We spoke to Jordan Hall to find out more about how her creative mind works and the idea of building a romantic comedy mixed with apocalyptic themes came to be.

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Can you start by telling us a little bit about you and How to Survive an Apocalypse?

I’m a playwright and screenwriter in Vancouver, British Columbia. I’m probably most recognized for my previous play, Kayak, which is about climate change and activism and not getting along with your mother-in-law—and in a lot of ways How to Survive an Apocalypse is a follow-up to that: A romantic comedy about preppers and hipsters and the looming spectre of the Apocalypses (whether personal, professional, or global) that await us all.

What was the inspiration for the story?

Plays tend to creep up on me. How to Survive emerged out of the collision of a lot of things I was experiencing and observing back in 2013 and 2014—There had been this resurgence of apocalyptic ideation (with movies like This is the End, It’s a Disaster, and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World), which crashed into the new visibility of the Prepper movement in mainstream culture, and the pressure of scarcity and growing inequality on the prospects for the current cohort of young adults—all of that sort of smashed together into the kernel of the play. I could see this young couple, who’d felt like they had such a promising life ahead of them, having to grapple with adulthood in the pressures of this environment—and turning to prepping as kind of an escape valve to avoid dealing with the spectres of personal and professional failure. And maybe I just have a really bleak sense of humour, but that seemed hilarious to me.

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What should audiences expect to see on stage?

A romantic comedy for the End of Days. A kind of heightened portrait of where I think people my age (and a little older and a little younger) find themselves as they face the challenges of maturity. And probably some of the least effective survival training anyone has ever seen.

What was your writing process like in creating the script?

You mean beyond: Get up, Make Tea, Open Laptop, Clutch Head?

Whenever I can, I like to engage in practical research. While I was writing How to Survive, I went through the process of getting my hunting license, took urban and rural survival courses, and even started a permaculture certificate—all to get a solid material sense of the world of prepping and survivalism.

Much of my actual writing process is really about drilling down into character. One of my biggest projects as a writer is the creation of female characters, and in particular female protagonists, who are afforded the same degree of agency and psychological scope as their male counterparts. A real challenge in How to Survive was to take the figure of the rom-com heroine, a figure that’s frequently use to reinforce unfortunate tropes about female behaviour, and to try to build a character in Jen who feels like a real person, grappling with failure and disappointment and the difficulties of navigating relationships between feminist ideals and the lingering expectations of entrenched patriarchy.

What advice would you offer to aspiring playwrights?

Be utterly, hopelessly in love with theatre. There are a lot of ways you can become a writer, a lot of ways you can become an artist—If you’re going to write plays, do it because there’s something essential about the communion with the audience that happens in that space, about the potential for magic inherent in the unity of space and time, about the flexibility the form affords to really experiment with the relationship between form and content. Write plays because you want, more than anything, the space to play with those things. The space to be as fearless as possible.

What was the biggest challenge for you in writing the play and how did you deal with it?

This was actually one of those rare plays that came together structurally quite early in the process, possibly because I knew I wanted to play with the comedy of remarriage as a genre, and that offered this amazing structural template. Which isn’t to say we didn’t push hard in workshop, driving for the moments of realism that keep the content of the play in tension with that structure—and that is absolutely where the alchemy of the play lives for me.

What’s the most rewarding element for you about writing?

I think what I love most about writing is the space it opens up for you to be deeply interested in so many things: I’ve written plays about fairy tales and climate change and particle physics and each of them was an opportunity to learn so much about a whole new world. I love the chance to try to empathize with characters whose psychology is very different from my own, to dig at the knotty, gnarly heart of the problems that they live with. I love the way writing is always an attempt to understand the infinite complexities of the world.

Also the jokes. There’s very little in the world that’s as fulfilling as an audience laughing at your jokes.

What plays, books, and authors have been influential in your career so far?

Tom Stoppard. I’m continually in awe of the way he merges the intellectually rigorous and the entertaining. Yasmina Reza, who creates comedies that are so incisive about both the hypocrisy and the human heart of privilege. I really love both Charlie Kaufman and The Coen Brothers for the ways they’re engaging with genre. And Shaw. Always, always George Bernard Shaw.

What other projects are you involved with at the moment?

I’m currently writing Season 3 of Carmilla: The Series for ubykotex and SmokeBomb Entertainment. I’m also working on a play about our relationship to biodiversity and manmade extinction called Rate of Loss, for Up in the Air Theatre. And it’s pretty new—but I was just lucky enough to be awarded a commission with Western Canada Theatre for what I’m thinking of as a “nursing home revenge comedy” called The Smallwood Solution.

Where can we find out more about you and How to Survive an Apocalypse?

I can be found online at JordanHall.ca and @save_my_script on Twitter.

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Thanks to Jordan Hall for speaking with us!

How to Survive an Apocalypse is on from June 2nd until June 11th the Firehall Arts Centre. For tickets, please visit  tickets.firehallartscentre.ca.

The post The Biz Interview: Jordan Hall appeared first on Biz Books.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon represents Richard’s first project for director Michael Bay and he graciously took the time out to discuss his work on the film and insights into the industry of being an art director in Hollywood.

What general elements in Transformers: Dark of the Moon can audiences pick out as being your work?

The streets of Chicago. The vast piles of debris… The physical elements were largely set in place by myself and [Nigel Phelps] on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis. It’s a massive undertaking to take what is an intact, beautiful city and make it look like what it looks like in that movie.

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What would you say is the most challenging element of the film for you and what are you most proud of as far as what you accomplished on it?

Everybody contributes as much as they can and I’ve gotta say the overall look of the film is what I’d say I’m most proud of. It looks spectacular. It’s shot brilliantly by Amir (Mokri) and Michael (Bay). It’s pretty amazing to take a present-day world and make it look like that. The moon was the other thing. I didn’t have a huge hand in it. I helped develop the actual dust that was on the moon – the whole surface of the moon. It was a big deal.

What was the most difficult thing to put together?

I think the spacecraft. We were dealing with a world that was glimpsed at in the previous two films – the Autobot spacecraft that crashed on the moon. It was a complicated thing to visualize and pull together. I suppose Chernobyl. They go to the bowels of Chernobyl and what does that really look like? A handful of Russians know what that is and the rest of the world will never know. We’re not going to get there.

You’ve worked on so many film projects and they’ve ranged a lot as far as budget and genre. How does your approach change if you’re doing an action film like Transformers: Dark of the Moon vs. a drama like State of Play or a comedy like Tropic Thunder?

Transformers is a very fast-paced film where you want to do things in broad strokes because (Michael) Bay’s constantly cutting from one angle to another angle to a different angle and [with] his rhythm, you’ve gotta have something visual back there that helps the rhythm and doesn’t confuse the audience… In his films, the action itself is its own character. In say The Road to Perdition, that’s all about invoking the time and the place and Chicago in the 1930s. Oddly enough (it) was shot where Transformers was and it was a whole different approach there. It was muted colour and it was also to set a tone of The Depression and the feeling of what it was like in the ’30s. It was very desaturated, not because we were cutting it quickly, but because that was the feeling Sam Mendes was going for… Then there’s Tropic Thunder where it’s all about a mockumentary (of) what Hollywood does when they make movies… [Tropic Thunder] is more about having a good time, so you can be a lot looser and freer about things in a comedy.

You have a huge range of filmmakers that you’ve worked with – Michael Bay, Oliver Stone, The Coen Brothers, and Tim Burton to name a few. What are the keys to a successful collaboration between an art director and a film director in your experience?

It’s really tough. You’ve got to do a lot of listening. A director will come to you to help. Your job is to help realize their vision. It varies director to director. For instance, Tim (Burton) pretty darn well knows what he wants his films to look like and you’ve really got to pay attention to him and listen to what Tim’s doing and trying to do, then just help him get there with that as much as you possibly can, and just be patient and bring your skills to help him get what he’s after. Other directors like Ben Stiller – he’s not as visually-driven as someone like Tim, so you can [collaborate] a lot more with somebody like that… It’s all incumbent on someone like me to really pay attention and listen to what these guys are trying to do cause they’re the captain of the ship. To be a good crew member, you have to follow the captain.

What inspired you to get started to become an art director to begin with? What people or films influenced you the most?

A lot of European filmmakers, Bergman in particular. I’m Swedish by birth and his style of filmmaking is spectacular, in my opinion. There’s nobody today that even gets half close of that… Initially, I wanted to be an architect and found architecture to be a really closed loop – not that filmmaking isn’t, but as a designer and creator of architecture, you can really do a lot more in a hell of a lot quicker time in the film business. The palette’s so much bigger.

What advice would you give to people who are interested in working as an art director?

I would tell them to get a very, very, very strong background in graphics design and architecture. Proportion is the single most important thing a designer can have and there’s a hell of a lot of people out there that don’t know anything at all about proportions that are trying to be designers and it’s frustrating. It’s very key to the success of a look is proportion and balance and it’s taught best to graphics designers…. Study photography. It’s all about the look. Follow the world of photography – modern photography. Somebody like Annie Leibovitz, her images are striking. Or Mary Ellen Mark – she’s another brilliant, brilliant photographer. Just how they compose and what they do – and what’s that background doing because their eyes are following that background. Don’t for a second think that it’s just about the foreground. .. There’s a lot that goes into these films that the average person in the audience would never imagine.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon is in theatres now.

The post The Biz Interview: Richard Johnson of “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” appeared first on Biz Books.