A veteran screenwriter, graphic novelist, and former video game journalist, Gary Whitta is proud of the handful of works that have been produced (The Book of Eli, which starred Denzel Washington in 2009 is a great, underrated sci-fi/apocalyptic gem, and After Earth which remains divisive) as equally as the works that haven’t (Secret Weapons, a throwback to mid-century pulp adventures that could still be awesome). He’s also responsible for Telltale Games’ critically-acclaimed The Walking Dead series, and gamers will see how he’s plotted the much-anticipated Halo 5: Guardians when it comes out this October.
But for all the words he’s written, he can’t talk about what would have arguably been his biggest work: Star Wars. At one point tapped to pen Star Wars: Rogue One, which has entered production for a 2016 release date, Whitta lived the dream of every nerd if only for a brief time. Parting due to differences, there was no bad blood from what I can tell in his voice and he expressed he’s looking forward to it.
Going in to this interview, I suspected Star Wars has still been something of a boon for him. Whether or not he stayed on that project, he would still be getting his newest, most personal work, Abomination, out to an audience. I was right.
“It’s been kind of a double edge sword for me, the fact that I worked on the Star Wars movie has been, I guess an asset in terms of promoting this book. People have been wanting to talk to me in part because I am part of the Star Wars movie. But I’m just in no position right now where I’m able to talk about it.”
Crowdfunded in under 24 hours on Inkshares, Whitta has entered literary fiction with his debut novel Abomination, a dark medieval fantasy about a knight hiding a terrible secret and a headstrong woman on a quest of revenge.
With Abomination set to release later this week, I spoke with Gary Whitta about his book, adapting to a new medium, a little on Star Wars, and from one journalist to another, how he sees the state of video game journalism today.
So really plainly, this is your first novel. Are you excited?
Gary: Oh yeah, it’s been a terrific experience for me. My background is a screenwriter. I’ve been doing that now for about 15 years and I’ve worked on a bunch of movies, had some made.
I loved The Book of Eli.
Gary: Oh thank you very much. I’ve had good experiences, Book of Eli was a good experience. I’ve had not so good experiences. You put a lot of work sometimes into films that don’t get made or films that get made but aren’t really representative of the work that you did or the hopes that you had for what the film would be. It’s not a business where a writer typically has a lot of creative equity or authority. It’s really kind of a crap shoot. You try to pick the right projects and you try to hopefully work with the right people.
Of course, it’s intensely collaborative.
Gary: There comes a point as screenwriter where at some point you kind of have to hand the work over and just trust that the people that are not going to make into a movie, want to make the same movie that you hoped would be made. All you can do really is hope because you don’t really have … you’re not like the producer or the director where you have the authority to say, well I think you should do this or that. You really do just have to, like I said, just hope for the best.
Was there anything new you had to learn in adapting to this particular medium? You kind of touched on it just now. Was there anything new you had to adapt from your background as a journalist and as a screenwriter?
Gary: Yeah it really was like going back to square one for me. The medium, I think of writing in prose and writing in novel is in so many ways different to writing a screenplay. Each different form is, I think, you have its own particular quirks and rhythms and rules and things that you have to learn. A good story is a good story in any medium, but the form of what you tell it can be very different. A lot of the stuff that I had spent 15 years learning as a screenwriter, really I had to kind of throw away. Because it just wasn’t relevant to writing a story in prose.
I kind of felt a lot like a newbie again. Like a complete amateur sitting down and this is the first real experiment. I really did this as kind of an experiment to see if I could do it. Write in a different form. It was like learning a second language and having to learn to write in a very different form. It was completely new territory for me and I found myself kind of learning as I went along.
About the story of Abomination. It’s a dark medieval fantasy, what was the nucleus of the idea? What inspired the book?
Gary: I think everything that I do, all of my ideas tend to kind of start with very pulpy, almost kind shocking roots. I grew up watching a lot of monster movies and kind of cheesy, campy, sci-fi and fantasy movies when I was a kid. There is always a very pulp kind of influence at the beginning of every idea. The Book of Eli originally started as, I wanted to do a good old fashioned post-apocalyptic story with a wandering hero. Almost an old samurai movie or a western. With Eli, the old samurai movies like Yojimbo and Man With No Name westerns were really the influences of that character. The religious stuff kind of came later.
With Abomination it really came from wanting to write a monster story in the tradition of stuff like the Wolfman and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Even the Incredible Hulk was a big influence. All those stories are really about someone who kind of carries a monster inside of them and it’s something they found they cant always control. I’ve always thought that was a really interesting story and I don’t think it’s accident that we’ve seen that come back again and again in stories. You see it Dr. Jekyll and you see it in the Wolfman. You see it stuff like John Carpenter’s The Thing. You see it in The Incredible Hulk. I think there is something very human about that. The idea of we all have kind of monstrous sides to our personalities. We all have our own demons and we go through our lives struggling to try and contain them and be the best versions of ourselves.
That’s hauntingly beautiful.
Gary: The idea of trying to kind of externalize that and have that, whether it be a kind of a violent temper or whatever that kind of monstrous side of your personality is. To make that real and have it be an actual monster. I think it’s something good fantasy and good science fiction has been doing for more than a hundred years.
I wanted to initially just to do my version of that story and also to kind of come up with the mythology that would allow be to create really, really horrendous, horrific, gnarly monsters. The kind of stuff that you might not have seen before. It’s not a traditional, is not a werewolf, it’s not a typical monster you might have seen. There are these really kind of horrifically kind of mutated twisted kind of very dark creatures. This is an experiment in seeing how kind of horrible and gross and horrifying I could really make it. That was kind of where it started and then I kind of built characters out of that. Yeah, I wanted to do a monster story basically.
Would you want Abomination to stay a novel, or would you want to see it adapt into another medium like a comic so that we could see those monsters in your head? Or do you think they are more powerful that the reader comes up with them on their own?
Gary: Initially I had intended to write it as a movie and for various reason I decided to try it as a novel instead. I think one of the strengths of the novel in fiction as a form of writing is that it allows the imagination to the reader too really kind of play such a big part. If you see a movie with monsters in it, you see the monsters, you know what they look like, they can be scary but they have basically been shown to you and you understand what they look like. In a novel, when they are just being described to you, and I tried to deliberately in Abomination to describe the monsters in deliberately vague terms so you never get a very … I think no few people would read this story and necessarily come away with, if you ask them to draw the monster afterward, I don’t think anyone would draw the same monster.
Sure.
Gary: I think if we were to make a movie, we would have [this be] a challenge… Again, that was part of the fun, and part of the reason I really enjoyed writing this as a novel is the ability to adjust rather than explicitly describe something, I think, the way you have to when you are writing a screenplay. Just to be very, very vague about it then let the readers’ own imagination [run wild]… Which I think is often more potent then anything you could describe. Allow them to fill in the blanks. They can come up with something quite horrific in their own imagination.
You have a handful of un-produced works that I saw on your website. Secret Weapons, Homeworld. Which one could you see living on as a novel kind of like Abomination?
Gary Whitta: I have quite a bit more than a handful, I think this is what comes with the frustration of being a screenwriter. For every twenty stories that you write, you might be lucky to sale or have made even one of those. For every screenwriter had this kind of large repository of unsold work. One of the nice things about opening up this second front as a novelist, and I also do comic books, is having the opportunity to look at some of these stories that might have been realized as movie ideas to begin with. For whatever reason they aren’t going to get made into a movie, but there is another way to go about it.
The very first script that I every sold in this business and it got me started as a screenwriter was a script called Oliver which is kind of a weird post-apocalyptic theme park retelling of Oliver Twist. We were never able to get it made into a movie, but I always wanted to tell that story and so I found a comic book artist who was willing to work with me on it and we developed it as a comic book and that comic book is coming out next year. I have this satisfaction of knowing that my story is going to be told, in one form or another.
There is nothing more frustrating to an author than having a story nobody gets to see. You want to put your stories in front of an audience. We at least get to do it in comic book form, and of course the irony of the movie business now is that once you create something as a novel or comic book, people are maybe interested in making it into a film. So who knows.
Right.
Gary: That is a deliberate choice that I have made as a writer just in terms of my approach. It’s not always necessarily thinking as a film first for any ideas. Because it is the hardest way to see an idea realized. If I’m able to generate a career as a novelist or a comic book writer, those are other avenues, perhaps easier avenues for me to get stories in front of an audience and then maybe even make a stronger case for seeing the movie made down the road.
I hope you don’t mind be talking about Star Wars just a little bit. It was a huge project to say the least, what was the most difficult thing about walking away from it?
Gary: I don’t mind you talking about Star Wars. You can talk about it as much as you want. I, however, am unable to say very much at all I’m afraid.
Oh, okay.
Gary: It wasn’t really a case of walking away. My work was basically done on the project and it was time for me to move on to the next one. I think they are just about shooting it now, I think that Kathleen Kennedy said at Comic-Con a couple of weeks ago they were starting to shoot in a couple of weeks so they should be starting right about now. I worked on it for about a year, by far the most fun I had writing a script in my entire life. For a Star Wars geek like me, I think that I grew up in that universe.
I think we all did.
Gary: It really was absolutely a dream come true. I had a tremendous time doing it and I’m confident they are going to make a really great movie, so I’m looking forward to it.
Before you were even a screenwriter, you were an editor for PC Gamer. Today gaming journalism has become YouTube personalities and “Let’s Play” videos. How do you feel about the state of this industry today over how much it’s changed?
Gary: I look at it these days very much as an observer. I still play the video games, I still have all the consoles. I play PC games.
You still write games.
Gary: I still occasionally do write, work on the development side with games. I don’t really write about games anymore, I haven’t done that in about fifteen, sixteen years. Games is what originally got me into the business of writing in the first place. I basically started as a kid straight out of school writing for video game magazines. I got out and started the screenwriter I think roughly around the time that everything was starting to change. Print, I think started to take a back seat to what was now emerging now as the online … the YouTubers, the IGN, the kind of big video websites that we see now that basically comprised most of what we think of mainstream game media. I think it’s been great. I still like to read most of the time, rather than watch a video. There will often be times where I will see a link that’s interesting and I will want to click on it or like a video not an article and Ill just click off. I don’t want to watch the video.
I get that might be a product of me being a grumpy old man. I think the audience is the 15-year-old kid of today that I was when I was consuming this stuff and I think probably loves this stuff now. You guys don’t look at screenshots anymore, you actually get to see and hear the game move and you can watch Let’s Plays and obviously the rise of Twitch.
If you would have told me ten years ago that watching other people play video games would be a massive pastime I wouldn’t have believed you. I also think the actual quality of video games journalism has gotten a lot better. When I worked on game magazines, they were much like the ones that I grew up on and they were essentially just kind of glamorous or glorified, I should say product catalogs. We reviewed games, we previewed games, we would give you game news. There would be strategy and tips like that, but game magazines were really the format for the occasional interview or feature with the developer or something. The format of video game magazines haven’t really changed very much in all of those years.
I think now with the rise of online journalism and there are so many outlets. We have so many different websites now that are able, I think, to do much more interesting work beyond just reviewing and previewing the games. Really talking about the culture of gaming and how it kind of weaves into society. I think there is a lot more basically intelligent, thoughtful, what I consider real journalism about video games. I think as video games have matured as an art form, the journalism has to mature to go along with it. Games aren’t just about blasting aliens anymore. We have games now that are telling real stories that are real touching on real things and I think it really has become as they say an art form, a genuinely valid medium and popular culture as much as film and television and books and the journalism I think has had to evolve a lot to keep up with that.
What do you hope Abomination can evolve into next? Will we see an Abomination II or do you hope to translate it into another medium?
Gary: For me, I kind of feel like I’m already at the end game. It’s already very satisfying for me to see the book out there. That I’m getting messages right now from people who have it or enjoyed reading the book. The ultimate goal for me as a storyteller, as an author, as a writer is just to have an audience of people consume that story and enjoy it and for me to see that that’s happening. We are already basically there. That is part of the reason why I wrote it as a book is that when you get to the end of writing a book, that’s the finished product. As opposed to a screenplay which is really just the beginning of the process of making a film. Where a lot of things can go wrong or maybe the film doesn’t get made along the way. For me the goal was write a book. Get it out into the world and have people enjoy it and we are there now. It’s very satisfying to me king of hold the physical book in my hand and to know that the people are out there reading it.
Anything beyond that is really kind of gravy. If there were to be some kind of film or television adaptation, I would absolutely welcome that. As I said, the idea was originally to do it as a film, so if it all comes first circle [and] that would be very satisfying to me. In terms of sequels or other stories in that universe, when you get to the end of the story and see the doors… I didn’t close [all] the doors [and] I didn’t kill everyone off or anything, but that wasn’t because I necessarily wanted to leave the door open to tell more stories. It was because I thought it was the right end to that story. But you know, if the book sells a million copies and people are screaming for another story, I’m sure I can come up with an idea, but it’s a little early to say right now.
Abomination comes out later this week from Inkshares.
https://vimeo.com/117341641