Staying True to the Process: Scott Beck and Bryan Woods Discuss Writing ‘65’
Beck and Woods are masters of making silence almost a secondary character in their stories to build tension. Script recently spoke with them about their Midwest roots and their evolution as writers.
The Jurassic Park/Jurassic World series brought dinosaurs to the forefront of pop culture again, but they've never really left the screen. From The Lost World (1925) to the O.G. dinosaur Godzilla, prehistoric reptiles have always been popular with audiences. They’re monsters who were real and are still represented in certain living creatures like crocodiles and alligators. They’re markers for how old the Earth is and denote the genesis of man.
Screenwriters/directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (A Quiet Place, A Quiet Place II, the upcoming The Boogeyman) take a swing at telling a horror/sci-fi/action tale about dinosaurs with the upcoming 65, which hits theaters on March 10, 2023. This Sony Pictures Entertainment release stars ecumenically-appealing Adam Driver and Ariana Greenblatt and has Sam Raimi as one of the producers.
Beck and Woods are masters of making silence almost a secondary character in their stories to build tension. The story takes place on gestating Earth 65 million years ago. It should be interesting to see how Beck and Woods help us navigate this world of menacing behemoths.
We recently spoke with them about their Midwest roots and their evolution as writers.
You guys grew up in the same small town. How did that foster your love for film and filmmaking?
Scott Beck: We grew up in a small town in Iowa. We watched movies on VHS tapes and loved going to movie theaters. We've known each other since we were eleven years old. We have the same history of reading scripts and making movies together. Growing up in Iowa, we felt so far away from the film industry. It never felt like there was a direct trajectory as a career. Discovering how to use our home movie cameras was inspiring. Also, growing up in the Midwest felt ordinary so it triggered our imaginations to imagine the extraordinary in our own backyards. With A Quiet Place, we wrote that with the Iowa farmland in mind. Even 65 was born of the idea of wanting to do a dinosaur movie but doing it in a territory like the U.S., which felt very familiar to us vs. an exotic island locale.
At what age did you discover what a director does?
Bryan Woods: In the era of DVDs, special features, and VHS tapes, it helped illuminate that there were filmmakers and filmmaking crewmembers that brought a movie to life. It wasn't just as simple as turning on your video camera and making your friends come over to move stop-motion. Early on, we watched interviews with some of our filmmaker heroes.
Who are some of those?
Bryan Woods: M. Night Shyamalan. We saw The Sixth Sense when we were in middle school. That screenplay really knocked us out. It really opened our eyes to the power of cinema and great writing. The Sixth Sense DVD has a great making of section, which included some of Shyamalan's storyboards. At that time, you could go into a Barnes & Noble and buy a script. An early screenplay that we got our hands on was Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia. His stories and characters are so gut-level and emotional, yet his writing is very technical. We just started buying screenplays and they started to paint a picture for us of how movies are made.
Do you guys have a process as directors of getting great performances out of actors?
Scott Beck: A lot of it is listening to ideas and doing your homework in preproduction. It's inspiring to have a filmmaking partner because that's the process that we have to enact. We listen to each other and try to add to each other's ideas. We try to bridge that collaboration, particularly when we have an actor like Adam Driver who in our estimation is one of the greatest actors of our generation. He comes to the table bringing a lot of fascinating instincts and authenticity, especially in a movie like 65 where it's stripped of dialogue and it's more about the ability to perform different emotions or physicalities. You have to lean as directors on an actor to convey all of that. Sometimes we'd have a line of dialogue that Adam wanted to remove because he thought he could just perform it. As directors, that's inspiring because we love to use all the tools that filmmaking has. We invited Adam and Ariana, who plays Koa, into the process of how to elevate the work from what we did when we had our writers' hats on.
How do you feel that writing and directing complement each other?
Scott Beck: I think when we're just writing a script for someone else to direct, we might be a little more precious because we're trying to give the roadmap that we know inevitably will be handed over. As writers/directors on a project like 65, we're precious to a point in the writing phase but we know that once we're on set and directing, you have to adapt to the moment. You have to be analytical and receptive to any changes that might be suggested. As writers, we're able to gut-check whether this new idea is telling this story in the best way possible. We're always challenging ourselves to keep our writer hats on to a certain degree but also adapt to make sure the story doesn't feel too rigid once we're on set.
How long have you guys been working together?
Bryan Woods: Scott and I have been working together since we were eleven years old. Independently, I had been forcing my friends and family to make movies with me. When Scott and I met each other, it was like, 'Oh, you actually like to do that too?' In middle school and high school, we would make these no-budget films. We learned every part of the process through doing that, we taught ourselves how to make a movie from beginning to end.
Once we felt like we had a handle on that and directing, we kept getting a similar pieces of feedback. We'd always screen our movies locally. That piece of feedback we'd get was that our directing was getting stronger but that our writing material wasn't strong enough. We really took that to heart. To be fair, we were in college so we were terrible writers at that time. We were still learning. We put the directing on hold for a second and just started writing script after script for about three to four years. We knew in order to get someone to invest in a movie, we'd have to have a script that was actually good.
How do you think you two complement each other?
Scott Beck: I think early on in our filmmaking ambitions, we were supporting each other, reading each other's scripts. There was a point where Bryan was leaning into genre elements, and I was leaning into character drama and really cribbing off scripts like Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia. We eventually realized we'd be stronger at this if we were working together. That blend of characters and genre started bleeding its way into some of the scripts that we wrote that probably is apparent to this day. I feel like our sensibilities, because we've known each other for so long, have intertwined and the way that the process works back and forth is that we're always trying to challenge the other to do their best. It's a healthy competition of ideas. When we finish a first draft it's more like the fifth draft because we keep ironing over each other's work. We pressure test each angle of the script and make sure we're seeing eye-to-eye on everything early on.
When did you guys get your first big break as writers?
Bryan Woods: After that period of writing scripts and trying to strengthen our writing muscles, we finally wrote a script called Night Light. We got a manager a year before we wrote Night Light. We were able to get a manager by making a short, 20-minute film called Impulse, which showed off our directing chops. There's a direct line from that short to A Quiet Place to 65. All three of those movies are modern-day silent films. They hardly have any dialogue. They have an apocalyptic, thriller tone to them and an emotional undercurrent. That short film was seen by a manager who's still our manager, Ryan Cunningham. We pitched him Night Light. It was written in the heyday of found footage. It all takes place from the point of view of a flashlight that this young woman takes into a haunted forest. It caught on and sold very quickly.
Do you guys suggest that new writers or aspiring writers do spec scripts?
Scott Beck: I think so. There was a period after Night Light where we were trying to figure out how to get the next movie made. We were chasing assignments for a while. The trick with assignments is if you're trying to get them for too long, it becomes tricky. We felt like we were losing a bit of the passion that was driving us in the first place. We went back to some ideas that had stuck around for a while. That's the litmus test for us of what we should write next. The idea that had stuck around for a while was A Quiet Place. We'd been sitting on that for ten years before we started committing the script to the page. Writing that on spec was one of the most fun periods of our career. There was no pressure, there were no expectations. No one was asking for that movie. It taught us so much about how to write. We did it also with 65.
What do you think are the structural differences between a horror script and a sci-fi script?
Scott Beck: In horror, there's an expectation of suspense and the jump scare....and the audience expectations. We try to figure out mathematically where the audience is expecting something to happen and how can we subvert those expectations. Withhold not one beat but maybe two or three so that the rhythm is unexpected. With sci-fi, what we respond to is the world-building and mythology. The decision is how much do you convey on the page and how much do you leave to the audience’s imagination. You require the audience to ask certain questions, but you don't need to leave every single answer there. Ridley Scott's Alien is such a contained horror/sci-fi film and character piece, but you don't really know all the mythology that surrounds it.
How much research did you have to do for 65?
Scott Beck: We did quite a bit. We wanted to make sure that we portrayed the late Crustaceous Period correctly. There was research in the script phase and the pre-production phase. We consulted with different ecological researchers regarding what the earth looked like back then. It had a more temperate climate like the swamps of Louisiana, where we actually ended up filming. There was a lot of fun in finding out about fossils that are being uncovered.
When you're writing a story like this, how do you strike the balance between horror and sentiment?
Bryan Woods: We're always thinking about two things. What's the worst thing that can happen to the character? In our early scripts, we were always so nice to our characters, which can make for boring stories. Also, we're thematic writers, which helps us zero in. With 65, we started thinking about this theme of rebirth. Once we came up with that, it found its way into the character story.
How do you feel your writing has evolved since you first started?
Scott Beck: We're our harshest critics...! Nothing has changed in terms of how we feel about the process. In the writing, we're now always trying to put our characters through the wringer. We also put some of our own lives, our own selves, into the characters.
65 will be available in Theaters on March 10, 2023.
Learn more about the craft and business of screenwriting and television writing from our Script University courses!
Sonya Alexander started off her career training to be a talent agent. She eventually realized she was meant to be on the creative end and has been writing ever since. As a freelance writer she’s written screenplays, covered film, television, music and video games and done academic writing. She’s also been a script reader for over twenty years. She's a member of the African American Film Critics Association and currently resides in Los Angeles.
