Chris Brancato
By Brianne Hogan.
Look up Chris Brancato on IMDb, and you’ll find a slew of television and film credits ranging from his start with Aaron Spelling on “90210” to “Species 2,” “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” and “Hannibal.” Not bad for a writer who says that his initial venture to Hollywood “had more to do with financial and mercenary reasons.”
The writer/producer shares, “At first I treated my pursuit of jobs in film and television in a very business-like fashion. I found out who bought what, finding out who were the players, finding out the ins and outs on how to get material made, and realizing that, at least at the beginning of one’s career, living in Los Angeles is a huge plus because this is where all the jobs are.” Understanding that what writers do at their best is “to try to capture the poetry of how humans lives came after the fact.”
Now, the writer and producer’s latest effort is Netflix’s “Narcos,” a chronicled look at the criminal exploits of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and the DEA agent who worked to bring him down, which premiered at the end of August. The show has been a huge hit for the streaming service – so much so that it’s already been renewed for a second season.
Creative Screenwriting had the opportunity to speak with Brancato about his first gig in the industry, his attention to detail, and how things have come full circle for him, thanks to “Narcos.”
Wagner Moura as Pablo Escobar in Narcos. Photo credit: Daniel Daza/Netflix
How did you get started in the television industry? What was your first gig?
I moved out here [to Los Angeles] when I was 28 years old. I started to write screenplays. Most people at the time, in the 90s, they wanted to be a feature writer, so that’s what I wanted to do. I wrote a feature or two. I had a college friend who was at CBS at a very low-level managerial position as an executive, and he basically thought my writing was good. So he allowed me to go into some meetings for CBS shows – this is when there were only three networks, FOX was just starting. So I got a job working for Aaron Spelling on a TV show called “Hearts Are Wild” that had 17 million viewers and still got canceled because it didn’t have enough viewers, which tells you a little bit about the monopoly the three networks had on the viewing audience. And then I wrote a script and it got produced, and from there I got to work for Aaron on “90210”.
Those shows that I was doing in the beginning of my career were nothing that made people get excited about my writing or me as writer. The way I think that as a writer, how you distinguish yourself, you need to write something – and it is so easy to say this and so hard to do because it took me ten years to do it – that is so personal. And that doesn’t mean telling your life story. It means writing something that you really want to watch and something you groove to. And I was able to do that with a movie called “Hoodlum,” which was a historical black drama about a hoodlum called Bumpy Johnson, who was played by Laurence Fishburne. And then later on, I wrote a show called “Dope”, which was about six characters in Los Angeles who, in one way or another, were involved with the drug trade or with stopping the drug trade. The script was competing against “The Shield” at the time and FX chose “The Shield” by a hair, and I felt, “Oh my god, this is the one that got away.”
But it had the effect that now I had a piece of writing that people really responded to, that sort of took me out of the, “Oh, okay, he can do the “90210” soap opera stuff, but this is dark and interesting piece of writing.” So that’s what I advise to all screenwriters: that you write a piece of work that gets you noticed, something that feels very distinctive and it feels original, which is extremely hard to do because we have all kinda seen everything. I think the first way of accessing that type of writing is to ask yourself, “What are the things I love to watch?” For me personally, a lot of that has to do with historical drama and journalistic non-fiction. “Narcos” is an example of having a job that all of the things that I love to do, like doing research, interviewing people who were involved, and all of the details that you could never make up, were part of the “Narcos” experience. And I think doing all of that, and collaborating with Jose Padhila, the Brazilian filmmaker, who was also interesting. He wanted to use archival footage in the show and I thought, “Hmm…that would sort of ground it in reality.” So it’s also about absorbing what other people have to say and making them apart of your decisions for yourself.
The cast of Beverly Hills 90210
So you mentioned “Narcos.” What was the inspiration behind creating the show?
Jose Padilha and a feature producer named Eric Newman had set up “Narcos” at Netflix because Eric had the rights to some DEA agent’s collected material related to Pablo Escobar, and he realized there was too much story to include in a two-hour movie. There had been numerous version of Mark Bowden’s book, “Killing Pablo”, in the feature world but no one could get a script going because there was something huge happening every five pages, and there was just too much information to fit in two hours. And Eric was smart enough to realize the Netflix form – telling a story over 12 hours – was better suited for the material. So I was hired to write the first script with guidance from Jose and Eric, and it came out through a bunch of discussion on how we should introduce this guy to the viewing audience. One of things discussed was, nearly everyone has heard about Pablo Escobar, but not everyone knows the details about his life. They just think he was a big cocaine dealer who was killed. So, for the first two episodes, we chose heavy voice-over because a lot of information has to be delivered to set the context of the show, which is Pablo Escobar on one side, and Steve Murphy, the DEA agent, on the other side, and they evolve on a level to where they are facing off each other. That’s what guided us. We wanted to set up the world, and why the world came to be with these two opposing each other.
You traveled to Colombia to do research for the show. How was that like to do research there?
It was awesome. I don’t speak Spanish — I am learning– so I had to have a translator with me for some of the interviews. I interviewed the former president of Colombia who was the president during Escobar’s time. I interviewed journalists who covered the Escobar years. I interviewed military generals and cops who chased after Escobar. I interviewed narcos and lawyers, and tried to sit there with my hand cramping taking notes, as I spoke to them. And I always view it like this: people who are involved with any subject matter you’re writing, know more about it than you. And they actually have details about it, that’s the most interesting thing about it, things you can’t make up. For example, Javier Pena, played by Pedro Pascal, told me that the narcos and Colombians in general would call the U.S., “Disneylandia”, so I thought that was funny. So there are mentions of “Disneylandia” in the show.
The other DEA agent, Steve Murphy, told me that the CIA and DEA had a huge rivalry and they hated each other. Murphy told me at one point his colleague told him his first name was Frank, but he was lying. So I thought that was amusing. So that’s the type of stuff that would go into scripts — those small personal details that I heard. That type of stuff is better than fiction. So I took those interviews and research, including books about the time period, and, then of course, you have to add the dramatis magic: how do you organize this? How do you make this a scene? How do you make this flow from episode to episode? That’s sort of the task because a lot of the great ideas for the show was apart of the research.
Chris Bracanto and Wagner Moura
So you’ve done all the research and organization. Walk us through a typical day of writing a “Narcos” script.
It was interesting. This one was different because, typically, I’ll be in a room of writers and we will figure out the season arch. We will talk about it, scripts will be given to individual writers, and I will work with them on outlines and getting the structure done. On this show, I had a great writing staff except they were all in Los Angeles and I had to be in Colombia producing the show. And there was a flow to the episodes and a translation process – half of the scenes had to be translated to Spanish – so I had to stick very close to those scripts. I sometimes compared myself to a wood chipper. Writers would throw in scenes, and I would ask them to write certain scenes, and I would ask them to write memos about a particular time that we were covering in that episode, and I would ask them for a bunch of ideas, and then stuff would sort of go into my brain, and like logs going into a wood chipper, out the bottom would come these chips of wood – a script — that I would sort of stitch together from all of this research and all of these interesting scenes.
The team really contributed a lot in terms of creating what the episode was, but I was the one who had to organize based on what we did last week, based on my direct conversations with the directors and actors because I was there. So it was a very unusual process. And we didn’t really have a template. There were no act breaks. We could say and do anything we want (Netflix) and so I felt there had to be a consistency of style within the show that required a pass on it so it tracked with what we did last week and set up what were going to do next week.
How difficult is it to write a character like Pablo Escobar, who’s fundamentally a terrible human being, and make him into someone you want to root for?
Well, that’s a great question. I went to meet Wagner Moura, who plays Escobar, and the minute I met him — he’s such a great guy — within two minutes, I thought, “This is perfect.” You just like him. I realized that the audience would be stuck in a horrible position of, “I can’t help it, I like this guy.” And he is a tremendous actor. So, as a writer, the challenge was to not create a mustache-twirling villain, but to create a guy who is as complicated as Escobar himself. He deeply loved his family. He considered himself a man of the people, and he built many, many soccer fields and schools and hospitals. So I tried to make sure to embrace the Robin Hood side, and the charmer and the politically astute man, and also then to counterpoint that with the actual things he did, the remorseless and terrible and psychopathic things, and see where we end up. I see a lot of responses on the Internet who say, “I can’t help it – I am rooting for Pablo. I feel bad!” And that was exactly the type of response I felt when I first met Wagner. And I think that’s what keeps people coming back to watch more.
The real Pablo Escobar
You’ve been picked up for a second season. What are the challenges of writing a series based on true events, but keeping it fresh so people remain engaged and surprised?
Well, it’s going to be a big challenge. I wrote a bible for the second season, and the timeline will slow down. The story will get told in a shorter time span because, between the time he escaped from prison and the time he died, is only 18 months. So my necessity will be less huge infinite and more delving into the last horrific months that he spent alive. The efforts he made to get his family out of the country, the formation of anti-vigilante groups against him and the emergence of the Cali Cartel. So there is plenty of story to tell, but I think it will take a slowed down form. We’ll see.
You worked on Hannibal, which was recently canceled. When a series that you’re working on is canceled, as a writer-producer, what is usually your next step? Do you already have other projects ready to be pitched? Should you always be working on something?
Yes, you should. I have a little stockpile of ideas that I try to pursue on my own — some of them commercial, some of them not so commercial, so whenever I have time, I can delve into. For me, the joy of writing a show is the process of doing it and the day-to-day work. I didn’t spend a lot of time working on “Narcos” wondering if it was going to be successful or, conversely, having anxiety and fear, worrying it was going to be a failure. I just sort of did the job everyday. It was a hard one, having to move away from my family, and having to write these scripts and do the translations and all that. So I try to be less connected to the result and more to the actual doing of it. But, yeah, to the writers out there, you should always be working on something. And if you get a script out there, and it doesn’t bounce or it doesn’t sell, that’s the day you start working on the next one. There is no other choice. However, I had left “Hannibal” to work on “Narcos” before it was canceled.
Mads Mikkelsen as Dr. Hannibal Lecter
To break into TV writing, should writers be focusing on writing specs or pilots?
Well, from what I see, of what I receive from writers of all ages and experience, are spec pilots because people want to see an original voice. You are an original voice that isn’t mimicking someone else’s. That said, I don’t care that much. What I like to see is a good piece of writing, and so if I read an original and it’s terrific, then I’ll think, “Oh, this person is a good writer.” Or if it’s a spec of an existing show, it has to be very, very good because you have to make it so that turns your head. And then, of course, I’ll meet with the person, and I want to hear what they think of the particular show and what their ideas might be. I also want to know if they’re fun and nice to have in the room for long hours almost everyday because you spend a lot of time with people.
What’s your biggest piece of advice for aspiring screenwriters?
A couple of things. I think there’s a pretty easy gauge if you’re cut out to be a writer, especially in Hollywood, and it’s simply this: you’ve gotta want to write. You’ve gotta feel it, it has to be something that’s in your blood. If you can take three weeks off, and not feel the compulsion to write because you have other stuff, then you might be a person who isn’t cut out to do this. More than anything, there’s a lot of technique and craftsmanship to learn — many of which is featured in Creative Screenwriting — on a constant basis. I am far more experienced and better writer now than when I walked in.
I walked in thinking, “Oh, I saw this movie and I thought it was bad and I can do better.” I had no understanding of technique. I wrote a whole bunch of crappy stuff in the beginning. It’s a craft. You need to work hard to learn the craft, and as you learn the craft, you get better at writing scripts that are cohesive and professional. And what happened after that, as I learned, I wrote more cohesive and professional scripts for years, and I got paid, but they lacked sizzle or being really special or being attention grabbing because they were different. And, finally, I started to focus on things that I found to be really interesting and different. I was able to write a script like “Dope” that people responded to in that way. Trust me on this: it’s not like I write one of those every single week. It took ten years of being a professional writer to get a script that people really responded to, and then, interestingly enough, people seem to be responding to “Narcos” and I find it a little bit of coming full circle. The script that I really loved the most did not get picked up in 2001, and now, fourteen years later, on the same subject matter that interests me, I am working on a show that’s different than what you normally see on television, and people are responding to that. I find that gratifying.
