Roger Avary

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Roger Roberts Avary (b. August 23, 1965) is a Canadian-born motion picture director, producer, and Oscar winning screenwriter.

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Childhood

Roger Avary, a direct descendant of pirate/marooner Henry "Long Ben" Avary, is the son of a Brasilian-raised deep-shaft mining engineer and a German physical therapist. Avary was born in Flin Flon, Manitoba but grew up in Oracle, Arizona, the home of Biosphere 2. In the early 1970s Avary's family moved first to Torrance, California and then to Manhattan Beach, California. Avary, a cartoonist in the style of Sergio Aragonés and Tom Eaton, made numerous early animations on the 8mm and Super-8 formats. In 1979 he began working at one of the first video stores in Southern California, Video Out-Takes, in Redondo Beach, California. The store was owned by the father of his childhood friend, and first collaborator, Scott Magill. The two had grown up making movies together, and experimenting in early Betamax videotape formats. One of those early Super-8mm films, The Worm Turns, won Best Film from LAFTA (The Los Angeles Film Teachers Association) in 1983.

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The Video Archives Years

When in 1981, Video Out-Takes co-owner Lance Lawson (a name that comes up repeatedly in Avary and Tarantino's films) left to open the now famous Video Archives, Avary went along, writing the store's database program with fellow 6502 programmer Andy Blinn on an Atari 800 computer. Under the vision of Lance Lawson, Video Archives became a gathering place for an eclectic and unique group of film geeks, who became known as "Archivists." Among this group Avary met an odd, brilliant film enthusiast, Quentin Tarantino. The two quickly became friends, introducing each other to their favorite films. These were the days of Z Channel, the age of video, and the first time in history that a large database of film titles were suddenly available -- Tarantino and Avary were to become charter members in the Video Store generation of filmmakers. In 1986 Avary attended the Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, California, with fellow future directors Michael Bay and Tarsem.

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The Tarantino Years

Early in his career, Avary made a number of contributions to some of Quentin Tarantino's movies. He worked as a crew member on Tarantino's unfinished first film, My Best Friend's Birthday. He had at one point written an unfinished, 80-page script called "The Open Road", which he described as being about the "odd couple relationship between an uptight business man and an out-of-control hitch-hiker who travel into a Hellish mid-Western town together" and compared to Martin Scorsese's After Hours. After moving on to another screenplay, a spec adaptation of The Silver Surfer, he allowed Tarantino to rewrite his script to add enough length to bring it to a 120-page industry standard length. Tarantino did more than that; he turned out a 500-page handwritten behemoth of a script that included only bits and figments of Avary's original, a work which Avary described as "the Citizen Kane of pop culture." Impressed with Tarantino's work, Avary eagerly signed onto the new project as a producer, and helped Tarantino pare down the script into True Romance, (Tarantino used the remainder as the basis for parts of his other scripts.) Working as producer, he and Tarantino tried unsuccessfully to get funding so that Tarantino could film the script. After the script was eventually sold, Avary was hired by Tony Scott and producer Samuel Hadida to work as a script doctor on True Romance (1993), a job which included paring the script down from 130 pages to 115 pages, adding a few small scenes, and writing a new, happier ending where the Clarence character lives, as Tarantino refused to compromise his script. When the Paul Brothers, a pair of wealthy bodybuilders who wanted to get into the movies, offered Tarantino funding for his script Natural Born Killers on the condition he include a scene featuring them, he couldn't bring himself to write it out of disgust, and asked Avary to write it for him as a favor. The scene, which has come to be known as the "Hun Brothers" scene, has been described by Oliver Stone as the best scene in the script. It was, however, cut from the final film because, as Stone is quoted as saying on the "Natural Born Killers" special edition laserdisc, "I fucked it up." Avary also co-wrote the background radio dialogue in Reservoir Dogs (1992), and designed the "Dog Eat Dog" logo which appeared in the end credits.

Most notably, Avary contributed material which, combined with Tarantino's, formed the basis of Pulp Fiction (1994) for which he and Tarantino won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Earlier in their careers, Tarantino and Avary had planned on making an anthology movie comprised of three short films; one written and directed by Avary, one written and directed by Tarantino, and one written and directed by a third filmmaker. When the third filmmaker never materialized, Tarantino and Avary took their respective stories and expanded them into full length screenplays separately. Tarantino's story became Reservoir Dogs, and Avary's story became "Pandemonium Reigns". "Pandemonium Reigns" ended up forming the basis of the "Gold Watch" chapter of Pulp Fiction (an earlier version of his website displayed an excerpt from "Pandemonium Reigns", illustrating the changes that were made by Tarantino when writing "The Gold Watch"), and other odd scenes Avary had written were reworked and incorperated into the Pulp Fiction script, such as the accidental shooting of Marvin , and the scene in which the bullets fired at Jules and Vincent miss their targets (Avary claims both of these scenes were written for his rewrite of True Romance). Tarantino and Avary got together in Amsterdam shortly after the release of Reservoir Dogs, and pasted each other's scenes together into a first draft, after which Avary left to film Killing Zoe, and Tarantino took over subsequent writing of Pulp Fiction. Avary's bizarre 1994 Oscar speech (for Best Original Screenplay) consisted of "I want to thank my witch, a wife, who I love more than anyone else in the world...I'm gonna go now 'cause I really got to take a pee." Some believe that Avary was unhappy about only receiving a "Story by" credit on Pulp Fiction. Avary has been reported as saying that it was originally agreed that both men would share a screenplay credit, and that Tarantino approached him at the last minute before the film's release, while he was editing "Killing Zoe", asking him take a "story by" credit instead, in exchange for increased residuals (which would be equal to Writer's Guild residuals). Avary claims he agreed to the deal due to the fact that he needed money after making Killing Zoe, a film whose budget was so low that he put his own salary back into the production. Tarantino reportedly insists, however, that Avary's lack of screenplay credit was due to the fact that he did not participate in later revisions of the script. This has led to much speculation on the part of fans and journalists, but both men insist that the issue is "ancient history."

Avary had also come up with an dissertation of the supposed gay subtext of the movie Top Gun during his Video Archives days, which he and Tarantino often told to friends as a joke (it is interesting to note that Pauline Kael had covered similar ground in her review of Top Gun, which is reprinted in the book "For Keeps"). Tarantino used this idea during an "improvisation" while acting in the movie Sleep With Me. Avary, who had just written the riff into a script he was writing for John Woo called "Hatchetman", was upset at the time due to the fact that Tarantino didn't ask him permission to use it (although Tarantino had given Avary credit in interviews for the idea). Since then the two have mended fences over the issue, as Avary recently complimented Tarantino on his performance in Sleep With Me, and expressed a desire to perform the gay subtextual analysis of Top Gun with him on a DVD commentary for the film someday. Although some have speculated that the two have had a falling out, both men maintain that there is no bad blood between them and that their feud was invented, amplified, and fueled by overzealous "yellow journalists", beginning with Jamie Bernard, author of the first biography on Tarantino.

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Killing Zoe

Avary also wrote and directed the neo-noir cult thriller Killing Zoe (1994) which Tarantino executive produced. The screenplay was based in part on his experiences travelling through Europe (which he also refers to in Victor's european trip in "The Rules of Attraction"). In fact, Avary had initially intended to write a screenplay completely devoted to this experience, for which Tarantino suggested the ironic title "Roger Takes a Trip". But when producer Lawrence Bender called Avary during location scouting on "Reservoir Dogs" asking if he had a screenplay that took place entirely in a bank so that they could take advantage of an inexpensive location they had no use for, Avary told Bender that he had such a script -- and quickly wrote "Killing Zoe" in under a week, using elements of his European trip as inspiration. It is interesting to note that while "Killing Zoe" takes place in Paris, the film was almost entirely shot in downtown Los Angeles locations, with only two days in Paris to shoot the opening credit sequence and two drive-by shots. The film was also an influence on Tarantino; according to Avary, Tarantino, while rewriting "Pulp Fiction", added the heroin scenes after veiwing a rough cut of Killing Zoe. The film was honored with le Prix très spécial à Cannes 1994, the very same year that "Pulp Fiction" won the Palm d'Or.

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An Absence from the Cinema

Avary briefly moved into work for television and made two pilots, neither of which was picked up. During this time he also produced two films, "Boogie Boy" (1997) for Tarantino alumni Craig Hamman and "The Last Man" (2000), for frequent writing collaborator Harry Ralston. During this time Avary spent quite a bit of his energy working as a high paid script doctor and using the money to finance the development of his own projects, like his long gestating epic on Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí. Avary is notable as the first mainstream filmmaker to maintain a journal on his avary.com webpage, before there was such a thing as "blogging", although in late 2005 Avary closed his weblog with no explanation or notice.

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A Return to Form

In 2002 Avary returned to cinema as a director with his adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel The Rules of Attraction, which he also executive produced. The Rules of Attraction was the first studio movie to prove reliable use of Apple's Final Cut Pro editing system for editing motion picture film. Roger Avary became a spokesperson for Apple's Final Cut Pro product, appearing in Apple print and web ads worldwide. His film from within the film, "Glitterati" (2004), used elements of Victor's European trip and was shot on digital video. In 2005, he purchased the rights to another Bret Easton Ellis novel, "Glamorama", and is currently developing it for himself to direct.

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Recent Work

In 2005 Avary, at the request of his friend, actor James Van Der Beek, played the part of a peyote-taking gonzo film director Franklin Brauner (AKA Donald Cammell) in the film "Standing Still." Most recently, Avary and novelist Neil Gaiman wrote and produced an adaptation of "Beowulf" (2006), which Robert Zemeckis is directing, utilizing the Performance capture technology pioneered in The Polar Express. Gaiman and Avary are also collaborating on an adaptation of Charles Burns (cartoonist)' graphic novel "Black Hole" for French director Alexandre Aja. Avary also wrote the screenplay adaptation to the hit Konami videogame, "Silent Hill" (2006), for French director, and friend, Christophe Gans, and "Killing Zoe" producer Samuel Hadida. Continuing his success in the arena of game-to-film adaptations, Avary is writing and directing an adaptation of "Driver" for Rogue Pictures and Constantin Films.