This is a transcript of SYS Podcast Episode 532 – Get To The Truth Of The Story With Jon Gunn .
Welcome to Episode 532 of the Selling Your Screenplay Podcast. I’m AshleyScott Meyers, screenwriter and blogger of its sellingyourscreenplay.com. Today I’m interviewing writer-director John Gunn. He just completed the film The Unbreakable Boy, which is a heartwarming drama about a boy with autism and also brittle bone disease. John was a co-writer on the film Jesus Revolution, which was a film we covered here on the SYS podcast in Episode 479, although I interviewed the directors of that film, not Jon, who was one of the writers. But today Jon is on to talk about his new film, The Unbreakable Boy, and how that all came together for him. So, stay tuned for that interview.
SYS’s six-figure screenplay contest is open for submissions. Just go to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/contest. Our early bird deadline is March 31st, so if your script is ready, definitely submit now to save some money. We’re looking for low-budget shorts and features. I’m defining low-budget as less than six figures, in other words, less than $1 million US dollars. We’ve got lots of industry judges reading scripts in the later rounds. We’re giving away thousands of dollars in cash and prizes. The winners for both categories, we have a winner for both categories, shorts and features, and we even have some producers that are specifically looking for short scripts. So maybe we can find a home for some of these short scripts. If you want to learn more about the contest or enter the contest or see who some of our industry judges are, just go to our contest page at www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/contest. If you find this episode valuable, please help me out by giving me a review in iTunes or leaving a comment on YouTube or retweeting the podcast on Twitter or liking or sharing it on Facebook. These social media shares really do help spread word about the podcast, so they’re very much appreciated. Any websites or links that I mention in the podcast can be found on my blog and the show Notes. I also publish a transcript with every episode in case you’d rather read the show or look at something later on. You can find all the podcast show notes at www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/podcast and then just look for episode 532. So just a couple words about what I’m actually working on. So, I know I’ve been talking about this for a while here on the podcast, but I am gearing up to make another indie film this year. I finally have the script where I feel it’s good and ready to shoot, which notably does not necessarily mean other people aren’t very critical of it for a whole variety of reasons. But as the artist, as the producer, as the director, I’m satisfied, pretty happy with it. So, I’m moving into pre-production. The first thing is making sure all the financing is in place. I have some verbal commitments from various folks, but that’s not the same as actually having the money in the bank and being able to start. principal photography, so that’s step number one, I’ve got to get that all squared away but I’ve also got to find the bar where we’re going to shoot. Probably 50% of this movie is going to take place in this bar, as written it’s a dive bar in the San Fernando Valley I mean the actual San Fernando Valley part is not that important but it does just for the story it does need to be sort of a dive bar. If anyone knows or owns or know someone who owns such a bar and they are very indie friendly, meaning they will rent it to us very cheaply, please drop me an email I do sometimes get some really interesting emails from folks that listen to the podcast and it’s oftentimes very, very helpful. So, if you know someone or know someone who knows someone who might be able to rent us their bar for a couple of weeks to shoot this film, please do drop me an email just info@sellingyourscreenplay.com getting the right location is going to be a big part of this production because as I said so much of it takes place in this one location I mentioned this a few episodes ago but I’m going to be I’m going to be putting together a podcast of other low budget filmmakers and we’re going to talk through the various stages of production pre-production, actual production-production, post production and then distribution I’ve got two other filmmakers lined up for this and then obviously my film will make three I’m hoping to get one more filmmaker so there’ll be four of us basically all doing very different films in terms of genre and in terms of sort of how we’re doing them but they’re all very low budget and they’re all very sort of manageable on sort of a low budget so it’ll be interesting again it’s just going to be us talking we’re going to talk about the different stages and it’s going to be a hopefully a great way to share some of our knowledge and show other people how to make their own indie film but also it’ll be a way for us to start to wrote our films and get our films out there into the world and just get a little get a little press hopefully so if you’re working on a film or going to shoot something in the next few months drop me a line or perhaps you can be a part of this series as well all these films and I think sort of keeping them in the same scope is important all these films are going to be in let’s say that you know 25 you know thousand dollar range in terms of budget. So, these are pretty low budget guerrilla films some of them be a little higher some of them be a little lower but it’s definitely going to be you know I would say ultra-low budget you know a lot of sort of guerrilla filmmaking is going to be needed anyway that’s the main thing I’ve been working on lately just gearing up, I’ve just been polishing the script and that’s the other piece to this I’m going to once I get my location locked this bar I have some other of the locations you know this house that I’m filming this or you’re recording this podcast and will be used heavily as one of the locations, so some of the locations that are in the script I already have but once I get the bar I really got to take a hard look at it and then I will go back and try and rewrite the script a little bit. really to accommodate the specific bar we have and in some cases it’ll just be you know more of just sort of the location using it using all the rooms maybe not having some rooms like I wrote a dish room where they are washing some dishes in the back and this and you know some of these things might not actually be available in our location. So, I’ll need to probably do another quick pass on the screenplay, not so much to change story or character or structure anything like that but just to sort of hone it for these location and especially this bar location because as I said so much of our film is going to be shot there so anyways that’s the main thing I am gearing up for. Do stay tuned for more updates as I get further into pre-production hopefully I’ll have some nice updates as this thing moves along. Anyways that’s what I’ve been working on so now let’s get into the main segment today I am interviewing writer and director Jon Gunn. Here is the interview.
Ashley
Welcome Jon to the Selling Your Screenplay Podcast. I really appreciate you coming on the show with me today.
Jon Gunn
Thanks for having me.
Ashley
Great to be here. So, to start out, maybe you can tell us a little bit about your background. Where did you grow up and how do you get interested in the entertainment business?
Jon Gunn
I was born in Southern California and always loved watching movies and always kind of dreamed of making movies. And then, you know, there wasn’t a lot of opportunity in the eighties to figure that out. So, I had some friends, we got camcorders and we started shooting our own movies in high school. Went to film school, Ithaca College in the mid-nineties. And I wanted to direct films, but I realized that I was going to need to learn to write to give myself things to direct. And so I actually accidentally fell into screenwriting just out of necessity and found that that was, you know, that was the most compelling way to find stories that I felt personally connected to was to write those stories myself. So, I started, you know, right out of film school, I just decided I was never going to take a real job and I was going to just struggle my way through it. And I started, I read every screenwriting book I could and I wrote a whole bunch of things. I had a writing partner that he and I were friends in high school and film school and just were writing and writing and writing for years, just struggling through, you know, trying to get something developed that we could make. I directed my first film that I wrote when I was like 25 years old, just raised some financing and about a million dollars and made an independent film called Mercy Streets. And that sort of continued to sort of roll into my next series of projects. Funny enough, probably one of my earliest hit film was an unscripted film called My Date With Drew. It was a comedy documentary, but it was sort of, we sort of shaped it. And it was interesting for me just to see that like the storytelling of a documentary still has to have the structure, you know, that keeps audiences interested in. And so, and that launched into a whole career for me as a screenwriter really writing studio movies. I wrote five or six movies for DreamWorks Animation and then I went on and wrote a bunch of movies for studios while I was simultaneously developing and directing films of my own.
Ashley
Okay, gotcha.
Jon Gunn
Yeah, so it’s always been a combination of writing and producing and directing at the same time
Ashley
Mm hmm. So just a couple of sort of off topic questions. Why did you go to Ithaca when you grew up in Southern California? Why not go to film school in Southern California? What was the draw to Ithaca?
Jon Gunn
Well, I actually moved around quite a lot. And so by the time I was in high school, I was living in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. And my best friend, John Mann, was like a high school filmmaker. And he taught me a lot of my sort of early lessons about how to put films together. And he and I both went to Ithaca to get together. And it was just like, I had a great film program and also had a great music program. And I wanted to be a composer and a director. So it was the perfect school for me.
Ashley
Mm hmm. Perfect, perfect. So let’s dig into your latest film, The Unbreakable Boy. Maybe to start out, you can just give us a quick logline or pitch. What is this film all about?
Jon Gunn
The Unbreakable Boy is a story about Scott Loret and his wife Teresa, who met each other and got pregnant on their fourth date and realized, OK, we’re going to raise this child. We’re going to raise this child together. But they were unprepared. They didn’t know each other that well. And then they had a child named Austin who had both brittle bone disease and autism, which is a very rare combination. It made him like one in a billion kid. And so, it’s really the sort of charms and struggles of this young couple learning to raise a child with autism and brittle bone disease and learning along the way about themselves, about each other. And this child, Austin, has this incredible spirit and this charming worldview. And so he narrates the story of his parents. And we get to watch the story of Scott and Teresa through the eyes of this 13-year-old child with autism.
Ashley
Gotcha. So, this originally was a book by Scott Lorette and Susie Forre. Were they the pair? Are they the actual parents of Austin?
Jon Gunn
Scott is, Susie co-wrote with Scott, his wife is Teresa. So it was like a really charming book that was sort of very anecdotal about like 20 years of their life experience, meeting, having this child, raising this child and their family and all the adventures of their family. And so I got it put on my desk by Peter Faccinelli who was one of our producers and who is in the film. He’s one of the actors in the film. He just read the book, met the family, loved it so much, brought it to us with tons of passion and said, we have to make this. And I read it at just the perfect time in my life. We were in quarantine and COVID had just hit. I was looking for another project to write. And this was a story that I found so inspiring and so much about gratitude that I really wanted to share that at that time with the world. And we already had a project with Zach Levi lined up, American Underdog. So, I sent him the script, he read it and was just like in instantly. And so, we went to Oklahoma in quarantine still and shot American Underdog and Unbreakable Boy back-to-back with Zach in Oklahoma.
Ashley
Okay. Wow. So, maybe you can just give us sort of a breakdown. So you get this book, but nobody had attempted a screenplay draft or to convert it to a screenplay. That was all on you basically to convert this book, correct? And so maybe you can talk about that process a little bit. Um, what did you have to trim and where there’s some other elements that you had to add to kind of give it a little more structure film structure, maybe talk about that process a little bit. What did you change and what did you keep?
Jon Gunn
Yeah, I’m happy to. I’ve done a lot of adaptations and a lot of true stories, actually. So, you know, I always find that the challenge is just boiling down the story to its essence. Like, what is the point of view and what is the story we want to share? And then figuring out with a book like this, which is a true story and has 20 years’ worth of anecdotes, I just sort of pulled all my favorites, you know, and then just looked at it kind of on the table of like, all right, we know we have a love story of a husband and wife. We know they have this child. At what age do we want to spend most of the story, right? For this kid. And I settled on him being a 13-year-old, like the transition for him going into high school seemed like a cool, or to middle school, seemed like a good moment, because it’s just filled with all kinds of, you know, struggles and concerns and funny stories. And so I just basically created a shape of the story that when narrated from the point of view of the child, and that was a big breakthrough for me early on, Austin’s voice is so unique. His worldview is so funny and magical and whimsical that I wanted to let him be the voice of this thing. And then he would tell the story of his parents meeting, falling in love, having him, and that because of the way he thinks, he counts things a lot. And he’s fascinated with the details of things that he would lay out all the different times that he had broken bones in his life because he’s got brittle bone disease. And he would count his parents’ dates and he would count his years and his experiences. And so it gave me a structure that was really useful, that it would be like, all right, this is a man, Scott Loret, who struggles with alcoholism and had really hit rock bottom at a certain point in the story. So I knew that rock bottom was going to be useful for me. And that if you have a book called The Unbreakable Boy about a boy with brittle bone disease and a father who was broken in his own way, then why don’t we shape it around where he broke the most and then tell the story as framed by, here’s the various times in my life when things have broken. And there’s just a lot of thematic ideas that you can imagine, you can look at through that lens of breaking and about that the healing from breaking is what makes us unique and that there’s beauty in the way that we can heal from our brokenness. So, there’s that metaphor of like the broken teacup that when you glue it back together, you paint the seams with gold to celebrate that those things make it special. And so I started with just the title, the concept of a kid with brittle bone, the idea of brokenness and struggling through brokenness and then about how families can help heal us in our brokenness and make us more beautiful on the other side. And it wasn’t difficult to find that with a boy like Austin who had such a positive spirit and such a joyful worldview that to find the idea of gratitude in the midst of struggle was a real, was sort of the gift of the story and that the father could learn that lesson from his son.
Ashley
Mm-hmm. How much do you have to be true to the original authors or even true to this family? I mean, you’re dealing with sensitive subjects, so you don’t want to necessarily, you don’t want to alienate the family that this story is about, obviously, but you might have to lean into certain things dramatically. You’re talking about alcoholism. You’re talking about really serious things. Just how do you feel just a commitment to being true to what the family experience versus being true to expressing this film as a sort of own creative entity?
Jon Gunn
That’s always the challenge with true stories, but I find in almost all the circumstances where I’ve done adaptations of real-life stories that I just communicate with the real people a lot. And I say, like, what are you comfortable with? What do you want to share? And let’s find a version of the story that you’re going to be proud of to share with the world, but that’s still compelling and entertaining for an audience. And so they were, in this case, the Loret family were very sort of open and unflinching and being willing to share their struggles. Scott Loret wrote the book to share all of these struggles. He goes on, he does speaking tours and shares these struggles with people and how he recovered from them and how his family healed them. So, because they knew that the brokenness was an important part of their journey and redemption, they were very open. And then it was just about choosing the right moments and then trying to reflect what I always find is like doing an adaptation, you want to reflect the essence of the truth, the truth of the story. So, you know, the dates might be different or certain characters might be consolidated. But if you squint at it, it’s exactly the experience of what they want to share. And, you know, we talk often with true stories about how this isn’t going to be a photograph of their life, it’s going to be a painting of their life, you know, it’s an interpretation of it. And the important thing is to get the spirit of it and the heart of it right. And I think they feel so deeply like this reflects their true journey. They love this movie, we’ve all become family, and I don’t think they can be happier with what we’ve got.
Ashley
Yeah, yeah, that’s great. So one thing that occurred to me, I remember years ago when Life is Beautiful came out, some of the initial reactions were sort of that you’re dealing with this sort of very sensitive subject in sort of a lighthearted way. And obviously, your time that won all the Academy Awards. So that wasn’t sort of the general perception, but I wonder a movie like this, do you have experience with autism? Have you been around it? You always want to be real careful with something like this about how you approach it. As not to be offensive, you’re also at the end of the day, you got to make money. So, you have to have something that’s dramatic, that’s going to be entertaining. Just how did you deal with that? Do you have experience with autism? Was there some part of your life that you could sort of bring to this? Did you do research? How did you handle something like that?
Jon Gunn
Yeah, it’s a great question because first of all, I do have many people in my life who have autism, who have children with autism, there are people in my family with autism. I think you recognize as soon as you look at a story like this that most people in the world are one degree away from somebody who has autism or someone who’s neurodivergent. And so, it wasn’t hard at all for me to access truth from my own life in that. Also, the family, Scott and his family who wrote the book and whose life it’s about were extremely available to us. And then we also had autism consultants. We had the script read multiple times by multiple people for sensitivity of understanding like, how can we reflect this true story in a way that’s compelling in a way that is entertaining, like you said, but in a way that’s also sensitive to all the fact that very often people with autism aren’t reflected accurately or frequently or well, you know. And I really wanted the community of people either with autism who or have autism in their life, I want them to be happy and to embrace this movie. So I hope that we did that justice and that it’s just, you know, I’ve heard so much good feedback so far, just the fact that that’s a story that’s told from the point of view with the person who has autism. But also, that it’s like, you know, we’re not overly earnest about it. It’s like this is a very, you know, common thing. There’s a lot of people with autism and there’s lots of different kinds of people with autism. And so that’s this story. This is one person’s experience who has autism and brittle bone disease as well, which is another condition that’s more unique that not as many people are impacted by. But yeah, of course, I hope so much. This is a love letter to the experience of this family and part of their experience is autism. And so, for people who have autism or are impacted by it, I would hope that they would see this film and feel that it’s a celebration and a beautiful and authentic representation of that experience.
Ashley
Yeah. So, let’s talk a little bit about your writing schedule and sort of just how you put pen to paper. I think this will be interesting. And I’d be curious to hear sort of your comments, how that maybe differs if you’re writing a spec script. It sounds like with this one, the novel came in, you had the producer on board. So, you knew you were going to, you’re writing this to make it. There probably were some deadlines involved. Maybe you can walk through that writing process. How long do you spend just doing a draft, an outline, note cards, and how long do you spend in final draft? And what is it? What is deadlines look for something like this when you’re converting it and you have a schedule, you want to go shoot it.
Jon Gunn
Yeah, and I’ll tell you, it’s funny, deadlines can be our greatest friend in many situations when it comes to writing. I’m pretty diligent and disciplined about writing. I’ve been doing it for a lot of years. When this particular project came, it was an interesting moment because I was about to direct another film that got shut down because of COVID. So, I found myself in my home with nothing to do and we had a development deal with Lionsgate and it was like, we need another project, something that we could shoot in quarantine. And that book had just fallen on my desk and I was like, I just read The Unbreakable Boy. I actually think it would be a perfect project. And my partner, John Irwin at the time was like, do it, write it, just start tomorrow. Like, let’s see if we can get something written because everyone in the filmmaking community was trying to figure out how to make anything during quarantine. And so this was a small enough story that we thought we could pull it off. So, I literally started right away. I think I wrote the script and I probably spent two weeks just thinking about it. Like, how am I going to break this down? I loved the idea right away of telling it through the voice of Austin because his voice in the book was so unique. And every time all of his dialogue and all of his thoughts were so interesting that I wanted to put them all on screen. So then I thought, oh, this is cool. I’m going to use the kid’s voice to narrate the parent’s story. So then I just took and laid out all the stories from the different chapters and told my favorites and then tried to figure out how can they all fit? Like, how am I going to span 20 years in one story? So I started to come up with a structure. Like the first act could be the love story that where they meet, they fall in love, they find out they’re pregnant, they have a child. Then when are we going to learn that he has autism? And then let’s move through the various years of his life to get him to the age where our kid will be for most of the film. So how can I crunch those stories into that window of when he’s a toddler and when they find out he’s got brittle bone disease? And then when he age him up to 13, so we can now live with the 13 year old through an extended piece of the story. And then it was about like, well, what happens when he’s 13, where’s the shape? And because I had a father who was struggling with alcoholism, that gave me a real good rock bottom that I knew would be a good end of act two, right? So, we’d sort of plant this brokenness in the parent, explore the brokenness and the struggles and the highs and lows through falling in love, having a child, learning your child that has brittle bone, autism, struggling yourself through all of those things. And then finding redemption from that rock bottom with the support and love of your wife and your family. And then to recognize that as a parent, we often feel like we fail and we often feel like we have to fix our kids if they’re struggling. And in this particular case, this child and his incredible spirit and optimism would help to heal the father. And so I gave myself a pretty solid structure there. Like I think I understand how I’m going to tell this story from act one, act two and act three to give emotional shape to all that and then find whimsy and levity and then the depths and the brokenness. And so you sort of start looking at, these are the themes I’m exploring. This is the shape of the story. Here’s the highs and lows and points I want to sort of balance so that it’s never too sad. It’s never too earnest, but it finds a good combination of happy and weird and funny and sad. And then that becomes this mix hopefully of a very beautiful emotional experience.
Ashley
But that’s a two-week process, doing all that. Are you writing things down on note cards and an outline? And then how long does it take you to actually bash out that draft? Once you have all that.
Jon Gunn
I usually start to get a pretty good sense of my act breaks, and I start to drop note cards of a lot of different ideas and see where they fit. And then I usually, before I start writing, I will figure out the shape of what all the scenes are. So, I’ll create a treatment or a beat sheet, where I kind of have a summary of every scene. And I’m like, then I start to find out I have too many scenes in the beginning of act two. Like it’s taking too long to get to Austin at 13. And that’s always a problem, right?
So often when you’ve got a good story that’s got a lot of good material, you can find yourself saying, I know that when I watch the film, I’m going to want to get to the 13-year-old version of Austin as soon as I can. But is there any way to take any of these ideas or scenes and move them from his youth to when he’s 13? Some of them, yes, some of them know, right? How quickly can I consolidate and condense the courting and the dating and the finding out that they’re pregnant and all that. And so I just write a bunch of it. And with this particular case, more so than usual for me, I started writing before I had it all figured out because there were some scenes I really wanted to explore to find a voice. Like I wanted to write the scenes where Scott and Theresa met for the first time. And I wanted to try some of the voiceover and some of the sequences. So, I just started writing scenes that I found charming and fun. And then that got me going. And then after a couple of weeks of doing that, I was like, all right, I’m going to now spend eight weeks and I’m going to write the script in eight weeks. And that’s what I did, I wrote in eight weeks. And the first draft was very close to the draft we made. I mean, it happened very quickly. I sent it to my partners. They were like, oh my gosh, we love this. And I did a quick polish on it for probably a week or two to adjust some notes and crunch it down and dial it in. And then we sent it to Zach Levi. He read it on a Friday, called us on Saturday and said, I’m in, and we were off to the races. So this is very rare how quickly this happened. And honestly, it was only because of COVID that this happened. I would have been making another film, but I wrote it out of necessity. I wrote it quickly because we needed something. It got greenlit because we already had a project with Zach and because we wanted to make something in COVID. And this was a story about gratitude. And honestly, I was just the gratitude of how fast the experience went and how well it went. It reflected, I think, in the film. We didn’t have much of an opportunity to overthink it. We just sort of went with the momentum of it.
Ashley
Gotcha, gotcha. So how can people see the Unbreakable Boy? What is the release schedule like going to be?
Jon Gunn
It comes out, a few weeks comes out February 21st nationwide. And so, and I’m so excited. We’ve had two false starts. It was supposed to come out a couple of years ago and then that second wave of Omicron shut it down. And then we had strikes and other issues. And so this has been a delayed film that finally seeing the light of day and February 21st, we finally get to share it. I’m so excited.
Ashley
Perfect. And I’d just like to wrap up the interview by asking the guest, is there anything you’ve seen recently that you thought would be really great to recommend to our mostly screenwriting audience, HBO, Netflix, anything you’ve been checking out.
Jon Gunn
Well, I will say I haven’t had a lot of time to watch things like that because I’m in Greece producing the House of David, a series called House of David that’s about the life of King David. And but in my free time, I have gone back right now. I’ve been rewatching Better Call Saul, which is maybe one of the greatest television series ever made. If you want to look at a show that’s just every single character is so incredibly well painted, there’s so much intelligence and charm. And I’m a huge fan of Better Call Saul.
Ashley
Yeah, it’s a great recommendation. It’s been a while. Yeah, I need to go back and watch that too. What’s the best way for people to keep up with what you’re doing? Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, anything you’re comfortable sharing, I’ll round up for the show notes.
Jon Gunn
Sure, I’m not very good at keeping social media interesting, but I think I’m jaygunn12 on Instagram so you can check me out there.
Ashley
Perfect, perfect. Well, Jon, congratulations getting this film finished. Look forward to following your career. Good luck with it and hopefully I’ll hear back from you.
Jon Gunn
Thank you, Ashley, so much for my pleasure.
Ashley
Thank you. We’ll talk to you later.
Jon Gunn
Bye.
Ashley
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On the next episode of the podcast, I’m going to be interviewing an Italian animation producer named Pietro Chito. I know I butchered that name, but as I said, he is Italian and has a real Italian name. He’s done a number of animated projects as a producer, and I actually have an animation script. I’ve been kicking around for a few years. I always liked it, but I’ve never been involved in a animation production. Don’t really know how animation production works in quite the same way as I do sort of more the physical production. So hopefully I’m going to learn a lot, and hopefully I’m going to ask some good questions, and hopefully everybody listening will also learn something as well. So if you listen to this episode and you have some questions about animation production, email them to me, and maybe I can ask some of those questions to Pietro next month and get some answers, because as I said, this is not a topic I know a lot about, just in terms of the workflow, budget, just how it actually goes, who do you need, what level of competency do you need with animators, with different roles in the production, and how we can potentially find those people. So those are all sort of going to be the questions that I’m going to be asking them. And as I said, it’s going to be a real eye towards me trying to potentially maybe produce my own animated, well, it’s a pilot, I guess is what it is, a 22-page pilot script, animated pilot script. So, as I said, everything I’m going to be asking him is going to be sort of through that lens about how can I then go out and produce this animated script. So, if you have an animated script or want to learn more about animation production, keep an eye out for that episode next month. Anyways, that’s your show, thank you for listening.