INTERVIEW: Bryan Stumpf - by screenwriter Kristi Barnett

Bryan Stumpf put out a crowd funding campaign to make a 20min short called Annulment. I wondered whether I should depart with my hard earned cash. The decision to say yes wasn’t that hard because I’m a screenwriter and have empathy and I’d read a spec sci-fi/action script of his called Commute. Immediately I could see his writing was a cut above and his sense of action scenes were exciting. I knew he loved genre and was incredibly passionate to get his stories made; so I took a gamble and gave him a chunk of my week’s pay.

The gamble paid off – Annulment has since made it into a large amount of festivals, officially selected and winner categories. I know how hard it is to receive these kind of accolades so I knew then that Annulment must be good. I watched it recently and straight away, realised how good Bryan’s directing and writing was. The actors were great and Bryan’s well placed comic writing about a recently divorced couple trapped during the zombie apocalypse was natural and pacey. Like anyone, I find comedy can be very subjective but the quality of the film and the writing made me giggle in places and smile throughout, as the ludicrous scenario of two ex-lovers realising that the end of the world is the beginning of their newfound love plays out. I can see why it’s doing well on the festival circuit. A thoroughly entertaining film.

Screenwriting is a pretty hard career to get started and maintain. What drew you to screenwriting in particular?

Actually, the director’s role in a movie was something I became aware of at a very early age. When I was as young as 7 or 8, while my friends might be able to name one of the pitchers for the Yankees, I was the kid who could tell you who directed Return of the Jedi.

Yet filmmaking remained just a hobby interest of mine - until graduate school when I started a documentary series at the local public access TV station, borrowing the station’s equipment. It wasn’t until I started looking into buying my own filmmaking equipment ($$!!) - after grad school, when I was a college professor of writing - that I had the thought, “You know, I could save a lot of money of I just wrote.”

So not until the age of 25 did I turn my attention to being a writer, and just writing short stories. And it wasn’t until years later, when I got laid off from a job that I decided to give screenwriting a try, finally marrying my love of movies with my writing.

I made my first production, the first twitter horror movie Hurst because I wanted to finally see something made and get a credit. I get the sense this was something you wanted as well – what was the main catalyst for making Annulment?

That’s exactly the reason I decided to make Annulment. After I submitted my first screenplay, The Making of Merciless, to my first screenplay competition, Shriekfest 2012, I got an e-mail from founder/director Denise Gossett, informing me I was almost a finalist for Best Screenplay. When I responded, telling her I was shocked because Merciless was my first attempt at a screenplay, she encouraged me to forge a career in screenwriting.

So I wrote more screenplays, and all through 2012 and 2013, my screenplays were winning awards and garnering fans (some of my scripts have a Twitter following), yet few seemed to be on the fast track to the big screen. So in winter 2014, being a bit impatient to see my work on the big screen, I figured it was time to write a short film that I would produce and direct.

Around that same time I was recently divorced — but it was a very amicable divorce, and my ex-wife and I remained good friends. Our divorce was so amicable, it was pretty common for her to stop by my house, just to say hello. During one of her visits, there was a huge snowstorm, and we were snowbound together for a few days. My ex-wife, observing the irony of being snowbound with me, her ex-husband, actually came up with the idea for Annulment — she said, “You know what would be a funny movie? A recently divorced couple stuck in a house together during a zombie apocalypse.”

It’s interesting how zombie tropes seem to be a part of isolationist horrors. What isolationist type stories influenced yours and are you a fan of zombie tropes in general?

I have tons of respect for the zombie genre, I think it’s smart for novice filmmakers with micro-budgets to make zombies movies, and I was very impressed by the zombie work of Sheri Fairchild and Frank Nicosia in Annulment.

And yet, ironically, zombie movies aren’t my favorite sub-genre of the Isolation Horror genre. When I think Isolation Horror, I think The Thing, and The Shining, and the third act of Jaws. I’m more intrigued by Jack London-type stories, where nature is perhaps the scariest thing in the movie. In The Thing and The Shining, characters must choose between facing down the “horror in the house” or fleeing into the wilderness, where they’ll most likely freeze to death. That’s horrifying.

And Jaws is my favorite movie of all time. I wrote Annulment using the Jaws template: there’s a surprising attack in the water at the beginning, and the characters must return to the water in the third act, where they must confront the attacker from the beginning — so there’s a bit of Jaws-like Isolation Horror on Annulment, with characters being vulnerable to attack in the middle of a large lake.

I’ve got a script called The Raft going into pre-production that could be considered isolationist. It’s a two hander body horror and the characters don’t have many places to go. It was a challenge. What challenges did you find writing a two hander in a limited location?

One of the primary challenges - and the lesson I should have learned from all the Jaws documentaries - was shooting on the water. We had to deal with waves and trying keep the camera steady, the canoe with the actors kept drifting out of the shot, and we had a hard time avoiding motor boats roaring by, making waves.

Another primary challenge was financing the production. There was some crowdfunding. But also there was some creative “bartering.”

For example, I wrote the film to take place at my family’s summer cottage — while I couldn’t really afford to pay my cast and crew much, they at least got to hang out and sleep over at a nice lake-side cottage for a few days. I also treated my cast and crew to three meals a day, prepared by my chef brother-in-law.

The biggest expense was insurance for the camera equipment. And shooting on the water bumped up the insurance costs. Additionally, I wanted to film some elaborate stunts and get footage from a plane (my mom is a licensed pilot), so it was also recommended that I pay the legal fees to create my own LLC, to cover liability, which is how my production company, Stumpf Farm Productions LLC, was born.

Was Annulment a cathartic story for you or were you simply using the adage write what you know?

Yeah, a lot of my friends and family saw the movie, and thought I was exorcising demons or writing a love letter to my ex-wife. I found this reaction so odd. I found it odd because I felt my friends and family were underestimating my imagination. Perhaps it’s because they don’t know many writers — so they don’t know it’s very possible for a writer to create characters, dialogue, and situations from scratch. I’ve had to tell people, and remind them, that the characters Harold and Kerry are fictional, composites of people I know, at best, and really have only have one similarity to my ex-wife and me — they’re divorced. I actually wrote the characters specifically for actors Mike Larose and Kat Scicluna, and based a lot of the dialogue on they way they interact with each other.

I suppose there was a little “write what you know” in regards to being stuck in a house with an ex-spouse, but other than that, I see very little of me and my ex-wife in Harold and Kerry, as I wrote them.

I always wanted to write the scariest horror that I personally would feel scared to watch, so made straight horror/supernatural story They Hide In The Dark my first ever screenplay, now in production. It’s interesting that you chose humour to convey the story; it’s a concept that’s appealing in straight horror as well. Why did you choose to create a romantic comedy horror?

Although I’m a fan of horror movies, I’ve been told my biggest strengths as a writer are comedic dialogue and action scenes. So I wanted to play to my strengths in my writing/directing debut. Plus Shaun of the Dead is one of my favorite movies — I’m a huge fan of movies that brings two very different genres together, and watching the two genres cross-pollinate each other in the telling of the story.

And I didn’t start writing Annulment thinking it would turn into a ROM-com — the romance part just developed organically. I just figured, despite the divorce, if you and your ex-spouse are the last remaining man and woman on the planet, it seems likely there would at least be some attempt at rekindling what was once there.

What are you plans or the future? Do you always want to direct your own features or is writing your main thing?

For the last few months, I’ve been in postproduction for Ghost Walks, a straight horror short I wrote and directed. But lately, I’ve been developing my optioned screenplay, Frostbite, for an interested director. Frostbite is Isolation Horror which will hopefully go into preproduction next year.

And my screenplay Commute, the screenplay you referred to at the beginning, has generated a lot of interest in a lot of my filmmaker friends here in Los Angeles - primarily because it can be best described as “Cloverfield meets Fast and Furious” - but as of right now, it’s still “on the market.”

Kristi Barnett is a screenwriter who has three options, including two horrors, in pre-production – Twitter, Facebook, Website