An Interview with Colin West, Writer-Director of ‘Linoleum’
Colin West sat down with Script to discuss his process, how many drafts his script took, and how he juggled all of the different storylines and timelines into one beautiful feature film.
Linoleum, written and directed by Colin West and starring comedian Jim Gaffigan, hit limited release February 24. It tells the story Cameron Edwin (Gaffigan), a television science host who is in the midst of a divorce and a mid-life crisis. Things begin to unravel for him when a red Corvette crashes out of the sky near him and we’re left to put the pieces of his life together. The film is as much a meditation on science as it is a heartwarming story of love; both finding it and holding on to it. Colin West brought personal experiences from his life into the writing of this film that is a lot more complicated than it seems on first blush.
Colin West sat down with us to discuss his process, how many drafts his script took, and how he juggled all of the different storylines and timelines into one beautiful feature film.
SCRIPT MAGAZINE: As writers, we tend to find a lot of different ideas and iterate them. I know you did a short film that touched on a lot of the same things as Linoleum, and I'm wondering if you can talk about the journey of the idea, from initial idea, to short film, to feature.
COLIN WEST: This process was such a journey, actually, and it started back in 2015. Obviously, the movie comes out now in 2023, so that's eight years of working through all this. The writing process started with the feature. The genesis of the idea came, more or less, through seeing my grandparents’ relationship evolve. They met when they were 16 and were high school sweethearts and were together until they passed away a few years ago. It was initially my way of looking at how you express a love story over the course of a lifetime. I initially started doing that.
The first script had very traditional flashbacks and was kind of structured that way. It would touch on big moments in life, but it was mostly focused on the middle-aged couple and went back and stuff. It was structured in a way that you would think to make a story like this. I actually started the script over the summer, while I was in graduate school. I didn't write it for a class, but it kind of became this living document that I was writing during that eight-year process.
I probably wrote ten other features in that time, but I always kept coming back to this one and revising it, and as my thesis project came along, I realized I really wanted to make a short version of this movie. So, actually, the short film and the writing process for the short came about halfway through the writing process for the feature.
I think a lot of people start with the short and then kind of get the momentum to make the feature and that kind of thing. I wanted to do the short as a learning tool for making the feature and writing the rest of the feature, and so I took a lot of big swings with the short... It's actually out online, you can see it, it's called Here and Beyond, and it has a lot of similar themes, but it is quite different. The tone of the world is there, though.
Eventually, the script came around. It was nice to then have the finished script, and then also a short to show around, although I don't think that was necessarily the tool that got us there per se, but yeah, that was kind of the journey from there. And then I ended up hooking up with some other producers and going to make the feature. We shot it in 2020 during the pandemic with all the protocols and stuff.
SCRIPT MAGAZINE: I think there's this misconception with some folks who are stepping into screenwriting for the first time that your first draft is the draft that's going to be the shooting draft, and it sounds like you went through a lot of iterations, can you talk about how it evolved?
COLIN WEST: I think a lot of that comes down to character for me, and looking at the different drafts of which there were so many drafts, Bryan, the things that were changing, I realized things were getting better when I would do rewrites for the character rather than the plot.
Almost once a year I’d go back and be like, “OK, but wait, I gotta think about this character, what is this person's arc and journey, and why do they need this story to happen to them?”
There are times when the main character was a university professor for a little while, they didn't have a family, or the family was somebody else's family that he befriends, so there were a lot of versions of it. I think that the closer I brought everybody to him, I think the more things really started to sing in the script, and I think the major thing was people would read the script and cry, and that was when I knew it was solid. That emotion that wasn't there for the first few years as I was writing it, and then as I started to give it to more readers, eventually I started hearing from people like, “Oh, I got really emotional there at the end and came around.” I realized I was on to something. I was connecting there.
SCRIPT MAGAZINE: How did you land on the science TV host in the 90s? You use it very well to great effect, both for the sub-text, but also the transitions. The transitions really hang on that conceit. At what point in the process did you hit upon those because I just thought they were a really clever device...
COLIN WEST: I have never had anybody ask about that, especially bringing up the transitions, which I think is so important. Honestly, I think when I start to know a script is working when I'm able to find a conceit that makes the transitions effortless. Often, when I'm writing, if I'm having trouble with bouncing between scenes or jumping time or doing some kind of montage, I realize that it's because I don't have a thematic concept that relates to the story.
I think a big lesson I learned through Linoleum was actually finding that what I really need is something like that. It's not plotted the stuff from the TV show, this Bill Nye, the Science Guy, or Mr. Wizard kind of show. It's not plot, it's all theme, because they're talking about everything else... I'll talk about some of that towards the end of the second act, and things are getting worse and worse for the character, the TV show is now talking about how what entropy is and how things de grade and how nothing can be fixed, and it all just sort of adds to the world. It gets the audience to actively start thinking, which is so great, which is like it makes people lean in a little bit. Once I latched on to that, that's just a really helpful writing device.
SCRIPT MAGAZINE: I particularly, really liked the line in that interstitial specifically, where it said something like to the effect that you can't combat entropy without bringing energy to it, and watching their relationship mirror that was really great stuff.
I want to ask about juggling all the storylines. As an outside observer, watching it for the first time, you've got all of the storylines sort of barreling toward the final moments, but watching it for the first time, it feels like three separate storylines. What was the key to threading all those together for you and how much of a challenge was that?
COLIN WEST: It was a delicate balance to have these multiple different time periods happening all at once without telling you until the end... We're giving it away immediately. This isn't giving anything away, but in the first two minutes of the movie, a bright red Corvette falls from the sky and lands in the middle of suburbia, and I think that that really sets the mood for the movie, and it shows you right off the bat, “OK, things are gonna be off in this movie.”
Setting up that expectation very, very early was helpful in telling the audience there's a puzzle happening here, there's an unreliable narrator. It, again, activates the mind. I think that was a really important part of this, especially in the writing process. I will say that as far as the twist at the end where it just comes together, it's less of a twist and more of a kind of soft reveal of how these things are playing out of why they're so bizarrely being played out.
That was also a writing process in the edit with our editor. That was a really critical part of the movie as well, and it's interesting now to read the script and see what we have shifted around since the edit and how we were able to balance those things. But to be honest, I don't care if people figure it out in the first half an hour, I actually think watching the movie a second time is more interesting because you already know the conceit. Now you can see how all the puzzle pieces were there before. It was delicate, but it was kind of a really fun challenge for the team, and I think why a lot of the team were really excited about tackling this...
SCRIPT MAGAZINE: I think it was really terrific, it was a really great piece of writing and I was really glad we got to talk.
COLIN WEST: It was nice talking to you, Bryan, for sure. It’s nice just talking about screenwriting.
SCRIPT MAGAZINE: Yeah, it really is.
Linoleum goes into limited theatrical release February 24, 2023.
You can find more from Bryan Young at http://www.swankmotron.com)
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Bryan Young is an award-winning filmmaker, journalist, and author. He's written and produced documentary and narrative feature films and has published multiple novels and a non-fiction book. He's written for Huffington Post, Syfy, /Film, and others. He's also done work in the Star Wars and Robotech universes. You can reach him on Twitter @Swankmotron or by visiting his website: swankmotron.com.
