Where Are They Now? ScreenCraft's Horror Screenplay Contest Runners-Up

ScreenCraft was proud to recently speak with the 2015 Horror Screenplay Contest runners-up, Alex Greenfield & Ben Powell. The writing duo's script Plague Ship deftly mixes big action beats with all-too-believable survival thriller tropes. The screenplay tells the story of a newly married couple whose honeymoon becomes a nightmare when a deadly plague breaks out on their luxury cruise ship. Now, husband and wife must do anything and everything to keep each other safe, both from infection and from the ship’s crew, who have decided that slaughtering passengers is the only way to keep the plague from spreading.

ScreenCraft: So tell us about Plague Ship. Where did the idea come from? 

Ben: I believe the initial credit on this one goes to Alex’s wife Penny who I think had a dream about quarantine ships or something like that.

Alex: Yep. First thing in the morning one day she comes out of the bedroom all excited and says, “I had a bad dream!” I couldn’t figure out why she was so psyched about a nightmare until she said she thought it would be our next movie. I called Ben right away after she told me about these kids trapped on a ship as a disease spreads.

Ben: For us, the writing process always starts with a couple of hours of bullshitting around on the phone. I remember Plague Ship starting off as a near future sci-fi movie. We’re always looking to do a story about post-collapse societies and that kind of thing and we started down that path with this Quarantine ship idea.

Alex: Very sort of Battle Royale or Hunger Games — the rebellious, bad kids are all imprisoned on this boat and sent off to the middle of the ocean. Lord of the Flies on a boat in the future!

Ben: Later on, the title Plague Ship stuck in my craw. I checked IMDB and discovered no significant movie with that title had ever been made. A lot of the pieces fell into place for me around the title and I fired off a quick email to Alex, something along the lines of “What if we do the first half of The Stand on a boat and call it Plague Ship…”

Alex: ...and that was it. It was just perfect for what we were looking to do. We wanted something contained, fast-paced, and scary. Breaking quarantine to escape Captain Trips on a luxury cruise ship? Sold.

ScreenCraft: What was the development and writing process like between the two of you? 

Ben: We’ve written a bunch of things together at this point and have a pretty solid system worked out. The two general kind of informal rules we have are that someone is the boss on every project so that if it comes down to a creative impasse, the decision gets made. The other one is that in rewriting we try never to undo the other person’s work. Going back and forth like that unleashes a kind of dickishness that’s not good.

Alex: We go so far as to turn revision marks off when we pass drafts back and forth nowadays. Even in the best of partnerships, there’s this tendency to go all side-eye and wonder, “Why’s he changing all my shit!?!” Our writer’s “voice” or whatever is so simpatico now that honestly I can’t tell half the time. Thing is, the system doesn’t always work. Or maybe it works incredibly well!

Ben: We argued more on Plague Ship than anything else we’ve ever done.

Alex: Right? We would just get f***ing INFURIATED with each other over these seemingly little changes. We got in a huge fight about whether we should call our heroine “Rachel” or “Raytch” in the dialogue slugs! We were both obviously super invested in the script, but something wasn’t clicking.

Ben: Eventually, we realized that the problem was that we each had a different idea of the main character. A couple of drafts in, Alex started asking why I’m diminishing the Rachel scenes. She’s the main character. I said, “No she’s not, Steven’s the main guy.” The lights kind of went on and we realized we were both kind of right and that was the source of the tension but also a big part of what makes the script work so well; the two leads are more complete characters behind getting extra attention from each of us.

Alex: Once we realized what we were doing and stopped fighting it, we had this wonderful kind of symmetry between the stories of two leads. Their journeys inform and compliment each other. Hell, the “Raytch”/“Rachel” argument became an important part of who the character is as a human being.

ScreenCraft: What happened with the script and your writing careers after it placed in the ScreenCraft Horror Screenplay Contest?

Alex: Man, it’ll sound like blowing smoke up your ass, but ScreenCraft has been a real shot of adrenaline to our careers. We had several managers and agents read Plague Ship and express an interest in signing us. Ultimately we decided to go with Andrew Wilson at Zero Gravity, who was a member of the Horror Competition jury.

Ben: We’ve been working without representation for years and have been doing okay for ourselves, but to really take our careers to the next step we feel like we need someone in our corner.

Alex: Andrew completely got every nuance of what we were trying to accomplish in Plague Ship. More than that, he understands where we are in our career, what we’ve accomplished, and how to move us forward. We couldn’t be more psyched.

Ben: All good stuff!

ScreenCraft: Is horror a genre the two of you want to stick with? If not, what else are you interested in? 

Alex: Dude, I feel like it’s taken me years to get to horror when that’s the main thing I’ve wanted to do! Until we got The Sand made, I’d written horror… but what I’ve been paid for is everything from romantic comedies on the Hallmark Channel to low-budget disaster movies, martial arts action, professional wrestling, you name it! If I could spend the next decade or so giving people nightmares, I’d be a happy camper.

Ben: I love crime stories. Noir. Tough Guy shit. I dabble in that stuff and flatter myself that I bring a little bit of that flare to everything. That being said, those movies are tough to get going and I really enjoy writing horror movies and wouldn’t mind sticking with them for the foreseeable future.

ScreenCraft: What can you tell us about The Sand? 

Ben: Beyond check it out, it’s available now on DVD and your favorite Video On Demand platform?

Alex: Watch it on a TV screen near you!

Ben: It’s a fun little creature feature that we’re really proud of. It’s the story of some kids who wake up after a party and find that their stretch of beach is inhabited by an under-the-sand monster. It’s sort of a real simple idea that came out of a walk on the beach, seeing one of those lifeguard stations and thinking about the old floor-is-lava game.

Alex: If you touch the sand, you die… so how do you escape? It’s like Cube under a clear blue sky. When Ben called me with the idea, I flipped.

Ben: I’d just come off a really low-budget indie called The Aggression Scale where I’d had the opportunity to spend the full fourteen shoot-days on set and watch the practicalities of production. A movie that was 95% EXT. BEACH – DAY seemed like a no brainer, especially when you add a bunch of bikinis to the mix.

Alex: It’s those bikinis that really set the tone, too. Those old-school beach horror movies — Piranha, Humanoids From the Deep, Blood Beach — were touchstones for us, but the real fun was taking all the tropes and expectations that go with them and turning them on their head. The women in The Sand are not victims waiting to be rescued, and it’s super gratifying that a lot of the reviews coming out of FrightFest in London — where we premiered — make it a point to mention that.

Ben: The Sand was the easiest thing we ever wrote. We had a blast tossing set piece ideas around for a couple of hours and had a script within two weeks which is more or less what the production team shot.

ScreenCraft: What films influenced your style of writing most? 

Alex: Carpenter’s early films were a huge influence. The Thing particularly; it’s such an elegant, deeply claustrophobic story. Lynch had a profound impact on me, too, especially Mulholland Drive — it comes as close to feeling like an actual nightmare as anything I’ve ever seen. Cronenberg’s body of work pops up in a lot of what I do, too. It’s more his books than his films, but it would be hard to overstate Stephen King’s influence on my writing. I’m a true Constant Reader and steal from the master all the time. The Sand owes a lot to his short story, The Raft.

Ben: We came up during the indie boom of the nineties so it was all about Quentin and crime stories. As far as horror goes, I think the first couple of Hellraisers were really important as far as the idea of establishing a complex cosmology even inside the confines of what amounts to a tight little haunted house story. I was also really into the old Charlie Band/Full Moon stuff; Puppetmaster was a favorite. I like a few laughs in my horror movies.

ScreenCraft: What's the most difficult part of screenwriting for you?

Ben: For me, it’s every aspect of the business part. I’m no good at self-promotion and query letters make me queasy. I’m kind of a slow thinker so I’m maybe a little spotty in The Room. Luckily, Greenfield is all charm and picks up the slack in that department. Honestly, one of the great things about contests like ScreenCraft is that you submit your work and it’s judged on the merits.

Alex: Ha! Ben’s right: I’m a total carny. I love getting in there and playing the game and doing meetings and all of that. I think one of the reasons Ben and I work so well together is our complimentary skill-sets.

The toughest part of writing for me is patience. Waiting for responses from executives who’ve heard a pitch or producers who have a script… or contests! It drives me nuts and Ben has to talk me off many a ledge.

ScreenCraft: What's the easiest part? 

Ben: For me, grinding pages is the most fun. I like to sit in the dark with a loose outline and find it.

Alex: The greatest high on earth is the moment when I’m so deep in the world I’m writing that the real world becomes insubstantial. In moments like that, it feels less like creating and more like… I dunno, taking dictation? That’s not exactly right. When you lose yourself in the work it feels a little transcendent, and there’s just nothing better than that.

ScreenCraft: What's the most important thing you've learned as a screenwriter?

Ben: Probably the toughest most important lesson I learned as a writer is to move on. You fall in love with the project you’re on because you have to but in the best case scenario, the movie gets made and a whole other group of people are going to carry your project to the finish line. As a screenwriter, you’ve got to move on to the next thing or it’ll drive you nuts.

Alex: Ha! I’m terrible at internalizing that lesson! I guess for me it’s all about collaboration. Every project that has a check attached is going to have multiple cooks who are absolutely convinced that their recipe is the only one. As the writer, you really have to learn a kind of mental jiu jitsu to balance make all those people happy while staying true to the story you want to tell. It’s a balancing act, but when you play it right, you can make a living.

ScreenCraft: If you could offer the best advice to novice screenwriters, what would it be? 

Ben: Write more screenplays. As my old buddy Sam Scribner used to say, “Ask anyone in town if they’ve written a screenplay and they’ll tell you every detail. Ask ‘em what their second script is about they’ll either shut up or they might writers.”

Alex: Yes. Write more and read more and be fucking tenacious. I’ve seen a lot of very talented writers bash their heads against Hollywood’s battlements for a few years and then give up. There are certainly enfant terribles who sell a six-figure script right out of the gate; they are the exceptions. Perseverance matters.

ScreenCraft: What's your dream project to work on? 

Alex: I would love to do a big, sprawling, There Will Be Blood-ish movie about the Gold Dust Trio — the three guys who took professional wrestling from legitimate competition to spectacular exhibition in the early 20th Century.

Ben: This is kind of process related but, for me, my dream project is one that I get to stay involved in. Too often the writer is the first one out the door when the production process starts. If I’m dreaming, then yeah, my perfect project is one where I get to sit in on the casting call fine tune the dialog on set and maybe sip a latte in the edit bay at the end.

Alex: Oh, sure. Give a smart, thoughtful answer. Dick.

Ben: All that being said, we’ve got a pretty hot Hellraiser on the drawing board and a World War I semi-horror thing that my dreams are pretty full of these days.

Alex: That’s what I’m talking about!

ScreenCraft: Thanks so much guys!

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