Eric Singer: The Hollywood Interview

Screenwriter Eric Singer and the one-sheet for his first produced feature, The International. (Photo by Jeffrey Fiterman)

ERIC SINGER:
THE SCRIBE ARRIVES ON THE INTERNATIONAL
By
Alex Simon

Editor's Note: This article appears in the February issue of Venice Magazine.

For many, Eric Singer would seem to be one of those lucky few who struck gold in Hollywood almost immediately. After dropping out of Boston University, Eric returned home to his native Los Angeles, determined to break into the business as a screenwriter. Taking a job as a night janitor, Eric spent his days writing, ultimately creating his first screenplay, The Sky is Falling, which immediately sold and made Eric an in-demand writer. Flash forward more than a decade later, and Eric Singer has written and sold many screenplays, made a very comfortable living doing what he loves, but has yet to see a single one of his scripts turned into a motion picture. Until now.

The International was penned by Eric after he became fascinated with the BCCI banking scandals of the 1980s and 90s. Realizing that the he had the makings of a crackerjack thriller in the details of the events that rocked the world of international high finance during that period, Eric penned a script that had some of the biggest stars and directors in Hollywood circling it hungrily. Starring Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, and Armin Mueller-Stahl, with German auteur Tom Tykwer calling the shots, The International is one of the smartest, most exciting thrillers in many a moon, reminiscent of the best work of John Frankenheimer, deftly combining action, political intrigue and complex characters who deal in many shades of gray. The Columbia Pictures release hits theaters February 13.

But the story doesn’t end there. Nor does it begin there. As in all things Hollywood, there is much smoke and many mirrors in the story of how The International came to the big screen. Read on…

Most screenplays have interesting backstories as to their gestation. The International is no exception.
Eric Singer: (The Writer’s Guild) was about to go on strike in 2001, and I had just come out of writing a movie that had been a crazy experience. So I was late in the game, and everyone was just rushing to book a job because it was fixing up to be a long, brutal strike. So I went to Columbia and met with a friend of mine named Shannon Golding, who’s an executive there. They were looking to do a remake of a Hong Kong action film. I wasn’t really that big a fan of the original film, but I was scared, and I knew what they wanted to hear, so I decided to go off, and put a pitch together, and met with the producers and the studio. They liked it, and boom, I’d booked the job to do this re-write. And I felt fortunate, because a lot of guys hadn’t booked jobs, and were scared shitless. It was the first time I’d ever booked a job just for the job. Up to that point, everything I’d worked on I was in love with. This was my first time taking an assignment, my first time doing a re-write, my first time taking a job that I wasn’t absolutely passionate about. About a month into it, I realized I’d made a mistake, and we also found out that we weren’t going on strike. But I’d taken the money, and I was struggling with it, and struggling with myself.

Director Tom Tykwer (L) on the set of The International.

Then you had a couple major blows in your life.
Yes. My sister and father were both diagnosed with cancer at the same time. My family just went into a tailspin. My sister has two kids, who were really young at the time, and it was a really dark, horrible time for my family. And it put a lot in perspective for me, caused a lot of shifts within me, and dropped my tolerance for bullshit to zero. I had lots of friends before I went into that tunnel, and once I went into that tunnel, I had two friends. I was already getting in trouble with the studio because my draft was so late, and I was thinking ‘I’m taking time away from my family to work on something I don’t love. Is this something I want to do?’ And the answer was an immediate, definitive “no.” So without telling the producers, the studio and my agent, I threw away the movie they hired me to write, and I went back to this idea I’d always had, based on the BCCI banking scandal back in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It had always fascinated me, and I’d always wanted to do a movie set in that world of high finance, and a bank that was like the Chase Manhattan Bank to the underworld. And I wrote The International, which was literally an original screenplay. I was so late with it, that the studio--and Columbia couldn’t have been cooler by the way, knowing what my family was going through—was about to pull the plug. I understand completely where they were coming from: they had a job that needed to be done.

So what happened when you finally finished it?
My producer, Chuck Roven, is the best producer I’ve ever worked with. We didn’t really know each other that well, at the time, but I kind of handed in the script to him, and then my girlfriend and I went to Mexico. I knew that my career was either going to be over, or they were going to love it. It fell in between those two. When Chuck first read it, it was like a fuckin’ bomb went off. (laughs) He was furious. So was my agent. She said “This isn’t what they paid you to do. What are you doing?” “But you like it, right?” “Yeah, I like it, it’s amazing, but…” But after the smoke cleared, to Columbia’s credit, they decided that they liked the script and went forward with it. But they also sat me down and sort of “had the talk” with me (laughs) about methodology and protocol, and all that. I owned up to the fact that it was out of order and unprofessional, but that I was also in a crazy place. They all kind of got it, and from that point on, we were all on the same page. It terms of a collaborative experience, once we got past the point of that initial shock, it was amazing.

Clive Owen (L) confronts Armin Mueller-Stahl in The International.

Originally it was set in the early ‘80s, right?
Yeah, I totally wanted that kind of ‘70s and early ‘80s paranoid thriller vibe. Godfather III was really the only film up to this point that dealt with the banking scandals, because it was really gangster warfare on a corporate level, and I thought that was the best part of the film.

Gangsters wearing Brooks Brothers.
Exactly. And in the original draft (the Clive Owen character) Salinger was a much more brooding, messed up guy. He was also a Holocaust survivor, which added another layer of darkness to the character. I did a lot of intense research, and talked with a lot of people who were leaving the Justice Department at the time, just as George W. Bush was taking office. They gave me all these details about BCCI, and how it went down. So it had a lot of elements of Coppola’s The Conversation. It was a thriller, but also a character study.

Naomi Watts and Clive Owen share a rare moment of levity in The International.

Then the script had a rather serpentine journey.
Yeah, about a year before Tom came on, Chuck calls me and says “Ridley Scott read the script, loves it, wants to do it.” That’s always an exciting phone call to get, and literally the next day, I was in a meeting with Ridley. Then a couple days later, we were at the studio meeting with all the top brass, and they gave us the green light. It was like lightning in a bottle, just crazy. Whenever things happen that fast, I always get uneasy, whenever it’s too good. I remember coming home and telling my wife, then my girlfriend, ‘Oh my God, it’s insane! We’re gonna have to move to London…’ And within two weeks, it was over. Ridley had fallen out, and went on to do another movie and all this tidal wave of excitement just dropped down to nothing again.

How did Tom Tykwer come aboard?
Tom’s agent at the time was a guy named Josh Donen, Stanley Donen’s son. Really smart guy. Josh had bought my first script, called The Sky is Falling, when he’d left to become a producer. Josh had gone back to being an agent, read the script for The International, and sent it to Tom, and he really responded to it. I’d always thought Tom’s work was really interesting. So when we met, the energy at the meeting was odd, because Tom had never done a studio picture, was very anti-studio, and has this amazing thing going in Germany where he can basically make anything that he wants, and is very insulated. He lives the life of a pure auteur. It’s amazing, his set-up. So he had very interesting things to say about the script, but the one thing we locked horns on, is that he wanted to contemporize the movie. (laughs) At the time, I was so attached to this period thriller, but in retrospect, it was really nothing more than that. All of Tom’s arguments of why he wanted to contemporize it turned out to be really legit. So that’s what we did. I went back and did more research to see how it would work today, as opposed to the ‘80s. The more I worked with him, the more I began to see him as the General that you want to follow into battle. Also, I really wanted to finally go make a fuckin’ movie!

You’d come so close numerous times before to having your work produced.
I’d been in pre-production on three different movies that ultimately didn’t get made at that point. I was at the altar, but the wedding just didn’t happen.

This is an interesting point you bring up. For almost a decade, you’ve been in the very enviable position of making a good living as a screenwriter, even though your work wasn’t getting produced, but after a certain point…
After a certain point there’s this threshold that you hit, where if you don’t have something made, something tangible to show for all your work, you begin to feel like you’re shoveling smoke, money be damned. Granted, I was very grateful to be getting paid to do what I loved, and I never forgot how lucky I was, but after a while, that just wasn’t the point anymore. What’s the point of spending your life in front of a computer, writing stuff that everyone tells you is great, that no one is ever gonna see? I had a friend at the time who was a carpenter. At the end of my day, I knew I’d just written something no one was ever gonna see. At the end of his day, he’d built a wall—something solid, something tangible to show for his labor. I was kind of envious of him. I had this thought that if I didn’t make a movie before I hit 40, I’d really start to rethink if this is what I wanted to do with my life.

Clive Owen takes aim in The International.

But it sounds like with this project you struck gold, and that Tom was a great collaborator.
Anytime I start working on a new project, I always go down to Hennessey and Ingalls, which sells art and architecture books. I’d always had this idea, going back to the original script, of having this architectural schematic to the script, where all the architecture in the film would come from what they call the “International School of design.” It’s something that most directors I’ve worked with are annoyed by, that sometimes I’ll write one scene where I direct it within the writing. Tom liked it. There was this one particular book I’d found at Hennessey and Ingalls, when I started to germinate the idea of the story. It was this really obscure book from Sweden, but when I looked at the book, I said ‘This is the movie.’ So I bought the book and used it as this visual touchstone throughout writing the script. When Tom came on as the director, I went and found another copy of the book. I wrapped it up, and after we closed the deal for him to direct, I gave him the book. He opened it up, and his face just blanched. He starts saying “Oh my God” in German. He tells me that the night he read the script, he went to his bookshelf, and pulls out the same book, brings it back to his girlfriend, and says “This is the movie.” It was one of those spooky moments where we both realized that this was fated.

Not only that, you had Clive Owen in mind for the lead when you were writing it.
Yes, exactly. I always saw Salinger as a Gene Hackman kind of character, and Clive is sort of an English version of that. He’s better-looking than Hackman, but has the same kind of volcanic, brutal intensity. He’s got some mileage, man. There was another star prior to Clive who was circling the movie who’s a great actor, and the biggest star in the world, but he wasn’t right. So when Clive came on, I was so happy. All the pieces just sort of fell into place. Then Naomi signed on and Armin, who I also wrote that part for. Armin is from East Germany originally, and had some scrapes with the Stasi when he lived there, so he was coming from a very real place.

There’s some great dialogue in this film. How do you think you developed your ear for it?
My father, who’s this great, Damon Runyon-esque character, always had these great metaphors and aphorisms he’d come up with. Actually, there’s a lot of my father in this script. He never trusted banks or bankers, so I think a lot of my own paranoia and fascination with crooked dealings in high finance came from my father.

The shootout in the Guggenheim Museum is one of the best I’ve ever seen.
That idea came to me once when I was at the Guggenheim, checking out a Matthew Barney installation. I just started looking around and thought to myself, ‘Wow, this would be a badass setting for a gunfight!’ (laughs) For years, I just kept that in my pocket, waiting for the right film to frame that kind of sequence around. I actually spent months working on that scene, getting it right. And Tom was very receptive to my ideas. I told him, if you have any Bruckheimer-type stuff in this, any slow-mo or trick shots, anything but handheld, completely objective reality, you’re going to fuck it up. And he just nailed it.

That’s almost unheard of, for a writer to give a director notes, especially on the set.
I’d never do it in front of the cast and crew. We had this system where I’d hand him notecards, and if I had a suggestion or need to make a point, I’d subtly pass them to him. Or if I needed to talk to him privately, we had a signal. Tom is the sort of guy who feels that you’re all in the trench together. There’s no pretention about titles or power. He just wants to make the best movie possible. When you’re on the set of your first movie, it’s this kind of orgasmic experience, and you want to be friends with everyone, but you also want the movie to be as great as you know it can be. But then you have to realize that the film is no longer yours, and you have to let go and trust the people who are making it. I was lucky that I got to trust the right people.

It’s even rare for a writer to be allowed on-set.
Yeah, sometimes the studios will send the writer for a week or two as a sort of little perk, but generally they’re not too thrilled with the idea of having the writer there, whereas the stars’ trainer and personal assistants get carte blanche. They’re doing the junkets for The International right now, and no one wants to talk to me. No one cares. They want to talk to the producers, the director and the stars. That’s it. They could really care less about me. And one part of me wants to say “Hey, none of you guys would be here if it weren’t for me!”

Trailer for The International.

Do you really want to be in the public eye, though? It seems that one of the perks of being a writer is that you can have name recognition and your work appreciated by the pubic, but still retain your anonymity and privacy. You don’t have to be a celebrity to be successful, whereas the actors do.
Being a celebrity definitely doesn’t interest me, but there are certain things I’d like to communicate, which is why I would have liked to have been a part of the junkets. There are specific things about the world we live in today, and how it pertains to the movie, that I would like to have heard in a larger forum, like the stuff with the Chinese that’s in the movie. This stuff is actually happening now, in the Sudan. They’re using proxy banks to fuel war in the Sudan, so they can control the resources in that country. Things haven’t really changed much since BCCI, except that the banks have learned from BCCI, and gotten more sophisticated. They represent an enormous amount of money and power. When you look into what some of these banks are doing, it’s some really unsettling, spooky shit. What we’re experiencing now, is just a different emanation that the bank in the movie is using, which is the idea of debt. Debt really is where all the power and control is. We’re now sort of on the other end of experiencing what predatory lending and debt manipulation can actually do. We’re not talking about a Third World country. We’re talking about the fact that it can ravage the biggest, most robust economy in the world. So what we’re saying is “Have you heard about these evil motherfuckers, and what they’re doing to the world, what they’re doing to you? Would you like to see Clive Owen shoot one?” (laughs) On the most base level, if you’re pissed off at bankers, come see our movie.