Scripted success
Many moviemaking duos can trace their collaboration back to film school. Not Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby . The screenwriting team behind "Manhunt" and "A Scanner Darkly" both went to Boston University in the mid-1980s -- not as film students but as colleagues in the School of Management.
"It was an interesting place to go. You had to fend for yourself," said Fergus, in Boston to promote their most recent collaboration, "First Snow." The indie thriller, which opens Friday at the Embassy Cinema in Waltham and Cambridge's Kendall Square Cinema, is also Fergus's directorial debut.
Oddly, Fergus and Ostby didn't meet until years after their Boston stint, when they both worked in New York at Showtime.
"We were both trying to start movie careers," he said. "We decided to join forces and try to write a script."
Fergus may not have been a film major, but his BU business degree came in handy when convincing producer Bob Yari ("Crash," "The Illusionist") he could helm a production as a first-timer.
"I didn't get terrified by the budget," he recalled. "Everyone felt like, '[He's] not insane. He can't screw it up as badly as we thought.' "
"First Snow" stars Guy Pearce ("Memento" ) as an Albuquerque salesman who becomes a paranoid mess once a fortune teller suggests his days might be numbered. The "under $10 million film" also stars Piper Perabo ("Coyote Ugly") as the doomed man's girlfriend and William Fichtner ("Contact") as his best friend.
Fergus said casting Pearce was a long shot -- "fantasyland" -- but getting him on board clinched the deal. Pearce "put his [butt] on the line," Fergus said. "If an actor is excited, then they'll take a chance."
Fergus can't attribute any particular strategy to his modest success. "You're trying to hit a moving target," he said, describing his frustration breaking into Hollywood. "You don't know the target. They don't know the target. That's just a waste of time." Eventually, he and Ostby said, "Let's write something we really care about."
That "something" was their script for "First Snow," begun some five years ago, which got them an agent. The writing gigs began to roll in. Their most visible job: writing the first draft of the Oscar-nominated screenplay for "Children of Men."
"We cracked the novel," Fergus said, bringing the P.D. James book "to the 30-yard line." Though their take is different from the version filmed by Alfonso Cuarón that took five writers to complete, his and Ostby's contribution gave them a reputation for "doing novels."
The writing team has an unusual collaborative process. They work via telephone and e-mail, with Fergus in Los Angeles (or for a period, in Albuquerque) and Ostby in Burlington, Vt.
"I realize we work better when there's a certain distance," Fergus said. But "having someone to lean on," he said, was crucial.
"Writing is such a lonely business," Ostby said by telephone from the set of "Iron Man," their superhero movie starring Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow. Even when the writing partners lived two blocks from each other, he said, they'd "spend hours on the phone shooting ideas back and forth."
Ostby said with Fergus, egos aren't involved. "There is a lot of self-doubt. Is this [garbage] or is this good? It reaches a crisis point. It's nice to have a partner." Having a comrade also helps when it's time to take a risk. Their success as screenwriters gave Fergus the courage to get "First Snow" made, but with one caveat: He wanted to direct. The only way that happened, Fergus said, was to be stubborn.
"Just write a good script and handcuff yourself to it," is Fergus's advice to budding writer-directors. "Being a first-time director isn't as scary as it used to be."
ETHAN GILSDORF
