphorical, and sometimes literal, page turning, the fairytale is allowable there. But, when you apply that to an adult scenerio, and specifically to sexual content, I can imagine how hard it is, how bold to, to get people to readily invest in that.

The interesting aspect of filmmaking, that I don’t understand at all, is that you establish a vernacular as a writer, and then when the director gets the script, he creates his own vernacular. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’re the person on both ends of that, as it is with your work. How do you make that leap from writer to director, figuring out what works on a page that might not work on a screen? How do you negotiate that space?

BW: Taking a step back, one of the challenges is finding how much to direct in the screenplay. I used to, of course, say, “Close-up on this; tilt up on this. This person shakes their head.” Every little gesture was specified because I was directing it in the script.

Then I went to the opposite extreme. One of the mentors said, “You need to put a little more atmosphere in the script.” I’d been told you just have the bare bones of action and dialogue. He said, “Yeah, but right now it sort of looks like anyone could direct this. When someone reads the script, they need to feel like, ‘He needs to direct this.’” You don’t add a lot of adjectives, but somehow you need to direct the eye. In other words, he said, instead of opening a scene by describing everything in the room, wait until something happens, someone picks up a glass. You don’t have to earlier say there was a glass in the room. Just find ways to direct the eye rather than give an inventory of what’s in the space and a list of what’s happening. I’m trying to do that now. It’s a fine balance between directing and over-directing. That was a valuable piece of advice which I hadn’t thought of before.

As far as my own work, we didn’t realize that things didn’t work until [Psychopathia] was being edited. On the one hand, you have the film so coherently in your head, and when you’re shooting it, you’re just obtaining the pieces that later on you’re going to construct with, where the pieces go. You’re just there to lock them down. But, that doesn’t always work because you want to leave yourself open to new ideas and inspiration.

With Psychopathia, it was sort of a blessing that it was underfunded because there was a lot of improvisation going on, and we relied on the cast and crew to come up with a lot of ideas. It was a very creative set. It wasn’t like we were there, “Three o’clock we have this shot, four o’clock we have this shot.” It was more, “How are we going to do this guys?,” and everyone would pitch in. The biggest credit I would give to Producer Tracy Martin, the DP Dave Bruckner but also one of the unsung heroes is Jonathan Hilton, who was the gaffer…He was the one who gave the film its look—not to diminish Dave’s contribution—but his work greatly enhanced the look of the film, and no one ever said, “I can’t do it, or you’re asking too much.” It was always, “Give me ten minutes.” It was the kind of set where everyone was happy to be doing something different besides commercials and music videos, and so they liked the fact that someone was challenging them to take a room and streak it with shadows. They weren’t just being asked to make things look pretty. We were looking for a specific style.

The structure of Psychopathia Sexualis has a great purpose, and it looks good on paper. It starts as a textbook, and then the characters break out of these scientific compartments and start to come alive. Then by the third part they have taken over the film. It starts out being non-narrative, then it gets a bit more narrative, and then it becomes dramatic. That’s great on paper, but that’s not so great for the general audience. People did not get into it. I probably shouldn’t have challenged the viewer so much. Is that—…?

SM: For me, it all goes back to the staccato rhythm. For the average film viewer, who sees maybe one to two films a week, the beginning may have benefited from more narrative linearity. But, like you said, the end is much more narrative and dramatic, and so those switches back and forth, those cuts back and forth aren’t bothersome.

Have you seen Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There?

Wood shakes his head.

SM: People were hesitant about that structure, and he essentially does the same thing you did with Psychopathia. He’s got blocks of narrative that very tenuously, and sometimes not so gracefully, fit together. So, I don’t want to say that the structure can’t be done. It’s obviously being done. And, I don’t necessarily think it’s overly challenging for the average viewer, but it’s tough—

BW: Oh, I’m not blaming the viewer. I’m saying I could have done a better job of it if I’d been a better filmmaker at the time. It was my first film, and I’d made a couple of shorts prior to that. So, it’s not like the film shouldn’t have been made that way, but it probably wasn’t the best thing for me to do as the first step as a filmmaker, bite off this huge challenge to make a movie that the first 30 minutes are non-narrative.

SM: That’s a wonderful part of the naivete of being either an upcoming screenwriter or filmmaker. Perhaps as a screenwriter you feel less of that eyes and heart wide open because you’re working on the page. I don’t know if you find this to be true. I know other screenwriters I’ve talked to do; they find the page to be painful, a blank page specifically. Do you feel that way? What’s the process like for you?

BW: For me the hardest part is rewriting. Anytime I open the script and look at something that’s already written, it’s like my mind closes up, and I wind up correcting punctuation instead. I really have to not be sitting in front of the computer or the script. It’s hard to generate fresh ideas when you have a 100-page script sitting in front of you. It’s all there, so how do you come up with something new?...It’s hard to get those creative juices flowing. Coffee helps a lot.

SM: We were speaking about logic before, and many screenwriters work with the three-act structure. Psychopathia works in a three-act structure emotionally, although in terms of individual scenes it doesn’t. Do you use a base of three-act structure at all, or have you thrown that out?

BW: I threw it out, but now I’ve brought it back. With Psychopathia it was naïve, but at the same time, it was ambitious, like, “Who needs a three-act structure? I’m going to make something that’s so bold narratively that it’s going to be appreciated, and people are not going to quibble with me about the fact that I didn’t follow the structure.” And, it didn’t work.

So, now I’ve read the books, and I read them so I understand how it works. But, I don’t say that by page ten the story needs to be established, by page sixty we need to be at the pinch-point, out of the first act into the second act. I’m much more aware though of the conventions of narrative structure.

What I’ve told people, and it goes back to studying film, is that you can violate all of the rules that you want, but first you have to know the rules. See, I violated the rules but didn’t know the rules, so it didn’t work. Now that I have a better understanding of how the rules of narrative work, I feel like I can break those rules in a way that doesn’t alienate the audience and that the film maintains a cohesiveness that it wouldn’t ordinarily have.

SM: How have you been utilizing that three-act structure for The Seventh Daughter?

BW: It’s not like I drew a chart and had to conform the story to the chart. I had a story in my mind, and then after the story was in my mind, I sort of figured it out, asked “Does it follow this structure?” It had four acts, and the fourth act took you out of the story, put you in another setting years later. I realized that that had to go. The way it is now the story is circular—without giving everything away. What I was doing was to have gone around but then wanting to keep going and add this big ending. I wanted the big ending, but the story was really complete before that point. So using the three-act structure allowed me to see that I was trying to stretch the story out beyond what it should have been.

I’m reading [Joseph’s Campbell’s] The Hero With A Thousand Faces. Both of the mentors mentioned that because this is like a quest film. So, I look at the: ignoring the call, responding to the call, all the stages that the hero or heroine goes through, and I want to be aware of all of that and be conscious of the fact that my story is actually conforming to a lot of that but also realizing where it’s not conforming.

SM: I’ve always felt, and this is just my personal view, that when you create a character, it’s not as if they’ve taken control over your world, but based on whichever initial actions you lay out for them, they’ll always be assigned a like set of reactions— unless, that is, the character is intentionally a chameleon—and so, the character will always act in line with that first action. For that reason, I feel as if after a character is established in that first action, that in itself will indicate to me where he’ll end up.

BW: Oh, wow.

SM: I don’t mean to say the first action dictates the whole of the story but that the first action sets up for the arc in a way that’s logical. I’m thinking of a bit of an esoteric film right now; [Ronald Bronstein’s] Frownland is a really good example of that. In the more mainstream arena, if you look at the entrance of Jack Sparrow in The Pirates of the Caribbean, he’s on a sinking ship, and over the course of three movies, he’ll have odd, unexpected moments outside of that, but for the most part, he’s in every way, in every scene, still the captain of a sinking ship.

Do you feel that way about characters?

BW: I feel like that’s a key part of genre, that with a comedy, a detective film, an action film, a horror film, that characters, in my mind, move more in straight lines. In genre, characters are quickly established according to types, so that you don’t have to explain someone’s psyche or motivation at all. This is the bad guy, boom. This is the love interest, boom. It makes me think of that, where someone is established quickly, and then they’re allowed to move in a straight line from that mode of behavior or from that personality.

I haven’t really thought about what you’re saying, where the character’s first action defines who they are. What I will say related to that is that there’s a process of a character coming along, determining their own actions. With The Seventh Daughter, in the earlier drafts, the main character was totally different. The father was going to turn her into a golem or robot and program her; she was just this mechanical creature who went through the whole movie obeying his will and just being his puppet. It made for a very uninteresting character. People may have cared for her, but how can we get into her story if all she does is take orders? After many, many rewrites, it became more about her struggling against the father, who’s trying to make her into this obedient puppet; and her wanting to do some things to please him because he’s a father she hasn’t seen in years but also having the urge to break away from him because he’s so oppressive. So, it was hard to give her character depth when it would have been so much easier to have her be this puppet.

The puppet was symbolically important to me. It’s sort of like the structure of Psychopathia was important to me, but I let it be so important that it was to the detriment of the drama and of the characters. This was the same thing; I had this great idea of making a modern version of the golem with a young girl who’s being controlled by her father. To me that was a great idea, but there was no drama in it.

The story has evolved so much from what it originally was. It’s heavily changed, but I’ve learned to accept the changes. I’ve found that anytime I have to go back and thoroughly rewrite something, it gets better, it gets tighter and it gets more compelling. I’m always resistant to doing that because I hate to throw away months of work.

The Seventh Daughter was read and workshopped as part of Brave New Works, this Emory [University] new play festival, but that wasn’t the script I’d originally submitted. It was one called Eden, Alabama, and I really liked that, and I thought, “This is the film. It’s low-budget. It’s something I can shoot in the South and not cost a lot of money. It’s got so much going for it. It’s got these great qualities that I like.” But, it just didn’t work as far as the drama, the motivation of the characters, things just didn’t add up the way that they’re supposed to. So, that was really hard to admit.

Eventually it’s going to pull together. It’s just finding the right alignment of elements. I can boil it down to what it’s about at its core. It’s about filmmaking as an expression of sexual desire. So, it’s about someone who’s making a film as his displaced sexual yearning.

SM: Interesting.

BW: (laughing) This film has morphed so many different ways, but I think it’s getting closer to finding the story that is going to convey that idea, that will bring all the resonance out of that that’s possible.

SM: Have you seen the Catherine Breillat film [Sex is Comedy]—

BW: Oh, right. I love her film Fat Girl. It’s one of my favorites.

SM: I’ve been wanting to see it.

BW: I think [Sex is Comedy] is about the making of Fat Girl.

SM: Really?

BW: Not officially but it’s just about the complexity of having a teenage girl doing a sex scene with Catherine Breillat as the director. How do you push that line with all the different political things that come into play? Yeah, Fat Girl is great.

SM: I’ll go on a bit of an aside here for a second but promise to bring us back to talking about The Seventh Daughter. I do think to a certain extent so much art is about a raw expression, the primitive, the sexual interplays. I just read an older now but really interesting article in Paste Magazine with Sam Beam [of Iron & Wine], and he said that people only write about three things, and he, as a songwriter particularly, only writes about three things: love, death and God. Those are the only three universals to write about. I agree with that. Within that first category, with love, when you’re looking at sex, so much—and, I see it more often in writing than I do in filmmaking, perhaps because the rhythmic nature of writing feels more naturally sexual to me—so much of what’s sexual lies within the idea of being a voyeur.

BW: And, sexuality’s such a difficult thing to express visually because you’re making it so literal.

SM: Exactly!

BW: With Psychopathia, when we did the necrophilia scene, if we’d tried to have a guy digging a grave and having sex with the corpse, it would have been maybe shocking, but it wouldn’t have been sexual; it wouldn’t have been the least bit romantic or fairytale-ish; it wouldn’t have had an air of mystery to it. The same thing would happen with any conventionalized sex scene. Once you have two specific people on the screen doing specific things, to me, it’s no longer about that magical experience of sex. It’s more about these two bodies moving together. Maybe that’s why with literature, it’s in your mind, and so you’re a more active participant. You’re creating the pictures, whereas with cinema it’s all spelled out for you, and the imagination doesn’t come into play as much. Would you agree with that?

SM: Yeah, the tropes you see in cinema are: the extreme close-ups that go a bit out of focus, you’re not quite sure what you’re looking at—

Wood laughs.

SM: The cutting is used to build the scene, but it’s always the worst when you’re in the middle of the scene and you realize, “Hey, I’ve seen that shot before of two other people kissing in another film! Her head’s going to tilt back soon. Ah! I never want to see that shot again.”

That’s why I was so attracted to the shadow play sequence of Psychopathia. It was so unexpected, and like other elements of the film, it brought up the idea of childhood again. There’s a quality inherently sexual about childhood too, the whole Lolita model, but in general, I think that’s glanced over. Most people don’t want to address the fact that children are capable of having sexual natures. So, for me that scene really works, is really compelling in a visceral way, and you’re right, it’s about keeping that balance of finding the mystery of the act but also allowing for the absurdity of it all. A shot that sticks with me is the one from American Beauty, that one of Annette Bening’s character, and all you see are—

BW: (laughs) Her legs.

SM: It’s so funny. It’s just so ridiculous.

Getting us off my tangent and back to The Seventh Daughter, I thought it interesting that you said that she had to become a dynamic character, that the audience had to see that in order to invest in her story. People always seem to look for that; they’re looking for the dynamic character, but not the dynamic character who’s so dynamic that they lose they’re humanity, that they shake someone out of their wits. I’m thinking here of No Country For Old Men’s Anton Chigurh…So, I think people are excited about those dynamic characters, but I also think there’s a huge risk in writing them.

How do you say as a writer, “I’m going to make the character this dynamic,”? How do you find a balance?

BW: Yeah, because if a character’s too dynamic, and there’s no threat that they are going to fail, no threat that they are going to die, and even with the Chigurh character in No Country For Old Men--he’s so dynamic; you know he’s immortal—that you don’t identify with him. You certainly don’t pull for him. He’s just this juggernaut, this force of destruction that is fascinating to watch but that you don’t really have very strong feelings for. He’s just kind of astounding. You could even say the same of Jack Sparrow, that he’s not the character you really feel for. He’s the one you enjoy watching the most. He’s not the one your heart breaks over. He seems to be more the archetype.

To me, you want a character who’s dynamic but also has enough weaknesses that you don’t know if they are going to succeed or fail, live or die, and they kind of need your help. So, you find yourself pulling for them or hoping for them. They have to have an obstacle to surmount, and they have to be dynamic enough to maintain your interest but not so dynamic that you know that they are going to achieve their goal. The obstacle has to be a little bit bigger than them so that they can just get to the top of it with you pushing.

SM: That’s very American too. We want people to overachieve; we want people to overcome the obstacle.

BW: The whole underdog thing.

SM: Whereas with foreign films that’s not always the case. American films, in general, tend to be much more optimistic intrinsically.

BW: Plus they’re goal-oriented. The end of an American film is the goal. Has it been achieved or not? And usually it has. I’ve always been attracted to films where by the end it’s not so much about the goal anymore. In a way, you could say that No Country For Old Men has a European ending because ultimately it doesn’t matter if they ever catch Chigurh, who lives and who dies. By that point in the story the point is this endless cycle of violence, and we can’t do anything about it. I like that kind of movie, but again it’s hard to rebel; you rebel against the conventions of American narrative at the risk of failing at the box office. If you’re a great filmmaker, you can make an open ending, or an ending that is downbeat or that suggests the ending that’s to follow and still maintain the interest of the audience, but that’s extremely difficult. That’s the kind of film I want to make.

SM: Does that ever make the endings and beginnings of films for you difficult to conceive?

BW: Beginnings are easy. I can come up with great premises for movies. The hardest part is the narrative, the plot that allows all the characters to unfold and for this plot to mean something. The third act is always the hardest; the first act’s the easiest.

With The Seventh Daughter I could never come up with an ending, and it drove me crazy. Then finally I was having dinner with my wife [film critic and journalist Felicia Feaster], and I said, “I’ve got to come up with an ending for this.” She just casually said, “Well, what if this happened?” It just pounded my skull, and that was the ending. That’s the ending. Maybe I’d been looking at it too long, and I was still married to this idea of this big, slam-bang. It was a concession to conventionality, a feeling like I needed to learn a lesson from Psychopathia, so the ending has to be, “If they want a dramatic ending, I’ll give them a dramatic ending.” But, it was wrong. It was not right. You had this eerie, strange story about this bizarre father-daughter relationship, and you can’t end that with a marital arts fight scene. It’s ludicrous.

So now hopefully it is an ending that brings the story full circle, that brings all the pieces back together. Hopefully the viewer will have this realization about what this has all been about. It’s ambitious to have that kind of ending. It’s easier to have the ending where the car blows up. It’s hard to have an ending where someone comes to a realization, and the audience comes to that realization at the same time. It’s the kind of cinema I like, and it’s the kind of ending I want my film to have—at the risk of failure.

SM: That’s really important, that idea of the protagonist and the audience member having a realization at the same time…If the audience anticipates an action or knows a piece of information beforehand, that’s usually not so bad because they feel like there’s a pay-off. So you can err on that side and often be okay. But, if your protagonist realizes something well before your audience, you’re in major, major trouble. You have to run away from that.

Wood laughs.

SM: Often writers I feel are expected to have this great process or structure, and I feel that can be the case for certain people, particularly for stylists. But, I do feel like a lot of the writing process is unconscious.

BW: And, the hard thing is, “How do you open that up?” You can take comfort in the structure and the style and read your books and get the charts, do all of that, endlessly revise by using the mechanics of screenwriting. The hard thing is getting that bolt of inspiration, but you have to have it. So when I was talking about revising a script, creating a new scene, the hard part is calling down that bolt of inspiration. It’s much easier to sit at the computer and endlessly revise without contributing anything genuinely new and original to it. That’s the hard part. You have to get all of your worries out of your mind; you have to be in a place that you’re comfortable—it’s not too loud. At least I do. And, I’ve got my coffee. Just from trial and error I’ve figured out the little things I can do to make myself have ideas, and you know, four out of five days it doesn’t work, but one day out of five it does work.

SM: I’m fascinated by specifics. You said you’ve got your cup of coffee, and it’s quiet. Otherwise, what is your writing environment like?

BW: Usually it’s a place like this.

Wood glances around the half populated coffee house.

BW: I can’t usually write very well at home. Usually what will happen is, I’ll be driving in the car, listening to music, and I’ll get ideas. I’m pumped up on coffee, and I have to get home and start writing them down.

Lately it’s been hard to get the ideas to flow. I think everyone goes through that…I recently went on a business trip to New York. I work for Kino, so I was meeting with everyone from Kino, and we were talking about film projects. I was out of my usual location, I was energized, I had a lot of coffee, and so I was able to write tons. The filmmaking retreat was another time [like that.] Getting away from the distractions of e-mail, of phone calls, of my day job, all those things, that’s the hard part.

SM: It’s the balance between a natural inclination toward the inertial and the societal necessity for displacement, how that really helps. So while people generally don’t want to be displaced, that’s exactly what they sometimes need most.

What is that particular connection for you between New York and writing?

BW: I lived in New York for a few years and thought, “I need some peace and quiet so that I can write.” So my wife and I moved—we weren’t married then—to Atlanta, and then when I was down here, I felt like, “I’m out of the loop now. I’m irrelevant. I’m not motivated anymore.” So we moved back to New York. Each time I got closer and closer to the truth. Then we were back in New York, and I was immersed in New York culture, but I was so exhausted that I couldn’t write.

SM laughs.

BW: So then we moved back to Atlanta again. New York, Atlanta, New York, Atlanta. Now I think I’m at my happy place. New York was inspiring but exhausting, so you couldn’t write. I guess the perfect balance is to be somewhere that’s comfortable but yet still have connections to things that inspire you.

SM: It’s the same balancing act as on Eden, Alabama, constantly moving the parts around until they feel right. But, man, four moves from New York and Atlanta! That’s a lot of moves.

BW: (laughing) But, it worked out.

SM: So, a wrap-up question for you: What is one question about your writing that you’ve always wanted to be asked but never have been?

BW: It’s not so much strictly a writing question but a filmmaking question in general. I’d really like to talk to someone about my work who really knows my work. So often you get reviews, but generally, the reviewer hasn’t seen your other films and doesn’t have any insights into you. To talk to someone about my work, who is familiar with my work and maybe who knows me as a person and can see how the two relate to each other would be my dream interview, the thing that I would find most gratifying in the interview process. Ideally it would be after I’ve made a number of films, and then there’s this large body of work.

In a lot of ways filmmaking is people wanting to be noticed and revealing parts of their personality under the guise of this fantasy or fiction. There are things in Hell’s Highway that I want people to know about me. There are things in Psychopathia--not necrophilia—

SM laughs.

BW: That I want people to know about me. Everything that I write I’m revealing something of myself, but it’s buried within the narrative or documentary. It’s all someone wanting to be noticed and wanting to be known from behind this veil. So, it would be nice to have someone know enough about my work and my life that we can talk about what’s me and what’s not me in my films.

SM:…Then the question to add to that is: Why are you making art? Do you ever worry, and sometimes I do, that you’re doing it for a selfish motivation?

BW: To me [making art’s] not something that I consciously do. Several times I’ve said, “It’s not working. I’m not going to do this anymore.” Then a couple of days later I have an idea, and I start writing again, or I decide that I want to make a short film. It’s always been a part of who I am; I’ve never been able to shake it. As a kid, I wrote stories, and in high school and college I wrote scripts.

It goes back to being a child and having escapist fantasies. That was the world into which I would escape the everyday boredom of my life. I didn’t have a bad or an unusual childhood, but it was always a childhood based in fantasy. Movies were my escape. I watched movies as a kid like crazy. I don’t know why I’ve always had that attraction, but it’s just part of who I am. So, I’ll get discouraged and say, “I’m just going to give it up,” and my wife will say, “You’re not going to give it up.” She gets tired of hearing that because she knows it’s not going to happen. No matter what, I’m going to be doing something.

I have thought about, “What is my art contributing to the world?” I guess it’s just too early to say. In the end, all my work says something about people trying to impose one morality on someone else and sort of living within a system where people are judging you, and you’re expected to live according to certain rules. Hell’s Highway maybe not so much, but it is in a way.

SM: I can absolutely see that.

BW: I think that’s in the end what it’s going to be about, but it’s still too early on to feel like I’m contributing anything clearly.

SM: That process of socialization and its connection to morality, it’s difficult for everyone, the imposition of one moral standard on another...Morality, in the end I think, is different for every person.

BW: That’s sort of what life is, is finding out where you fit. You always have to rebel against something, and you’re always looking for something. If anyone is born into a certain lifestyle, and they live in that lifestyle and they die in that lifestyle, there’s no drama in their life; there’s no journey. It needs to be about exploring.

SM: But, maybe not. Maybe that’s fascinating; maybe that’s enviable in a way, when you think about some oldtimers who seem to be at peace with their lives, and that’s not to say their lives weren’t dynamic, but many of them began and ended in the same place.

BW: From the outside people often look like they haven’t had a journey when maybe they actually have. It can be a spiritual thing; it can be a professional thing; it can be a romantic thing.

SM: That’s true. I don’t cater to the idea that people can live without a journey, but I do understand the idea that one person’s journey is more quiet than another’s. I defy anyone living in New York to have a quiet journey, but I’ll be very happy to meet that person. In the same way, I defy, most people—well, not the dirt bike racers—in rural western North Carolina to have really loud journeys. It’s almost as if your environment dictates your life path, which is another reason I find it interesting that you and Felicia moved back and forth from New York to Atlanta those times. It’s like, “What kind of journey are we going to have?”

BW: Maybe it is a decision that I don’t want my journey to be a professional one. I want my journey to be a spiritual one.

For more information on The Seventh Daughter, visit www.seventhdaughter.com/, and for more information on the filmmaker visit www.bretwood.blogspot.com/.

The following interview follows a series covering the participating screenwriters from the Atlanta Film Festival Screenplay Competition 2007. The early entry deadline for the 2008 competition runs July 27, regular July 25, late August 22 and extended September 5. For further detail about the application process, visit www.atlantafilmfestival.com/screenplaycompetition.html.