FilmCraft: Screenwriting
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Born in Iran and currently residing in London, Hossein Amini initially thought that he wanted to be a writer-director after helming a few shorts while at Oxford. But once he started making a living as a writer on other people’s projects, he discovered that he enjoyed focusing on screenwriting. His career began with television movies, The Dying of the Light (1992) and Deep Secrets (1996), but even then Amini knew that his interest was in features. A chance encounter with director Michael Winterbottom at the BAFTA awards in the mid-1990s led to their collaboration on the feature Jude (1996), an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure that starred Christopher Eccleston and Kate Winslet. Amini’s next adaptation was The Wings of the Dove (1997), based on Henry James’ novel—the film went on to receive four Academy Award nominations, including Best Adapted Screenplay. Soon after, Amini signed an exclusive overall deal with Miramax Films, working on the independent company’s diverse projects like Gangs of New York (2002) (for which he didn’t receive a credit) and The Four Feathers (2002). After his Miramax deal ended, he was approached by Universal Pictures to work on an adaptation of a book by crime author James Sallis about an enigmatic getaway driver. The project, Drive (2011), was eventually independently financed and directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, receiving rave reviews in competition at Cannes. Though Amini has primarily written for indie and art-house films, he has recently been involved with some major studio projects, including Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) and 47 Ronin (2013). Currently, he’s directing The Two Faces of January, his adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel, which stars Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst.
An English Literature and Film Studies major at Wesleyan University, Mark Bomback was inspired to pursue screenwriting by watching films like La Dolce Vita (1960) and Sam Fuller’s The Steel Helmet (1951). And although his first produced credits were for unsuccessful projects, The Night Caller (1998) and Godsend (2004), he has more recently positioned himself as a respected event-movie writer. This process began with his script for Live Free or Die Hard (a.k.a. Die Hard 4.0) (2007), the highest-grossing Die Hard film worldwide and the one responsible for reviving the series after a 12-year absence from the big screen. Since then, he has worked on the screenplays for action films such as Race to Witch Mountain (2009) and Total Recall (2012). Additionally, he has done uncredited rewrites on projects like Constantine (2005) and Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011). However, his finest script to date is 2010’s Unstoppable, which was based loosely on an actual runaway-train incident that occurred in Ohio in 2001. He’s modest about his status as an A-list action writer in Hollywood, saying, “I do feel like I’ve recently been added to a list that’s really hard to get on—although I suspect I’m somewhere on the bottom half. The goal is to continue to slowly move up that list. But it’s a very hard list to get on, because you have to be a true closer, and you’re compensated accordingly.”
