Q&A: Filmmaker Brian Duffield Needs More Weird in His Life
The 'No One Will Save You' writer-director lets me interrogate him about his journey from missionaries' son to Hollywood, screenwriting craft, and passion for offbeat original stories
In Hollywood, screenwriters are often told they need a great story to sell themselves during general meetings. Diablo Cody was an ex-stripper, for example, which stuck in so many people’s minds, whole articles were written on the subject. Mine was that I had made up both my name and resume, claiming I was a successful journalist, and somehow managed to become a successful journalist in the process since nobody ever cared to check my credentials. My favorite might be my friend Dailyn Rodriguez’s; her father was in the Cuban mafia in New York City. Writer-director Brian Duffield’s comes close, if only because nothing about it seems like the kind of secret origin that would produce a successful filmmaker.
One year after Jurassic Park blew his eight-year-old brain, Brian’s parents — American evangelical missionaries — packed up their lives and moved the whole family to remote Ireland to spread the good word. As a result, Brian grew up with little limited access to the medium he would one day pursue as a career, often relying on reading about films in books rather than ever experiencing them himself. That’s probably why he abandoned the farm life in County Kildare as soon as he graduated high school, returned to the United States, and got down to the business of chasing his dream.
After breaking into the business with a spec named Your Bridesmaid Is a Bitch, he started landing screenwriting jobs and very quickly — comparatively speaking — started getting films made, too. He was still in his twenties at this point, which I am not at all jealous about. At all. At all.
First up was the Divergent film Insurgent (2015), but that year also saw the Natalie Portman-starrer Jane Got a Gun released. That one was a nightmare experience for him, a shit show of a production, which we’ll get into during our conversation. These were followed by The Babysitter (2017), Underwater (2020), and Love and Monsters (2020). In all of these cases but one, The Babysitter, Brian was either the first writer in or one of multiple writers who tackled the script.
With Spontaneous (2020), Brian made the leap to the director’s chair when he adapted Aaron Starmer’s novel of the same name. I don’t even know how to describe it except maybe…delightful? It’s a dark rom-com where teenagers begin to spontaneously combust into blood and gore. Three years later, he created the animated TV series “Skull Island” (2023), which is an extension of the so-called Monsterverse franchise my friend Max Borenstein helped launch when he wrote Godzilla back in 2014. The same year, Brian followed up Spontaneous with the terrifying and wildly ambitious alien invasion horror flick, No One Will Save You, which is essentially a film without dialogue. I mean, there are a few lines — literally, a few — but they’re often mumbled. As a technical feat, it’s a remarkable one and, in many ways, a master class in how much effort screenwriters are forced to waste on pointless, forced dialogue to “help” audiences understand what’s happening on screens.
There are a lot of reasons I was excited to have Brian join me for one of my artist-on-artist conversations, but I think it’s how narratively daring so many of his screenplays are that tops the list. What he accomplishes on the page often blows up alleged rules and engages the audience in ways other screenwriters fail to. Few writers make me “see” a film as well as he does. We’ll go deep into his craft and much more during our chat — including his unique journey to success, what Jane Got a Gun taught him about how to survive the business, and his evolution into a director.
COLE HADDON: Let’s start with a favorite question of mine. Can you tell me the last piece of art that you experienced that made you feel like a rank amateur, like you’ll never be good enough to produce anything that great? The medium is irrelevant to the question.
BRIAN DUFFIELD: Probably Hundreds of Beavers, which was just so creative and original and silly - all in ways that I wish I could be but feel eternally short of reaching. I harbor dreams of being an indie filmmaker like those guys, but think I’m just too dumb to be able to pull it off, or at least until AI forces my hand and I can’t make studio movies anymore.
CH: [Laughs] Well, I adore this film, and I’m now determined with getting the filmmaker behind it to join me for one of these conversations. Do you ever find yourself walking out of a film such as this one and, in a terrifying fit of inadequacy, questioning everything about a project you’re working on? What I suppose I’m really asking is, does the singularness of your creative vision tend not to waver once you start working or are you susceptible to unexpected bouts of insecurity inspired by, say, a film about murderous beavers?
BD: I try not to second guess myself, which I fail at, but I’ve found that keeping my head down and focused on the original goal is usually the healthiest path forward for me. That’s not to say things don’t change along the way, but I think once I start concerning myself with what my peers or audiences think, it can all start to feel a little karaoke adjacent - instead of making the thing that got me excited in the first place. I think I have movie blindness to whatever I make, in that it never looks or registers in my brain as a real movie, so everything I see inspires me and makes me feel like shit. I think a big part of directing, especially, is learning how to keep the faith in your vision and knowing how to accept criticism that strengthens it – even if it alters the original vision – and knowing how to discard or reassemble criticism or notes that don’t hit the mark.
What’s inspiring about Hundreds of Beavers is how clean, clear and unique their vision is. They knew what movie they wanted to make, and, by god, did they make it. It’s a great reminder that budget doesn’t have to matter if your voice is clear enough.
CH: You grew up in what I think could called unique circumstances for an American kid, in that you were the child of missionaries living abroad in Ireland. When you returned to the States, it was for college, which was followed pretty quickly – if I’m doing my math correctly, that is – by your first spec sale. You were a baby at that point, really. What I’d love to do is come to a better understanding of how your specific creative DNA was engineered, so to say. For example, was it always cinema for you?
BD: I think so. Jurassic Park was a big Earth-shatterer for me, and I remember getting the Making Of book when I was seven, and that really being the first time I understood that movies were made, and written, and planned. And that was always really fascinating to me and, as I got older, I just got more and more interested in it. I remember reading Ebert’s 100 Great Movies books that were at a local library in Ireland, but had no access to see basically any of the movies, and I think that lack of opportunity weirdly fostered my interest.
CH: So, I had a similar experience, but with a Return of the Jedi making-of book. It was the first time I saw things like storyboards and a script to make it clear someone was writing all these things my favorite characters were saying on my screen. What I’m curious about is the distance between that Jurassic Park making of book and your first spec sale. Did you begin experimenting with the screenwriting format immediately as I did, or is that something you didn’t get around to until, say, college?
BD: I was writing screenplays in my early teens, and probably fan fiction before that. I remember we had moved to Ireland and movie theaters were scarce, and so I knew about The Lost World, but couldn’t see it – wasn’t allowed to see it – so I took to writing little Lost World sequels. I think I’ve said it in the past, but I feel like that was like learning to play the guitar. You start off with [Bob] Dylan and “Stairway [to Heaven]”, and one day realize two chords sound good beside each other and start writing your own songs. And then you get hooked on that. And then, wait for them to ask you to work on a Jurassic film, so the circle completes.
CH: Are you getting impatient with that wait?
BD: [Laughs] Not really. It would feel nice to be wanted, but I’m also very happy being allowed to make these weird original movies for the time being!
CH: Absolutely. I’m glad you’re doing it, too. We both know how much the world needs them. Before we move on, I want to ask about how you were raised, which, as I said, is pretty damn unique – I don’t need to tell you that. Our origins help forge us into the people we become, whether we like it or not. I can’t help but wonder if your early life might’ve provided you equally unique tools others might not possess such as, say, a way of looking at the world, at truth, at fear, whatever that the rest of us might not that you’ve come to realize helps make your work more distinct as a result.
BD: I know my wife hates this, but I feel like I had to figure a lot of things out about life and faith really young – without getting too much into a therapy session – and that might have opened me up to being more self-aware of how I was feeling, perhaps, and why I became relatively single-minded about “making it”. Because I had no real fallback options. That and a great deal of luck, I guess. But I think feeling rather lonely and secluded – and deprived of movies and the like – made me really focus in on writing screenplays at a younger age than most people. It was still in the era before DV cameras and iPhone cameras, so writing scripts and doodling dorky storyboards in rural Ireland was as close as I could get to doing what I wanted to do.
CH: Let’s come back to your age when you sold your first spec. I’ve chatted with some 60 artists for this conversation series at this point, and very few of them made that leap so young. Were you prepared for that as a storyteller and as a person? The obvious question would be, how did it impact your life? But I’m far more curious how it impacted your mental health having that happen to you without more – I guess you’d say – life and, more importantly, failure behind you?
BD: No, it was awful and confusing. It was great in the sense that I was so severely broke and miserable working temp jobs and I was able to move into writing full-time and get out of the hole, but it came with a lot of anxiety, that was definitely exacerbated by all the Jane Got A Gun fun. I don’t know if I changed as a person, but I had a lot of fear of the work and dream job going away since that is the history of basically everyone in Hollywood at some point, and every time I would pass on a shitty writing job, I would have anxiety that another one wouldn’t come along.
CH: Looking back, how do you explain passing on these shitty jobs when struggle and poverty were still in your rear-view mirror? What I mean is, most young screenwriters are just desperate and glad to get work when they get that first big break, but you knew enough to say, “Nah, not for me.” Talk about that.
BD: I mean, a shitty job that pays shitty and treats you shitty and is with shitty people for shitty hours isn’t the hardest to turn down. What I figured was a temp job was usually pretty boring, the people were nice, and the hours easy with a real “leave work at the office” ethos – which just gave me more time and brain energy to write while hoping that by living out here I would make the right connections.
CH: By contrast, I was certainly encouraged to take every questionable job I wanted no part of. Everything I heard was, “This job will get you the next job, which will get you the opportunity to eventually do what you really want.” It began to feel like a con very quickly, but there was no obvious way to escape. I think I’m impressed that you had more savvy than I did, which I now can’t help but wonder if that was a result of you being younger than I was when I broke in. Turning down work when you’re in your mid-twenties probably feels a little less scary than in your mid-thirties when your window to really make it can feel like it’s already rapidly closing.
BD: I remember my first spec after my first sale didn’t sell, and I was really spooked and terrified about that. It still hasn’t! I remember people told me that the genre that spec was in was what everyone wanted, and so I did that, and no one wanted it. And I did a few little polish jobs and never liked it – I still don’t particularly – and the books I’d get sent to adapt weren’t inspiring me. So, when people started telling me about what I should spec next, it was more of the same, and I felt a sense of, “That’s not what I want to write, and it didn’t work before, but I have an idea for a Western so maybe that would be cool even if no one buys it.” In hindsight, I wish no one bought [Jane Got a Gun], but following my instincts and writing what I wanted to write was what really kickstarted my career. I just wasn’t big and experienced enough to protect it from losers yet.
CH: So, there’s this moment after you break into the business, if you break strong, that you’re hot shit. Everyone says they want to work you. In your case, you got your name on a major studio release – Insurgent. But at the same time as that film is getting made and promoted and released, Jane Got a Gun is falling apart in slow motion. Every single thing seems to have gone wrong, as you just alluded to. As someone who had to live through something similar, how did that feel watching something hatched from your own imagination be mangled by the system?
BD: The Jane situation was so bananas and backward that it definitely threw me for a few years, and Insurgent was a nice thing to go into after and in between because it was so much more rigid and normal, and it was nice just being a cog in a machine instead of a creative force. Jane was definitely as bad a situation as there could be, but I think it helped me recalibrate my stress levels for when things for wrong on set or on a production – they are essentially permanently at zero now – so that’s nice.
CH: I’m envious. I just wrote a very autobiographical line of dialogue somewhere along the lines of, “I have no idea what calm feels like.” As I’ve met very few filmmakers who remotely experienced anything like I did on my TV series, “Dracula”, I’d like to ask a bit more about this experience. Specifically, what “threw me for a few years” means. In my case, I think I probably qualified as depressed. Many, many nights staring at my bedroom ceiling in the dark. I think it dramatically impacted my writing for a couple of years, too, and, more recently, I’ve come to accept that it affected how I interacted with other professionals from agents to producers. I think I just stopped trusting my collaborators for a while.
BD: I had always planned on directing, and directing being the thing, because I really see it as finishing the sentence that writing starts. And so, I think I struggled for a while because my ideas were not necessarily “indie” ideas, so it was hard/impossible to have the conversation about directing them a lot of the time, but then they’d be directed and I’d be like, “How the fuck is this happening, why can’t anyone be a grown-up director with their big boy pants on?” So, I think I got angry for a while, but in a way that fueled me.
I think I always hoped I’d have these on-set experiences as a writer and carry the lessons learned over to my sets, but for the most part, I was just baffled and confused and the lessons to be learned, I’d learned in fucking high school. I think I kept looking for my “good experience”, and then I finally got it with a pilot I wrote and hired Matt Shakman to direct. It didn’t wind up going to series – for a funny and long-winded reason – but it was such a lovely experience, and Matt was such a grown-up – not to mention talented – filmmaker, that after it wrapped, I was like, “Okay, got the good experience, I’m now directing my own shit - or Matt is.” But it took me a few rough productions and years of reflection until I got that swagger or arrogance back.
CH: I love the observation that so many of the lessons provided by being on-set were already learned in high school. I’m not sure if that’s entirely my experience, but it’s close – and I’ve certainly found myself on more than one occasion asking myself, “Why does it seem like I’m the only person who knows what he’s doing here? I’m the nobody in this equation!” What do you hope people take from the experience of working on your sets that maybe they might pass on themselves someday?
BD: I hope they have a nice time and feel like they are also authors of the movie along with myself. So many wins in every movie come from a new idea from an assistant on the day, or dolly operators nailing a take in one and saving you fifteen minutes, and it goes unsung in the “directed by” credit. But it’s so communal, and I think a nasty or oppressive set limits that magic from happening. I definitely don’t want to whisper a good idea in a douchebag’s ear.
CH: Let’s get into your craft, specifically as a screenwriter. I’m going to ask a rather broad question. It’s one I’ve never asked before, but I’m curious what your answer might be. What is it about the screenwriting form that you hate most as a storyteller?