Roger Avary

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Roger Avary

Roger Avary at the 2007 Scream Awards
Born Roger d'Avary (dropped "d'" in 1992)
August 23, 1965 (1965-08-23) (age 42)
Flin Flon, Manitoba, Canada

Roger Roberts Avary (born August 23, 1965) is a Canadian-born motion picture director, producer, and Oscar-winning screenwriter.

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] 1965 to 1983: Childhood and early years

Roger Avary, a direct descendant of pirate/marooner Henry "Long Ben" Avary, is the son of a Brazilian-raised deep-shaft mining engineer and a German physical therapist. Avary was born in Flin Flon, Manitoba but grew up in Oracle, Arizona, the home of Biosphere 2. In the early 1970s Avary's family moved first to Torrance, California and then to Manhattan Beach, California where he attended Mira Costa High School. Avary, a cartoonist in the style of Sergio Aragonés and Tom Eaton, made numerous early animations on the 8 mm and Super-8 formats. In 1979 he began working at one of the first video stores in Southern California, Video Out-Takes, in Redondo Beach, California. The store was owned by the father of his childhood friend, and first collaborator, Scott Magill. The two had grown up making movies together, and experimenting in early Betamax videotape formats. One of Avary's early Super-8 mm films, The Worm Turns, won Best Film from LAFTA (The Los Angeles Film Teachers Association) in 1983.

[edit] 1981 to 1986: The Video Archives years

When in 1981, Video Out-Takes co-owner Lance Lawson (a name that comes up repeatedly in Avary and Tarantino's films) left to open the now famous Video Archives. Avary went along, writing the store's database program with fellow 6502 programmer Andy Blinn on an Atari 800 computer and under the vision of Lawson Video Archives became a gathering place for an eclectic and unique group of film geeks, who became known as "Archivists". Among this group Avary met an odd and brilliant film enthusiast, Quentin Tarantino. The two quickly became friends, introducing each other to their favorite films. These were the days of Z Channel, the age of video, and the first time in history that a large database of film titles was suddenly available -- Tarantino and Avary were to become charter members in the Video Store generation of filmmakers.

From 1985 to 1986 Avary attended Menlo College, in Atherton, California.[2] The school, "a West coast Bennington", laid the foundations for his film adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel The Rules of Attraction. Avary was quoted as saying that he and Easton-Ellis are very similar people: "Adapting Rules was natural for me because I feel very close to Bret. We're about the same age, we're both from L.A., we both attended affluent liberal arts colleges, we both grew up in the 80's, attending the same clubs, listening to the same music. We're both social satirists who view our subjects from the inside. It's quite possible we're the same person -- but we're not."

From 1986 to 1987 Avary attended the Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, California, with fellow future directors Michael Bay and Tarsem Singh. Avary left Art Center to take a job running projectors at Empire International Pictures. In the Summer of 1987 Avary took what money he had and "Eurailed across Europe until it dried up", an experience he would later fold into the screenplay for The Rules of Attraction. On returning, he discovered that his mutual friend with Quentin Tarantino, Scott Magill, had committed suicide.

[edit] 1987 to 1994: The Tarantino years

Early in his career, Avary made a number of contributions to some of Quentin Tarantino's movies. He worked as a crew member on Tarantino's unfinished first film, My Best Friend's Birthday. He had at one point written an 80-page script called "The Open Road", which he described as being about the "odd couple relationship between an uptight business man and an out-of-control hitch-hiker who travel into a Hellish mid-Western town together" and compared to Martin Scorsese's After Hours. After moving on to another screenplay, a spec adaptation of The Silver Surfer, he allowed Tarantino to rewrite his script to add enough length to bring it to a 120-page industry standard length. Tarantino did more than that, turning out a 500-page handwritten behemoth of a screenplay which Avary described as "the Citizen Kane of pop culture." Impressed with Tarantino's work, Avary took on a producorial role, and proceeded to work with Tarantino to pare down the script into what would ultimately become True Romance (1993), (Tarantino used the remainder as the basis for parts of his other scripts.) Working as producer, he and Tarantino tried unsuccessfully for several years to get funding so that Tarantino could film the script himself. Eventually, the script was sold to French producer Samuel Hadida. Since Tarantino was busy prepping Reservoir Dogs, Avary was hired with Tarantino's consent by Tony Scott and Hadida to work as a script doctor on the script, a job which included bringing the length down, reforming the narrative to a linear fashion, and writing a new, happy ending where the Clarence character isn't killed.

When the Paul Brothers, a pair of wealthy bodybuilders who wanted to get into the movies, offered Tarantino funding for his script Natural Born Killers on the condition he include a scene featuring them, he couldn't bring himself to write it out of disgust, and asked Avary to write it for him as a favor. The scene, which has come to be known as the "Hun Brothers" scene, has been described by Oliver Stone as the best scene in the script. It was, however, cut from the final film because, as Stone is quoted as saying on the Natural Born Killers special edition laserdisc, "I fucked it up." Avary also co-wrote the background radio dialogue in Reservoir Dogs (1992), and designed the "Dog Eat Dog" logo which appeared in the end credits.

Most notably, Avary contributed material which, combined with Tarantino's, formed the basis of Pulp Fiction (1994) for which he and Tarantino won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Earlier in their careers, Tarantino and Avary had planned on making an anthology movie comprised of three short films; one written and directed by Avary, one written and directed by Tarantino, and one written and directed by a third filmmaker, reportedly Adam Rifkin. When the third filmmaker never materialized, Tarantino and Avary took their respective stories and expanded them into full length screenplays separately. Tarantino's story became Reservoir Dogs, and Avary's story became "Pandemonium Reigns". "Pandemonium Reigns" ended up forming the basis of the "Gold Watch" chapter of Pulp Fiction (an earlier version of his website displayed an excerpt from "Pandemonium Reigns", illustrating the changes that were made by Tarantino when writing "The Gold Watch"), and other odd scenes Avary had written during his rewrite of True Romance were reworked and incorporated into the Pulp Fiction script, such as the accidental shooting of Marvin, and the scene in which the bullets fired at Jules and Vincent miss their targets. Tarantino and Avary got together in Amsterdam shortly after the release of Reservoir Dogs, and pasted each other's scenes together into a first draft, after which Avary left to film Killing Zoe, leaving Tarantino to continue subsequent writing of Pulp Fiction. Avary's bizarre 1994 Oscar speech (for Best Original Screenplay) consisted of "I want to thank my w-tch, a wife, who I love more than anyone else in the world...I'm gonna go now 'cause I really got to take a pee."

[edit] The death of life: Killing Zoe

Avary also wrote and directed the neo-noir cult thriller Killing Zoe (1994) which Tarantino executive produced. The screenplay was based in part on his experiences travelling through Europe (which he also refers to in Victor's European trip in The Rules of Attraction). Avary had initially intended to write a screenplay completely devoted to this experience, for which Tarantino suggested the ironic title Roger Takes a Trip. But when producer Lawrence Bender called Avary during location scouting on Reservoir Dogs asking if he had a screenplay that took place entirely in a bank so that they could take advantage of an inexpensive location they had no use for, Avary told Bender that he had such a script -- and quickly wrote Killing Zoe in under a week, using elements of his European trip as inspiration. While Killing Zoe takes place in Paris, the film was almost entirely shot in downtown Los Angeles locations, with only two days in Paris to shoot the opening credit sequence and two drive-by shots. The film was also an influence on Tarantino; according to Avary, Tarantino, while rewriting Pulp Fiction, added the heroin scenes after viewing a rough cut of Killing Zoe. The film was honored with le Prix très spécial à Cannes 1994, the very same year that Pulp Fiction won the Palme d'Or. It continued to win awards worldwide on the festival circuit, including Best Film at Japan's Yubari International Film Festival and the Italian Mystfest. The film was also celebrated by the Cinémathèque Française, who heralded Avary as "the Antonin Artaud of cinema" during their Cinema of Cruelty retrospective.

[edit] Filling the gap: 1995 to 2002

Avary briefly moved into work for television and made two pilots, neither of which was picked up. During this time he also produced two films, Boogie Boy (1997) for Tarantino alumni Craig Hamman and The Last Man (2000), for frequent writing collaborator Harry Ralston. During this time Avary spent quite a bit of his energy working as a high paid script doctor and using the money to finance the development of his own projects, like his long gestating epic on Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí.

Avary is notable as the first mainstream filmmaker to maintain a journal on his avary.com webpage, before there was such a thing as "blogging", although in late 2005 Avary closed his weblog with no explanation or notice. In a later interview with JoBlo.com, Avary mentions that "I looked around and realized that Brett Ratner, and Rosie O'Donnell, and Al Gore, and everyone else had a weblog, it just suddenly seemed uninteresting. I wanna do something different with the internet."

In the late 90s, Avary was hired by Warner Bros studio to adapt Neil Gaiman's comic series The Sandman to the big screen. He frequently sparred with the studio over the direction of the film, with Avary wanting to adapt as close to the source material as possible. When he suggested that he would film a large part of Sandman like a Jan Švankmajer film, he was fired. After the incident, Gaiman and Avary became friends and started work together writing an adaptation of the epic poem Beowulf.[1]

[edit] A return to directing: The Rules of Attraction

In 2002 Avary returned to cinema as a director with his adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel The Rules of Attraction, which he also executive produced. Currently ranked as one of the top twenty-sixth highest grossing college comedy of all time [2], The Rules of Attraction was the first studio movie to prove reliable use of Apple's Final Cut Pro editing system for editing motion picture film.[3] Roger Avary became a spokesperson for Apple's Final Cut Pro product, appearing in Apple print and web ads worldwide. His film from within the film, Glitterati (2004), used elements of Victor's European trip and was shot on digital video. In 2005, he purchased the rights to another Bret Easton Ellis novel Glamorama, and is currently developing it for himself to direct.

[edit] Filling the gap: 2005 to 2007

In 2005 Avary, at the request of his friend, actor James Van Der Beek, played the part of a peyote-taking gonzo film director Franklin Brauner in the film "Standing Still."[4] Avary also contributed a commentary track on the special edition DVD of George Romero's Day of the Dead and for the Criterion laserdisc of John Woo's "Hard Boiled."

In 2006 Avary wrote the screenplay adaptation to the hit Konami videogame, Silent Hill (2006), with French director and friend, Christophe Gans, and Killing Zoe producer Samuel Hadida. Both Avary and Gans are long time video gamers and fans of the Silent Hill series. When Gans asked Avary to help him adapt the first game to film, Avary did so without hesitation. Although the movie was poorly received by critics, Silent Hill has come to be known by the series' fans as one of the first adaptations that is most true to the imagery, spirit, and source material of the source game[citation needed]. Avary has expressed interest in returning to work on future Silent Hill films.[5]

On August 3, 2007, id Software announced at Quakecon 2007 that a film adaptation of their game, Return to Castle Wolfenstein is in development with the writer/producer team of Silent Hill on board with Avary as director and writer and Samuel Hadida as producer.[6]

Most recently, Avary and novelist Neil Gaiman wrote and produced Beowulf (2007), which Robert Zemeckis directed utilizing the Performance capture technology pioneered in The Polar Express. Gaiman and Avary have obviously enjoyed the experience of working together, and come across as a happy team in Beowulf interviews.[7] Avary has expressed interest in working with Gaiman again.[8]

[edit] Legal troubles

On January 13, 2008, Avary was arrested under suspicion of manslaughter and DUI, following a car crash in Ojai, California where a passenger, Andreas Zini, was killed. The Ventura County Sheriff's department responded to the single-vehicle crash after midnight, Sunday morning on the 19-hundred block of East Ojai Avenue. Sheriff's deputies allege Avary's wife was ejected from the car, but is reportedly in stable condition. Avary was released from jail on $50,000 bail.[9]

[edit] Filmography

[edit] Director

[edit] Writer

[edit] Producer

[edit] Executive Producer

[edit] Actor

[edit] Cinematographer

[edit] References

  1. ^ Kevin Kelly. "Comic-Con: 'Beowulf' Footage Screening, Q&A, and Party!", cinematical.com. Retrieved on 2007-08-02. 
  2. ^ Box Office Mojo
  3. ^ Final Cut Pro drives 'Blue Car,' 'Rules' films
  4. ^ Clint Morris. "Exclusive Interview : James Van Der Beek", Moviehole.net. Retrieved on 2007-01-21. 
  5. ^ Matt Withers. "INT: Roger Avary", JoBlo.com, 2006-04-20. Retrieved on 2007-01-21. 
  6. ^ Gamespot. "Wolfenstein headed for Hollywood", [1]. Retrieved on 2007-08-03. 
  7. ^ Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary: Shaping Beowulf's story, video interview with stv.tv
  8. ^ Tom Ambrose. "He Is Legend", Empire, December 2007, pp. 142. 
  9. ^ Staff. "'Pulp Fiction' screenwriter Avary arrested after fatal Ojai crash", Ventura County-Star, 12/13/2008. 

[edit] External links

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