INTERVIEWS

Writer-Director Drew Pearce On ‘Hotel Artemis,’ Trigger Songs & Tonal Shifts

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Drew Pearce is the man behind blockbusters like Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation and Iron Man 3, but he’s also just released Hotel Artemis and has writing credits for upcoming films like Sherlock Holmes 3 and an untitled Ghostbusters project. For Hotel Artemis, the story got started when Pearce scribbled down the words, “bad guy hospital.”

The film is set in a riot-torn Los Angeles that exists in a few years in the future. The story follows a nurse, played by Jodi Foster, who runs a members-only emergency room for criminals. Aspects of the film remind viewers of the hitman dwellings from John Wick, but Pearce worked hard to create a film void of any individual genre.

The action Indie also stars Sofia Boutella, Dave Bautista, Sterling K. Brown, Jenny Slate, Charlie Day, Zachary Quinto, and Jeff Goldblum. In this interview, Drew Pearce talks about filling notebooks with ideas, his love for Kurosawa, trigger songs for different creative projects, and controlling your fate as a screenwriter.

Creative Screenwriting Magazine

What inspired the whole concept of Hotel Artemis? How has it simmered over the years in your subconscious mind and when did you decide you were going to do this now?

I think I was maybe doing Iron Man 3, so it was maybe 2011, and I wrote down the words “bad guy hospital.” And, the way I work is: when I have an idea that I like, I start a little notebook. I start a Dropbox folder for images and I start a playlist for music. Over the course of the next year or two years, I accumulate the ideas. I accumulate the pictures. I accumulate the music and then at a certain point, if it’s one of the ideas that’s going to come out, then it tends to reach this internal velocity and I’m like, “Right, I have to do this one.” That’s what happened with Artemis. I think that’s why, ultimately, what it is, is a mixture of inspiration.

There’s a certain thing where people tell you, write what you know. With this movie, I actually wrote what I wanted to watch. That was kind of inspired by a lot of my favorite movies from the 80s and the 90s. Back then, when you went into a video store, you didn’t go, “Oh, this one is a studio movie. This one is an Indie movie. This one is an art house movie. Robocop, in my brain, was next to Diva and Repo Man. All of those films kind of had a personality to them. I think that’s sometimes a personality that gets kind of filed off in modern filmmaking. That’s why it had to be an Indie because I wanted it to have that.

But, I do think there’s something ironic about writing what you want to see because if you do that when you’re connected to the material, I think that you ultimately end up writing what you know anyway. I was two drafts in before I realized I had written a movie about a 65-year-old woman who felt lost without the identity of what her job was. I realized my mom, who is 66, had just had to retire. She was an educator for 40 years and was finding it difficult to transition into a world where she wasn’t defined by that. That completely plays into the nurse character. Similarly, where I grew up, no one I knew was in entertainment. My parents were working-class-Scottish. I kind of didn’t know I was allowed to do this. I’m not one of those kids who grew up directing their first script when they were seven years old.

Creative Screenwriting

I didn’t know I was allowed and I think those kind of self-imposed glass ceilings of class or culture are completely what Waikiki’s (Sterling K. Brown) story are about. That’s part of the cage he is in—the inability to hope that he could be bigger than he is. That was one of the things that inspired the movie. I think that a lot of L.A. I moved here eight years ago and I adore the city and its culture and 100 years of Los Angeles crime fiction. There’s a huge amount of [Raymond] Chandler in the movie. It’s music. It’s movies, of course.

That idea of the 1920s meets the 2020s:  I love downtown. Downtown L.A. is just incredible. I would do walking tours downtown because it’s such a wonderful secret. It’s actually literature that let me know it even existed. If you read Marlowe or John Fante, then suddenly you see in the 1920s that this place was the hub. It was this incredibly glamorous place. The one that we see on film is the more busted, 1970s flophouse version of downtown. So I loved the idea, generally with L.A., that you can see all of its history at once because there’s only 120 years of it. That was the secret of downtown, which is part of the reason why it became a secret hospital for criminals.

In your Dropbox folder, what was in the images sub-folder and music sub-folder for Hotel Artemis?

There are thousands of images—a lot of Korean cinema. I think in the last ten years, Korean cinema has been one of the most vibrant aspects of filmmaking. Visually, of course, which is why I worked with Chung-hoon Chung (Oldboy, The Handmaiden) on this. I think Korean cinema, both culturally and as a genre, certainly took me as a Westerner, is never afraid to take giant tonal shifts. You’ll have a moment of high drama right next to a moment of very broad comedy right next to a moment of ultra-violence and then a moment of really sincere emotion. That definitely was a massive influence on Artemis. Those images kind of serve to remind me of that, both directorially and as a writer. There was a bunch of Kurosawa in there as well. There’s always a bunch of Kurosawa. I don’t know if you know Drunken Angel, but it’s Kurosawa in 1949. It’s about a drunken doctor who secretly looks after criminals. He got there first, pretty much always, and there’s no dishonor in that.

In the music one, it was a mixture of songs. Weirdly, the song that’s on the trailer—Ty Segall’s “Thank God For Sinners”—I got but thought was never going to be right for the movie. It was in the original Dropbox, but it’s a mixture of songs. The nurse uses 70s L.A. music as a way to block out the tragedy of her past. So there’s a whole bunch of that in there. L.A. music in general. And, there was a bunch of scores, which I also find really helpful to write [as background music].

There’s a thing I often do with music. Often I have to jump between writing different projects. Because I have a different playlist for each project I’m doing and usually a trigger song at the top of it, then if I’m having to shift projects from day to day, I write to a different playlist. It kind of works as a writing sense memory to kind of put me into the right place.

Was there a trigger song for Hotel?

There was. It was “Band of Thieves” by Elysa Weinberg. She’s an obscure singer-songwriter. She was kind of one of the huge inspirations for the nurse. She came to L.A. in 1970 to be a music star in that folk-rock explosion, but she never made it. She made this beautiful first album. None of her other albums got released, even though she worked with Neil Young. I think her biography is part of what inspired me, but literally the music starts the same as the song. The song starts, “Woke up with a band of thieves, making their way across town. What about the good life I’ve been expecting for so long?” “Bands of Thieves” was the trigger song. It’s the one I would put on first and it would get me there.

How did you balance the tonal shifts? When did you decide this is too jarring; this needs to be more subtle or this needs to be a bit more hard-hitting? How did you navigate that in the writing?

First of all, I really enjoy—especially if it’s a writer-director project—being able to juggle tone. Zig-zagging as Shane Black (Lethal Weapon) calls it. I think there’s a freshness to it. I think part of what makes any movie enjoyable is a surprise. A joke is a surprise. A moment of violence is a surprise. An emotional disclosure is a surprise. And also, characters themselves. If they can be fresh, then you will be more inclined to work out what they’re going to do next and love them. I think that’s why there are tonal shifts. I think the “how” of it is a longer process.

It’s the thing of screewriting the scene and living with the scene. Then, take the macro view of: is this right for the script? Then, if you’re the writer-director, there’s the question on set: does this feel like the right one? Even more, you get to the edit. There will be that beat and I love the tonal switch, but at that moment, we need to stay in the groove of emotion, for example. So even though it’s a line you adore, it goes. At least ten of my favorite lines from the script didn’t make it in the film because of the editing process.

It’s funny because as a screenwriter, I’ve got terrible memory. From draft to draft, as I kill lines, I never remember them. My film producing partner, Adam Siegel (Drive, Wanted), literally started keeping a folder of his favorite lines that I had dropped because I would forget them. He would say them back and I thought, “That’s good, we should use it.” He’s like, “You wrote it. Four months ago.”

Can you remember any now?

Yea. There was one from the Wolf King. There was one from Jeff [Goldblum’s] character. When she takes the piss out of him for being an ex-hippie who became essentially a drug dealer and a mob boss. He said to her at one, “I gave peace a chance, but it didn’t work and all that left was war.”

You’ve talked about the inspiration of Hotel Artemis. At what point did you decide this thing needs to get made now?

I wish I could control fate and my career enough that I could say I’m the one who decides that this is the go project. I had written, over the last 8-9 years, this is the fourth spec I wrote to try and direct. None of the others ever quite made it over the line. There was always some reason. And, I think, for whatever reason it was, be it designed to be a smaller movie or something about the concept being sticky to people or that the characters spoke to certain actors, that Artemis is the one that stayed the course.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s an Indie movie, so there’s this terrible thing as a writer-director that half of your brain is dealing with the problems of “how am I going to do this? Am I telling the right story?”  The other half of your brain, everyday, is told that the movie is falling apart. It’s the same kind of focus as trying to focus on rewriting while also being the director. You’re just working double shifts. I would get up at five in the morning and I would go to bed at one in the morning and that’s how I did it for eight weeks, before we shot.

How did the story evolve between drafts—be it title or focus or theme?

I think that maybe one of the reasons that this is a movie that got made it the magnetic north of the story I was trying to tell stayed constant from the beginning to the end—this idea of a woman whose tragedy led to locking herself away. I always had this idea that these people are physically trapped in a building, but they are also trapped in cages of their own making, emotionally. The nurse trapped in the tragedy of her life. Sterling [K. Brown], as Waikiki, is trapped in this relationship with his brother. That also tied up with L.A., which has always literally had the conceit of the guilted cage associated with it. That was always there from the beginning, so that was good.

But, a lot of things changed along the way. When I first started writing the script, the mob boss was Russian. A year into that and everything that happened around the election and since, if you’re writing something speculative and set something ten years in the future, you need something to feel fresh.

Frankly, the reason there were Russians in there at first is because of what I had seen in Britain; the rise of the oligarch and how it would take over a city. I was like, “Well, in ten years time, that may very well have happened with Los Angeles.” As it turns out, on a much bigger level, it was already happening. But those things, I believe in that concept of Judo logic. Use your weakness as your strength. In doing so, I was able to move a slightly more generic idea, which was the Russian mob, and then I thought about what an L.A. mobster would be and I came up with the Wolf King. This guy, who was the mob version of David Geffen, who moved to L.A. in the late 60s and kind of monetized the sub-culture and is now a Malibu billionaire with thousand-dollar, cashmere sweatpants. That’s who the Wolf King is and because of that, he feels a little bit fresher.

In terms of genre, can you narrow the film down to one genre? Also, is Hotel Artemis a cautionary tale?

There are partial spoilers for the film below.

I think when it comes down to nailing down a genre for this movie, one of the challenges in marketing it is that I never sat out to make a movie in a specific genre. I think it probably lives in sci-fi crime, but I also think there are components from so many different things. My favorite movie of all time and a huge influence on Hotel Artemis is Casablanca. I think it’s really hard to classify what genre Casablanca is. It’s a war movie. It’s a romance. It’s a thriller. And, I don’t know how else I would classify it in specifics. I’m not for a second drawing a direct connection between Casablanca and Hotel Artemis, but I definitely think that it’s clearly one of the things I respond to in movies, which is when they’re almost unclassifiable.

As for the second part of your question, I think all sci-fi or all speculative fiction is really about the year it was written in rather than the year it was set in. I think if one wanted to, one could definitely see that there is a theme. This a movie about a group of people that have paid to be at a place that is safe and constantly feel threatened by this faceless street mob, outside their doors. But really, the problem is only the inside, not on the demonized hordes on the outside. I think that’s definitely a subtext take on the movie.

There’s a very simple way that we can break out of our cages and also maybe work our way through the shit storm outside, which is working together. That’s what the nurse and Waikiki do and that’s how they escape. I’d like to think that the movie has a very hopeful ending. In a very early draft, there was a more nihilistic ending and honestly, with the world as it is, I think it’s almost a cheap shot. It’s a much tougher gig to try and find hope in it, but that’s a worthwhile endeavor for a storyteller, right now.

How do you balance your career plans within the reality of a completely unstructured industry?

I’d love to say that I can in any way control it. I feel like I bob up and down on the tides of fortune, to a degree. I think the way I’ve taken control of it and the only way you can do it, destroys your life, which is, you have to just spec script now. If you want to control the tone of a thing and not just in order to direct it. But, to create something original, I think you have to do it on your own dime. I’m very lucky in that I have a reputation and maybe even a skillset that allows me to right the bigger temple movies or maybe work in the edit doc, uncredited. That, at least, keeps the lights on, but it means double shifts.

Do your day job and love your day job. I think that’s what’s really important. Here’s the thing: no one ever became a writer because they wanted to be a hack. Hacks are made, they’re not born. Everybody who wanted to be a writer did so to tell stories, but it’s only the systemic series of disappointments and crushing of hope that means you’ve heard a “No” so many times that you go, “Fine, I’ll do the thing that you’re asking me to do.” If that happens over a long enough period of time, I can understand when you go, “Tell me what you want and I’ll write that.”

There’s no dishonor in it, but all there is a little bit of sadness. The more we can balance the job of writers and the necessity of that with more unique stories from our own voice that we want to tell. It’s tough, but I think that’s helpful to our art.

In terms of your resume, you’ve bounced between television, movies, shorts, and animation. How do you define yourself as a writer?

I’ve definitely transitioned around mediums. I don’t know how much I’ve actually bounced around in subject matter that much. I tend to think of what I do as a triangle. There’s genre in general. There’s crime and there’s science fiction. Everything I do lives in that triangle somewhere. Like when I wrote The Wedding Sting for Paramount, it’s a crime movie based in 1990 and it’s wholly a crime movie where Artemis is somewhere in the middle of that. It’s crime-sci-fi genre.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some days where I’ve got to make that intimate family drama, but honestly, the themes that I would put into an intimate family drama are often Trojan-horsed with my skillset into a genre movie.

When you’re thinking a project is about to die, how do you keep yourself together? How do you stay motivated?

I think there’s a few ways. It is extraordinarily on the ego to be a writer. It is not Chilean pet mining, but it is emotionally draining (and also very bad for the back and carpal tunnel—a terror of writers). I have some really prosaic things that I do. I’ll go for a run. Not listening to music, I tend to find that halfway through the run, an idea has shaken out. Or, there will be enough adrenaline rush that my frustration has turned into righteous anger. That usually can drive me on to write something else. I do sometimes write with a chip on my shoulder. Joy is a great way to write, but often it’s “Fuck-you juice” that powers my engine. Oscar Wilde always said, “The pram in the hallway is the enemy of the art in the study or the drawing room.”**

I found that to be the opposite case. I found that when I had a family, it inspired me. It rewired the DNA of my work to be more emotional. Though it’s a giant challenge to be a family and a writer, particularly because of the schedule. I used to write through the night and now what I do is I get up a 4:30am and I write two or three hours before my kids get up. But, they’re also a wonderful reminder, though art and life can be intertwined, that life part is really important. The dick joke in a space port that is currently destroying your mind, it gives you a little perspective on that.

Look, being a writer is by turns lonely and crushing and elating and transporting, both for you and the audience. The trouble is, you don’t necessary get to decide what part of that you’re currently in. One other coping mechanism I use is for notes. Basically, if you use the Kübler-Ross Method of grief management works for getting notes. I know that I’m going through the right stages. Anger, denial, impotence, and finally acceptance—there’s one more in there. But I find that if you know that’s what you’re going to have to go through, then it helps you know that that’s how you’re going to react in advance.

How do you see the business changing in the last five years? What would you say to screenwriters who want to be more strategic about their careers?

I think there’s one basic fundamental change, which is that the major studios now make two kinds of movies. One is very cheap genre movies: $5 million horror movies. The other is $50 million blockbusters. That doesn’t leave any room in the middle, so that work has moved to television. I think there is a strange upside-down-side to the rise of streaming. I feel like there are hundreds of great shows, but algorithms don’t necessary treat your show fairly. You might get lucky. You might not. That’s pretty scary. That’s even scarier than when it was network TV.

But, I do also think that what’s changed since I got into this is that with the rise of YouTube, access to cheap filming, and also, the access to an almost free ability to look at anything in cinema history if you know where to look and what you’re looking for. I think that the takeout at the moment is that if it’s not happening, you just dig in and keep going.

But, there are outlets and you should design what you’re writing and your ideas to a way that gets them out there in the world. Maybe all you can afford to do is a one-person monologue, but it’s a distinctive character. Put it on YouTube and film it with a friend on an iPhone. In my case, that’s exactly what Artemis is. I spec’d and spec’d and spec’d and in the end, I designed a movie that I could make as an Indie and that I could control the tone of and that I would be able to direct. I think that’s the one element of control that writers have over their destiny.

Check out the trailer for Hotel Artemis below:

Creative Screenwriting Magazine

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Brock Swinson

Contributing Writer

Freelance writer and author Brock Swinson hosts the podcast and YouTube series, Creative Principles, which features audio interviews from screenwriters, actors, and directors. Swinson has curated the combined advice from 200+ interviews for his debut non-fiction book 'Ink by the Barrel' which provides advice for those seeking a career as a prolific writer.

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