Q&A: Screenwriter Michael Brandt Is Just Hitting His Stride
The 'Chicago Fire' creator discusses what he's learned about playing the creative long game from more than twenty years of writing hit films and launching a TV franchise
Whenever I begin one of my artist-on-artist conversations, I have almost no idea where they’re going to lead. Most are conducted in stages and upfront I caution that we’re just going to let the chat go wherever it wants to until it reveals its real identity. With filmmaker Michael Brandt, I was especially unsure what to expect because what I knew about him — from his early training as an editor, to his varied feature writing career with writing partner Derek Haas, to the NBC “Chicago” franchise he helped launch when he co-created “Chicago Fire” with Haas — made it impossible to get a creative bead on him. But as soon as we started talking, his openness about his career — both the good and disappointing — made it clear I was about to have an exciting discussion with a screenwriter and occasional director who could speak thoughtfully about how careers really evolve in Hollywood and the upright, walking, frantically typing artists who appear at the end of such specific hominid charts - Homo scriptorius.
Michael and I will get into his early years as a screenwriter, but for now, it’s worth noting that his partnership with Haas was incredibly successful. There was a five-year period from 2003 to 2008 that saw their names appear on the big screen four times as credited writers on 2 Fast Too Furious (2003), Catch That Kid (2004), 3:10 to Yuma (2007), and Wanted (2008). In 2011, Michael made the leap to the director’s seat with The Double, which he also co-wrote with Haas. Then, in 2012, the team created the smash TV hit “Chicago Fire” for legendary producer Dick Wolf; this year, it was renewed for its thirteenth season. It spun off two more “Chicago” series, “Chicago P.D.” in 2015 and “Chicago Med” in 2016; this year, they were renewed for their twelfth and tenth seasons. I hope I don’t have to explain what a staggering achievement this all represents.
More recently, Michael and Derek Haas decided to end their writing partnership. Michael will get into this in our conversation, specifically his urge to take what he learned from their years together and focus on even more personal storytelling. His first project post-break-up, Arthur the King, hit screens earlier this year and starred Mark Wahlberg. What strikes me most about where he’s ended up as a storyteller is the sense that he’s only been building up steam for the past two decades or so and the most creatively exciting part of his career might yet be ahead of him.
For writers at all stages of their creative journeys, there is much to learn here about the realities of becoming a professional writer, living with creative disappointment, pushing yourself to evolve in new directions, and much more. Michael and I go off on a tangent at one point about “commercial filmmaking” — or, rather, commercial storytelling — that I think will be of great interest to anyone who aspires to create art of any kind.
COLE HADDON: When you look at a blank page on your screen today, what do you hope to accomplish as you begin to write? What I mean is, what motivates you to come back time and time again beyond paying your bills?
MICHAEL BRANDT: Truly, I hope to get out thoughts and feelings I have about things that are mostly kept inside me. I do love telling stories in a social setting and I find that the ones I want to tell are the ones that make a point. That point might be to humor, or to point out the absurd - like the Vietnamese bathroom attendant in Hanoi that thought I needed a backrub while I was peeing. But most often they are relationship stories. Often fathers and sons, but nearly always about faith and trust in each other.
I guess I’m an optimist at heart, even in a time where that’s not considered cool or even wise. I’m no different in that writing is brutally painful, the old thing about the blank page, blah blah blah. But I keep telling myself during that first painful draft to keep going and get something down so you can then shape it into what you want. I started as a film editor, which is more akin to sculpting than painting. The removal of unneeded stuff to end up with something great rather than the creation of new stuff. Editors get hundreds of hours of footage to make a two-hour movie out of and that’s just how my brain functions. I constantly have to tell myself to keep going until Fade Out. Then the fun part - and I do find rewriting fun.
CH: This comparison to how editors work is…daunting. Not every writer is as skilled at revealing a story’s true identity, though I imagine your time in the editing bay helped you. What is your relationship to outlining and treatments? Do you just go for it, let those “hours of footage” accumulate on the page, to find out what you’ve got before you really roll up your sleeves?
MB: That’s evolved over the years, for sure. When I started out, I believed that detailed outlining was an excuse to not get going and face the pain. Network TV definitely beats that out of you. The structure of an episode with act breaks, the schedule, the need for network sign-off, the place of the episode in the greater world of the season, etcetera.
Now, I relish the development process before writing as it can be more of a conversation. I guess that is a result of the writers’ room, as well, and something feature writers don’t usually experience. I have a trusted few I like to shoot the shit with in terms of story and then I spend some time organizing that into an outline. The pitfall of that is in the writing process, simply writing to the next scene on the beat sheet. I find that’s an easy mistake to make, which leaves you with flat scenes. But it does help get that hated first draft down, so there’s that.
CH: Like you, I started off in features. I never wanted to work in television. But the writers’ room experience was transformative for me in a lot of ways. Before my first one, I’d just stare at a screen for hours, trying to fix that one problem. The room, however, taught me to ask “what if?” all the time. It seems like you’re doing the same thing, but one is lonely and mechanical at times. The other is far more organic. It just…evolves. Not necessarily superior in terms of results, don’t get me wrong, but that question is so freeing.
MB: Honestly, the room was an extension of what I’d been doing with Derek [Haas] for years, so it wasn’t as jarring as it might have been for a solo writer. I’d already been steeled somewhat for the response to a bad idea, which makes it so much easier to toss them out in a room. It’s not living in fear of looking stupid that is the most productive. So often the bad idea leads to a good one, and I don’t know how many times someone has said, “This is the bad idea but…” and it turns out it’s not a bad idea. I also love entertaining the idea, at least for discussion, of doing the opposite of what’s on the table. It’s a fun road to go down to challenge your original idea.
CH: The “what if your character did the opposite?” challenge – yeah, that’s a great tool I picked up from the writers’ room, too. Before that, I think it’s something I did unconsciously – we didn’t end up employed as screenwriters because we were obvious all the time – but in hindsight, I’ve looked back and realized some of my earlier work would’ve been dramatically improved by liberally asking that question about every scene.
CH (cont’d): Let’s keep talking about the impact of writers’ rooms on you. I’m sure you read Denis Villeneuve’s out-of-context comments about how he feels about dialogue in features today. He cited TV as part of that problem, as TV writing, in its ascendance, might’ve changed how audiences experience and understand stories on the big screen. We don’t need to debate his position, but I do wonder if writing so much television – maybe even specifically network television – damaged your feature writing in any way that you’ve become conscious of? I know it did my own, at least until I worked out how to distinguish the writing experiences more.
MB: I like dialogue and I like banter and I like smart people talking and bantering. I think that’s something I’ve always been drawn to as a writer. As much as it’s a nice idea to make a movie only with visuals, what stimulates my brain is the conversation and it’s always been that way. There was never a moment making TV that I thought about pairing down the visuals because of the medium. Sure, you have to do it for budget, but that’s the case in features, too. My feeling is I can always write the production out of a budget or a production problem if given a minute to do it, and at some point the rubber meets the road in terms of money and schedule. Now, I will say that directing network television isn’t great for the directing chops, and it’s easy to concentrate on getting the money makers on the screen in close-up when it would be fun to tell the story more visually. So, I’d say it’s a director problem, not a writing problem.
CH: That’s a fascinating observation.
CH (cont’d): Maybe this is a good opportunity to look back for a moment. A moment ago you referenced starting out as an editor. You’re the first former editor or editor in general I’ve spoken with for this series. What about the form appealed to you as an aspiring filmmaker and, more broadly, storyteller?
MB: My first day of film school a professor asked me what I wanted to do. I said write and direct and he said, “Well, I don’t know how to teach you to do that…but I can teach you how to edit - which will get you in the room with filmmakers and the have the tools to tell the final rewrite of the story. I went to Baylor, which at the time was very cutting edge in new technologies, so just knowing how to turn on an Avid put you ahead of most in Hollywood at the time. Within a year, I was working with Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, more for my techy skills than my creative. But he was right, I learned a lot and made the right connections. Editing is by far the most important job on a production that is least understood and appreciated. Most editors can’t tell you why something works or spill the beans on why they’re good. It’s a tough thing to study, too. But very few do it well, and when it’s not done right, it’s not something you can put your finger on…the blame usually gets put on the performance or the script. Good editing can really elevate something and bad editing…well, it hurts more than bad performance in my opinion.
CH: So, what motivated the leap to screenwriting with Derek?
MB: We went to school together and found we both dreamed of being in LA and working in the biz. It was really that simple. We had similar tastes and after I moved here we started kicking a spec back and forth via email. I gave that script to a woman I was working with on a Rodriguez movie and it was passed up the chain until Brad Pitt was attached. Derek then moved to LA and we were off and running. Sounds a lot easier than it really was in this discussion!
CH: [Laughter] I know nothing in this business is easy, don’t worry.
Okay, you’ve created hit TV series and you’ve written hit films. We could dwell on those, sure – and we’ll come back to them at some point, no doubt – but let’s talk about heartache right now. I’m going to ask you three questions about the stuff that went wrong in your career rather than all the right. If you could, answer each, but tell me how you emotionally experienced them. What did they teach you? How did they break you or force you to grow or whatever it is they did to you?
First up: What was the job you didn’t get that you still haven’t gotten over?
MB: Well, it’s much easier to dismiss the “job” I didn’t get over the “project” that no one else wants to make, so I’ll speak about them both.
When I was writing with Derek and we were pretty early in things, we were up for the rewrite job on War of the Worlds. The script showed up at our houses with copy-proof paper and watermarks. It was all very Three Days of the Condor and exciting. Josh Friedman – I think – had written a draft and they were looking for work on it. David Koepp was hired over us, which is actually pretty easy to justify on every level. He’s great, has a shorthand with Steven [Spielberg], etcetera. But getting that job would have sent us to a different level in terms of the town and how we were viewed. Now in the sliding doors world of it all, maybe it would have ended terribly or I’d be a Scientologist or we never would have created the “Chicago” shows, so who knows? In the end, I realized it’s much easier to get over jobs you don’t get when the person who gets the job makes sense. We passed on a few that really worked out like Transformers and The Ring, but I don’t look back with regret. So many things have to come together to make something that works and it’s impossible to tell.
CH: Absolutely.
MB: The projects that I’ve worked on that haven’t been made is the tougher conversation. I am very sure that my best work is on my computer and nowhere else, for many reasons. Derek and I did a Joe Namath script for [James] Mangold to direct that didn’t work out, and I love so much about it. There’s also the true story of the Billionaire’s Vinegar, which is about faking wines and selling them to the rich. When I see those folders on my computer, it hurts. But the truth is, they aren’t as commercial as the town needs today, and are/were one step away from being great. Projects like these easily fall through the cracks because they certainly don’t need to be made and wouldn’t further any studio head’s career, but they mean a lot to me and I deeply cared about them. I’ve never had a child run away and join the circus, but these feel like bearded ladies now.
CH: There’s a lot to come back to here, but let’s stay on track for the moment: What’s the job you did get that went so south that you still haven’t gotten over it?
MB: Wanted 2. There was no reason not to make that movie. The first did really well and was set up for more. Yes, Angelina [Jolie’s character] was dead in the first, but we did a draft that handled that, and I think the script for the sequel was better than the first one and would have been well-received and done great. It fell apart for purely political reasons as producers got distracted and studio executives changed, and we know that execs don’t care much about the previous regime’s projects. In a time of nothing but sequels, that would never happen today.
CH: No, I can’t imagine it would. Though I expect Wanted is due to be rebooted any day now. Okay, last in this trilogy of professional terror: What’s the worst thing to happen to you in this business that turned out to be a great thing?
MB: Leaving the “Chicago” shows and not writing with Derek any longer was really tough because I’d fallen in love with the shows and the atmosphere we created in Chicago. Shooting everything there made for a real family feeling that got me and everyone through the grind of 22 episodes a year and three shows - so that was a major change. That, timed with Derek staying on and me writing on my own for the first time was a major shock to the system. But, I look back and can’t imagine writing with a partner again. Derek was and is a great writer, and during the early days our sum was definitely better than our parts, but ultimately writing is so personal that to really get into yourself and find what you want to say, you have to do it alone.
CH: Everything about art can be described as various muscles. You don’t use them, or you get help using them, and they begin to change in some way. In a writing partnership, maybe you’re the character writer and they’re the plot writer. The plotting muscle gets flabby as a result. What was it like stepping away from your partnership with Derek after so many years? What did you discover about yourself as a writer, good or bad, when it was just you staring down Final Draft?