Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka met in the graduate program at Columbia Film School. Gatewood recalls, “We weren’t friends. We didn’t hang out, but we had our first screenwriting class together and we liked each others’ writing.”
“We started to talk and found we had uncanny similarities in terms of taste, what movies we liked, writers we liked, and in our second year, we started to write together.” Working on scripts and sharing beers for fun, the writers eventually found a path to make a career out of their partnership.
“Slowly, we stopped drinking as much as started writing more,” jokes Tanaka. “That’s how our partnership evolved.” Today, they’re known for their work on The Sitter, Comrade Detective, Dice, Superstore, and the new Apple film, Sharper.
Described as “a con film in reverse,” the new movie stars Julianne Moore, John Lithgow, Sebastian Stan, Justice Smith, and Briana Middleton. The mysterious description reads, “Motivations are suspect, and expectations are turned into chaos, as a con artist takes on Manhattan billionaires.”
Over the years, their writing process has evolved, partially due to growth, partially due to raising families, and partially due to the recent pandemic. “It had to change depending on our life situation,” admits Tanaka.
“Ideally, we’re both in the same room and treat it like a job. But there are times when we have to work separately. We may do Zoom. We may split up scenes. In a perfect world, one of us is taking the lead, the other one is coming up behind and rewriting so by the time you get your first draft, it’s much more polished.”
The Creative Box
Early in their career, if one were to simply look at their IMDB page, it would appear as if these writers are only interested in writing comedy. In reality, this was never the case, just the bottleneck, or golden handcuffs, from finding success in a single genre.
“When we first met, our tastes were the same and comedy was one thing we liked. We liked thrillers. We liked dramas. Gangster films. Honestly, all genres — just about all types of films. But when we first started writing – you do kind of get put in a box.”
The first screenplay that shined a light on the duo was a Film Noir Family Comedy. “When we were breaking in, that was the only thing people would look at us for. We happened to write The Sitter as a comedy and people just saw us as comedy writers.”
In The Sitter, Jonah Hill is a college student forced to babysit the kids next door. In Comrade Detective, Channing Tatum and Joseph Gordon-Kevitt dub a fictional Romanian detective show from 1983. Dice stars Andrew Dice Clay for Showtime and Superstore is an NBC sitcom.
Gatewood continues, “We were working on other projects, but you can get boxed in. I feel like we were for a while. There were some projects we had gone after that we wished we would have gotten, but it’s hard for people to take you seriously.”
Madeline (Julianne Moore) Photo courtesy Apple TV+
Following the footsteps of people like Jordan Peele and Todd Phillips, the writers knew they had interests outside of comedy and needed to break the mold put around them. “We were up for a writing job that we wanted, that was a straight drama about New York in the 70s we knew we were perfect for, but looking from their perspective, these guys did a Romanian cop show, so why would they do this? Part of the reason for writing Sharper was to show we could do more than one genre.”
A Foot in the Drama Door
Initially written as a spec script, the new type of genre gave the “comedy writers” a foot in the door to create this drama. “That’s how you learn to write, period,” says Gatewood about writing specs. “Any advice we would give is basic and there’s a reason for that: you should treat [writing] like a 9 to 5, stick to those hours, put in the mental work, then maybe next week it’ll come through.”
“Writing scripts is how you get better and better. Alex may feel differently,” says Gatewood, “but I can see us expanding as writers and it’s because we keep doing it and doing it and doing it… I just think it’s that simple in a sense. It’s tough now because pitching has become a big thing and once you’re inside the system, you have to learn to pitch to get jobs, but you have to prioritize the writing.”
“The other thing about specs,” adds Tanaka, “is that, for us at least, they’re fun to write. There’s nobody looking over your shoulder, giving you notes, giving you thoughts. In a way, it’s the purest way to write a screenplay. Then, you send it out into the world and it’s live or die. We’ve written plenty of specs that have gone from our computer straight into a drawer, because they didn’t work, but at least they were fun to write.”
“I think if your whole career is doing what you just did last time, I think that can get very stale very quickly. For us, we look at specs as research and development. We’re trying different things. With Sharper, we experimented with linear narrative, and how to break that up a little bit. Those are things we wouldn’t be doing if we were going into a writing job.”
Writing Sharper
If you haven’t seen Sharper, it’s a genre bend that might actually be best to watch going in knowing as little as possible. As a reverse con film, it begs to be unraveled, bit by bit. In simple terms, the first half happens essentially backwards, then the second half puts it all together.
Like other partners we’ve interviewed in the past, writing partners are somewhat of a draft ahead, simply by having two sets of eyes and two minds working in the same direction. For Gatewood and Tanaka, this begins by “talking it through ad nauseum.”
“We really talk it through. Then we do an outline, but it’s not like something we would hand in to a studio. It’s just the story beats in a sentence or each scene. It can be three words, but we’ve talked it through so we know the rest of the scene. We get that shell down, get it out on paper, and take it from there.”
They do several passes at this, talk it out again, re-work the shorthand beat sheet and eventually sit down to write the drafts. “Each script is a little different, the way we approach it. That’s what makes it daunting, starting a new spec. You’re always like, ‘How did we do this last time?’”
Alessandro Tanaka and Brian Gatewood. Photo courtesy A24 Films/ Apple TV+
“It’s difficult, especially early on, getting over [the idea] that you just finished a script and then thinking you have to do it again. It’s terrible, and it never really goes away,” jokes Gatewood. “But that’s something that, if you’re a writer, every other writer has the same feeling. It’s daunting, but you have to power through that hump to move on to the next script so you’re not psychologically imprisoned by one script.”
In terms of choosing this story over another idea for their next spec, Sharper actually came from the past. Tanaka says, “This one was different. I had written the first thirty pages or so when I was in film school. I brought it into class and didn’t get much of a reaction (Gatewood wasn’t in this class), so I put it in a drawer and ten years later, I found this file.”
It had been so long Tanaka didn’t really even remember what happened. Seeing something of a spark, he sent it to Gatewood who said they should put everything else to the side and get to work on this next screenplay.
Genre-Bending Con Stories
Gatewood got the idea right away: a con story told in reverse. “For years, we had been talking about writing a con movie. So when he found those pages, all he had to say was, ‘I was trying to figure out how to do a con movie in reverse,’ I immediately got it. Part of that is that we had been working together for so long that I knew what he was thinking.”
The movie clicked fast from that point forward, after sitting still for a decade. To know the genre “backwards and forwards,” they watched a pile of con movies to try and further unlock this new spin. “Another piece of advice we give people — and I feel like nobody takes it — when we first started writing together, we found that sitting down, watching a sports movie and two more sports movies, you see the pattern [of the sub-genre].”
“You start to see patterns and understand storytelling and how narrative works. We still do that till this day.” The same is true for books, articles, music and interviews, to fully immerse yourself in that world. Then, when the writing starts, they shut that off completely and dive into the story at hand. Over just a few weeks, they finished the script for Sharper.
After the script is finished, spec or otherwise, the writers would say that in today’s market, things like pitch decks are also important to get anything made. “As much as I hate to say it,” begins Tanaka, “I think it helps, especially when people are pitching over Zoom. It helps to be able to tell the story visually as well, while you’re telling the story. But none of that matters if you don’t have a great script, but having a visual thing you can turn to — but that’s always been the case. You need to go in with something.”
Gatewood added, “I think the standard keeps getting raised. You used to go in, pitch your idea, and the network would pay you to write the pilot. Now, it’s like, you have to have the pilot, the Bible, the actor or director, and to that end, along with saying the visual pitch [is important], having some sort of document that is able to express where this show is going to go and why and how it can continue, is also important. You have to have more materials now than you used to have.”
The misconception, here, for novice writers comes in the form of spending too much time on the pitch deck and too little time on the story. “If anybody is telling you that the script is not the most important thing, then they’re wrong. The script is the most important thing even though there are reality factors, like having a star attached, but consistently, it’s going to come down to the script.”
This interview has been condensed. Listen to the full audio interview here.
