Roger Avary

[72teeth]

'Pulp Fiction' screenwriter arrested after crash

Soon Avary will say this is where Quentin got the inspiration for Death Proof...

[MacGuffin]

'Pulp Fiction' writer sentenced in fatal DUI crash

VENTURA, Calif. - An Oscar-winning screenwriter of "Pulp Fiction" has been sentenced to a year in jail for causing a fatal traffic crash in Southern California.

Roger Avary was sentenced Tuesday in a Ventura court. He also received five years of probation.

Avary pleaded guilty in August to gross vehicular manslaughter and drunken driving for the 2008 crash that killed a passenger in Avary's Mercedes in Ventura County. Authorities say Avary's car was traveling at more than 100 mph when it crashed into a telephone pole.

Avary's wife was ejected from the vehicle and was treated for non-life-threatening injuries.

Avary and Quentin Tarantino share the 1995 Academy Award for writing "Pulp Fiction." He also co-wrote the screenplay for the movie "Beowulf."

[©brad]

He also co-wrote the screenplay for the movie "Beowulf."

Talk about rubbing salt in the wound.

[modage]

At least that headline gives him credit Pulp Fiction!

Silent Hill 2 Writer Roger Avary Sentenced to One Year in Jail
http://www.movieweb.com/news/NEa5OeadGYXGdj

[pete]

he's not polanski alright.

[MacGuffin]

Roger Avary's First Post-Prison Interview: Where His Career Will Take Him Next
Source: indieWire

Roger Avary is an Oscar-winning screenwriter, but these days he has trouble gathering his thoughts. "How do I put this?" Avary said on the the terrace outside his hotel in Locarno, Switzerland, where he's currently serving on the international competition jury at the city's film festival. "I haven't talked about this to anyone other than family and close friends, so I want to measure my words very carefully."

He stared at the ground and took a breath. "Incarceration didn't change me," he said after a long pause. "In many ways, incarceration galvanized me. The totality of the experience helped me." While Avary looked relaxed in a salmon-colored shirt and neatly tousled hair, sunglasses hid the emotion on his face.

Four years ago, the co-writer of "Pulp Fiction" and "True Romance" -- as well as the director of "Killing Zoe" and "The Rules of Attraction" -- faced a situation far more disturbing than anything depicted in his movies. Driving under the influence in Ojai, Calif., Avary got into an accident that killed his friend Andreas Zini.

Released on bail, Avary was eventually charged with vehicular manslaughter and pleaded guilty, serving time in a one-year work furlough and then later behind bars for eight months. Reasonably enough, he discusses the incident with trepidation. "I spend nearly every waking moment thinking about how I can live my life in such a way as to honor this absolutely terrible loss that occurred," he said.

The answer has slowly come to him with new work. Based on the sheer volume of projects currently in his queue, Avary may have entered the most productive period of his career, not to mention an entirely different stage of artistic expression.

The last two years have been especially busy: He recently finished overseeing the scripting process for the second season of the French-Canadian espionage show "XIII: The Series." He's working on a screenplay for Paul Verhoeven based on the director's scholarly tome about the life of Jesus. With production company Wild Bunch, he's planning to reteam with "Rules of Attraction" scribe Bret Easton Ellis to direct an adaptation of Ellis' "Lunar Park." For "Moon" director Duncan Jones, he reworked the screenplay for a biopic about James Bond creator Ian Fleming. He also plans to adapt the early William Faulkner novel "Sanctuary."

Avary said his immense activity is part of his plan to find a creative outlet in everything he does. "I'm looking for work that enriches me and touches me somehow. I'm certainly not taking work just to pay bills."

As if to prove that point, at the request of the Locarno Film Festival, Avary agreed to maintain a blog chronicling his experiences in Switzerland. He used the opportunity to construct another piece of fiction that refers to his fellow jurors as "the Thieve's Guild": Apichatpong Weerasethakul is "the Thailander," while "The Housemaid" director Im Sangsoo is "the South Korean," tags that make the group sound like a medieval take on "Ocean's Eleven."

Avary's reports contain enough coded insight to turn them into a brilliantly gonzo set of festival dispatches that turn the jury process to a form of espionage. After singling out Apichatpong's meditative filmography, Avary wrote that "he always did things his own way...not every heist needed to pull in the big bucks. A true thief pulled a heist because it was in their soul to do so."

That's a sentiment to which Avary relates. He said he never stopped writing except when he had no choice: After he began tweeting a similarly embellished account of his experience in the work furlough, Avary was forced into solitary confinement and served out his remaining sentence in lockdown. Since then, he has stayed away from the creative prospects of status updates. "The problem with 140 characters is that subtlety is lost," he said, then politely requested we change the subject.

With the trauma of his jail time came an epiphany that carried him through the ordeal. "I never stopped writing," he said, although he had a harder time watching movies, a hobby relegated to the prison television where he found himself watching "My Name Is Earl" by default. Even such relatively minor limitations influenced his new perspective. "If I've learned anything," he said, "I've learned that we don't have control."

Asked about his state of mind over the course of his prison experience, Avary flashed back to 2000. Around that time, he was involved in developing an unrealized HBO series entitled "Medal of Honor" about soldiers who received that prize. Over the course of his research, Avary befriended Vietnam vet James Stockdale, an American pilot who was imprisoned for several years in the Hanoi Hilton, the torture center most recently known for housing John McCain. Stockdale was kept there the longest -- seven years -- and subsisted on a diet of pumpkin soup in between torture sessions.

"I asked him how you survive something like this," Avary said. "I cannot stress to you how strong and noble this man was."

Avary said Stockdale turned to his position as a Stanford professor, where he specialized in the stoic principles of the Greek philosopher Epictetus. "The basic philosophy of stoicism is that you have nothing real external to your own consciousness, that the only thing real is in fact your consciousness," Avary said. "In thinking about his experience, it just occurred to me that the notion of control of your external environment is an illusion."

Given his introspection, it's no surprise that he's a great fan of fellow juror Apichatpong's work, singling out "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives" as a favorite. "I find him to be a fascinating humanist in many ways."

While Avary's own filmography may lack Apichatpong's soothing qualities, his two feature-length directing credits (not counting "Glitterati," which was constructed from footage of a wild Eurotrip seen in "Rules of Attraction" but never released) contain heavy, immersive stories about people losing control of their lives and struggling to understand their priorities. No matter the loud, angry people they focus on, Avary's movies contain an intimacy that holds up.

This October will mark the tenth anniversary of "Rules of Attraction" hitting theaters in the U.S. Avary said would like the movie to receive a special anniversary release, but has yet to convince distributor Lionsgate. Seen outside the context of its initial release, it remains an enjoyably surreal endeavor that messes with the characters and viewer alike by constantly rewinding various party scenes, drawing us into seemingly inconsequential moments of hedonistic indulgences and rendering them bleakly poetic. Avary, who drew from personal experience for certain moments in spite of taking cues from the novel, described it as a form of self-analysis. "On the initial release of the film, my intention was to make something about events in my life that I had observed and lived," he said. "I was writing as a social critic of myself."

Much of Avary's output, both as a director and screenwriter, places his literary perspective inside a showy entertainment mold. (Unsurprisingly, he's also a fervent gamer who collects vintage arcade systems and speaks excitedly about the medium's current potential. "If Stanley Kubrick had been alive today and making videogames, he would have made 'Portal,'" Avary said, referencing the recent Valve franchise.) However, until we see Verhoeven's "Jesus of Nazareth," no movie scripted by Avary better demonstrates the marriage of spectacle and historical inquiry better than "Beowulf."

Prior to selling the property and taking a screenwriting credit along with Neil Gaiman, Avary hoped to direct that project for years. (Robert Zemeckis directed.) Having taken a lesser role in that passion project, Avary found himself in a tough headspace even before the 2008 disaster that changed his life. "I began to ask myself, 'Who am I as a filmmaker right now?'" he said. "And I didn't know what I had to say."

Now he has a solution and sounds tentatively hopeful about it. "When you're a writer, you pull your life into your work," he said. "My first love is cinema. That's where I want to be judged."

At that exact moment, a small finch landed immediately beside us, sidling up to Avary's espresso. Avary turned to it and smiled. "Oh, hello!" he said. The bird sat there for a moment and stared back before fluttering off. Avary watched it go. "That's amazing," he said. "What a beautiful bird." For the first time, beneath his sunglasses, his eyes appeared to light up.

[MacGuffin]

Roger Avary To Write & Direct 'Castle Wolfenstein'
Source: Playlist

Man, remember when those "Castle Wolfenstein" games were popular or were cutting edge? Remember when "Return To Castle Wolfenstein" was a big deal? Damn, we feel old. And yet, the brand and franchise continue to endure, and the long-gestating movie looks like it's finally happening, with a rather interesting name set to guide.

His comeback is now official, as Roger Avary (who, in case you missed it, was also recently attached to direct the thriller "Airspace" with John Cusack in the lead) is slated to write and direct "Castle Wolfenstein." Ambitiously being positioned as an action movie in the vein of "Captain America: The First Avenger" and "Inglourious Basterds" (because of its retro futurism and a new take on classic bad guys) the story follows a young US Army Captain and a British Special Agent on a top secret mission to Castle Wolfenstein, where Hitler will be for the unveiling of a new secret weapon.  After reaching the Castle, our heroes are confronted by Himmler's SS Paranormal Division and must fight, not only for their survival, but for a mission that could alter the course of the War. Actually, it sounds mostly like "The Raid" but in WWII, with ghosts and monsters and stuff.

Of course, being a videogame-based movie, our optimism isn't high particularly when the narrative thread just reads like a level-by-level walkthrough. But perhaps Avary can put his own spin and sauce on it, and perhaps turn it into something inventive. At any rate, his fans will surely be happy to hear he's back with more than one project cooking. Distributors are already circling 'Wolfenstein,' and the project is being repped at AFM.

[Pwaybloe]

Is this the same video game where you get intoxicated and kill your friend in a car wreck?

[Neil]

^ you should write for family guy.

[Pwaybloe]

I sincerely hope that was a venomous insult and not a shrouded complement. 

[WorldForgot]

Lucky Day, Incarceration, and QT

At that time I was at a place they call the Hole, which is twenty-three-hour lockdown. You’re in your cell for twenty-three hours. Then you’re allowed out in the day room for an hour. During that hour you can do things like shower or change the channel for other people or walk around. Making telephone calls was a big thing to do. But the rest of the time you were in your cell.

The lights were on twenty-four hours a day. If you’ve ever seen Oz, Tom Fontana kind of nailed it. He got it right, at least in terms of art direction. You’re on this deck and there are eight cells across on the top and the bottom. You’ve got various factions of the Mexican mafia down below. You’ve got a couple of cells of guys from the Aryan nation up above. There’s a couple of cells of Black Mafia Gang. Some various “lames,” non-gang related inmates… They’re clustering everyone together. So, it’s sort of a tense environment. It’s filled with colorful dialogues to be sure. Suffice it to say, every week or so, in the middle of the night, suddenly the lights go bright—they’re always on at night, but they’re suddenly brighter—and a whole bunch of guards coming rushing in through the door. They open up the doors to all the cells and take everybody out. They line you up against the wall and they strip everybody naked. So, you’re standing there naked with all these various characters. They take all of your clothes away and they’re handing out new clothes. We wore blue outfits with orange tee shirts, underwear, and socks.

While they’re doing that, the guards are ripping apart your cell. They’re going through just looking for everything. They’re looking for tar heroin. They’re looking for cell phones. They’re looking for shanks. They’re looking for pruno, which is jail wine. They’re looking for anything that’s contraband. And in my cell, they were looking for anything I was writing. I found out later that I was put in that unit because I was considered a security threat because I was writing about everything I’d seen. Because, you know, I’m a writer. [Laughs.] That’s what I do. So, I’m observing everything and writing about it. They would come in and basically go through your box, and they’d go through it and they’d dump it. They’d lift your mattress up and throw your sheets all over the place. They’re looking for anything… You know, sometimes a screw goes missing in this place. Or a pen of some kind. They discover that and they’re like, “Holy shit! Someone has a deadly weapon!” They then put the entire facility on lockdown and they begin looking through everybody’s everything. To find a screw.

These guards are under intense pressure themselves, so you’re kind of on the receiving end of that. So they’d go into the cell and they’d be ripping it apart. What they would take from me was any pages I was writing. If I was writing something, it was gone. If I went to the yard, they would take my pages. Anything that I was writing. So I learned after a while that the way around that was to seal an envelope to my attorney, which is against the law for them to open. So the minute the lights went bright and the guards came in, I would seal the envelope. Whatever pages I had written to that point would then get mailed out the next day and go to my daughter, who would then type them up into Final Draft. You’re incredibly productive when you’re on twenty-three-hour lockdown.It’s sort of like the producer or studio executive’s dream for a writer—to chain them to a table with just a golf pencil and paper. [Laughs.] You don’t even have a computer. There’s no distraction. So I was relatively productive. I wrote four scripts and a book.

And I’m hearing this colorful dialogue from all sorts of super colorful characters from a variety of curious backgrounds. [Laughs.] A lot of this was just sort of flowing through the air and became a part of the story. So I was in this environment, and when you’ve fucked up as badly as I had—when you drop an atom bomb on your life and the lives of others, and you’ve created complete and total disarray and irreversible damage—you become (at least I became) very existential about everything. Especially when you’re basically locked into a cube with a window into another cube and that’s it. You’re not looking at trees. You’re not looking at the outside world. Every now and then I had a glimpse of the sky, but you’re basically in a cage. A concrete cage.

[jenkins]

oh wow

[Alethia]

He delved into that in a very deep way on the BEE podcast 2 or 3 months ago, very riveting.

[jenkins]

The Rules of Attraction is a good movie

[Alethia]

Agreed!