“I was hungry,” says Kurt Johnstad, who took any position he could find to get on set. “I was just looking for an avenue to tell stories. I looked at all the jobs and the flow and rhythm of being on set. I realized a director or cinematographer needs all these people, but you could be self-reliant and self-generate — it’s the writer.”
“The writer can just sort of be in their little shack and type away. I gave myself ten years to have a career, from my 20s to my 30s. Just try to do this. I don’t come from an entertainment business family, so it was hard. By 30 though, I felt like I had a career and was going in the right direction.”
Johnstad recalls that he wrote about three full films before he got his first credit, which was a straight-to-video kickboxer / bloodsport movie called True Vengeance. “That’s what it ended up being anyway. I’ve never seen it,” he jokes. But, it got him his first credit and fueled his career.
He also credits this early relationships with other martial artists for career longevity. Friendships with people like Chad Stahelski (Dir. John Wick), Sam Hargrave (Dir. Extraction), and Dave Leitch (Bullet Train) have led to multiple collaborations.
Now, Johnstad is best known for writing scripts like 300, Act of Valor, 300: Rise of an Empire, Atomic Blonde, and most recently, Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire and Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver.
From Frank Miller to Rebel Moon
While pushing dolly on a music video, Johnstad befriended the director, who was an unknown Zack Snyder. “He called me like a year later, said he was going down to Chile and knew I liked rock climbing. He asked me to do some rigging and he asked me to be his 1st AD.”
A grip at the time, Johnstad didn’t know exactly how to do the job and viewed the job as stressful, but Snyder talked him into it. They worked on commercials together from 1993 to 2003, when Snyder got the chance to do Dawn of the Dead.
“We had written a few things on the road but that experience of playing around and being creative, when he came back from Dawn, he said he wanted to do Frank Milller’s 300.”
Kurt Johnstad
Johnstad took the challenge of turning the script into a movie. “That’s how I got to Frank. I had known his work from the 80s — that Dark Knight run — but I hadn’t read 300 and didn’t know a lot of the history. We got into writing that together.”
This same type of collaboration happened for Rebel Moon, which actually sparked back in their conversations in the early 1990s.
As creative people, we’ve written a lot of movies, some that have yet to see daylight
“In 1997 Zack brought up the idea of Rebel Moon to me on an airplane.” They talked about their favorite movies — Johnstad’s is Seven Samurai and Snyder’s is Star Wars. Snyder said something like, “Wouldn’t it be cool to do Seven Samurai in outer space?” The screenwriter jokes they were coming back from a women’s antiperspirant commercial as they discussed this dream job.
“It’s been a 28-year conversation to get it to where it is now,” says the writer. “We really leaned into Joseph Campbell, the reluctant gunslinger, any Clint Eastwood movie, or Sam Peckinpah. So it’s all there. We really wanted to tip our hat and give a nod to those movies we love.” They even named a character Milius after John Milius (Jeremiah Johnson, Apocalypse Now).
Writing Action Scenes
“My style, if you were to read my scripts, if they have action in them or just a character scene, I’m a very lean writer. Those action descriptions, I try to get them as clean and clear as possible, to engage not only the actors but the readers.”
The first goal, of course, is to get an executive to keep turning the page. But, that same page must be entertaining and descriptive for all actors, set designers, stuntmen, and everyone else who touches the script. “It’s got to be clean and minimalistic.”
How this plays out, for example, is that even though Johnstad understands what a “jab-cross-hook-cross combination” is, he’s not writing this on the page. The same is true for “scissor kicks” or “flying arm bars.” Instead, he wants to tell the reader “Loraine fights like a man — elbows and knees — blood for blood” in the example of Atomic Blonde.
The same is true for “she takes a knee to the face” or “she takes an elbow to the stomach and is thrown down the stairs.” He adds, “Too much detail paints the director or fight choreographer [into a corner]. I just want to set up the visceral, it’s three against one, she uses her environment, and picks up what she needs to end the fight.”
“It’s the feeling of the scene, but not the specifics of the scene.” In a film like The Protector, it’s Muay Thai fighting while in the Jason Bourne films, it’s Filipino Kali. But the job of the writer is merely to translate that in a way so everyone understands what’s happening on a visceral level.
“I also use movie references for the reader. I may say, it’s a car crash, so it’s like Bullitt on steroids. Or, it has the tension of a John Frankenheimer movie. You can do things that inform the reader about style or tone, or give them a visual signature. Now, people say it’s Gun Fu in a bar because John Wick made that brand so well known now.”
How to Set the Tone
“I’m also a big fan of needle drops. As the reader is reading it, they know that Miles Davis song or that AC/DC song. I’ve had actors say that to me. Christian Bale told me he was reading a script and he couldn’t believe I included a New Model Army song in the script. Things like that draw people into the page.”
In Atomic Blonde, for example, he has several David Bowie songs and George Michael songs in the script. This helped shape the tone of the film. But, when they gave the script to the insurance company who helps decide the budget, they had to take all the songs out as that would have added hundreds of thousands to the shooting draft (we discussed similar needledrop advice in this interview on The Prank).
“We knew we were going to get Bowie to open and close the movie, so we added that back in post. But there’s no rights police if you’re just writing a script. If something is playing on the radio, that’s what’s playing on the radio. It’s someone else’s job to secure the rights. For me, I say, set the tone.”
Another way in which Johnstad sets the tone, for the most part, is that he often writes R-rated for an adult audience. “These first two cuts of Rebel Moon are PG-13 but he will do extended R-rated cuts, probably a Hard R knowing Zack. But I’ve always written R-rated movies. I’m not adverse to a PG-13 or G-rated movie if it moves the characters, but for me, I always land on an R-rating because that’s the world I live in.”
“The world is a complicated, messy place. Humans do really wonderful things and hard, despicable things on this planet. In LA, you see a $10 million dollar house and then someone sleeping on the street, so it can be both ends. That’s an R-rated world, in my mind. So that’s where my tone lands.”
This interview has been condensed. Listen to the full audio version here.
[More: Kurt Johnstad Talks Netflix’s ‘Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child Of Fire’]
