GENRE HACKS: A Filmmaker's Life: If they're gonna be bad, they better be very, very good....

Thursday, March 24, 2011

A Filmmaker's Life: If they're gonna be bad, they better be very, very good....

A stereotypical caricature of a villain.

While writing Conan the Barbarian, I was sometimes criticized for making the villain "too sympathetic," as if slaughtering and the innocent and torturing the helpless weren't enough to make him a "bad guy."

Here is a great article by a friend and collaborator on writing complex characters who are neither all good nor all bad:

A Filmmaker's Life: If they're gonna be bad, they better be very, very good....

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Sean Hood was an active WGA screenwriter from 1998-2018. Over those two decades he was best known for horror films and swords-and-sandals movies, as well as this blog, Genre Hacks.

After graduating from Brown University with a double major in pure mathematics and studio art, Sean spent several years working in Hollywood as a set dresser, prop assistant and art director working with filmmakers as diverse as James Cameron, David Fincher and David Lynch.

He began writing and directing his own films in 1992 as a founding member of Filmmaker's Alliance. He continued his studies at USC's School of Cinematic Arts, graduating in 1997 with an MFA in production. His student film, The Shy and the Naked, won a grant from the Sloan Foundation. His short film Melancholy Baby won the Los Angeles Short Filmmaking Grant, presented to him by Eastman Kodak at the Directors Guild of America.

After finishing film school, Sean got his "big break" when his first major spec script was purchased by MTV/Paramount in 2000, which led to a deal with Dimension Films. Over the next two decades, while working on genre features such as Halloween: Resurrection and Conan The Barbarian, Sean has returned to USC to teach screenwriting at the John Wells Division of Writing for Screen and Television.

His last major film projects, written in 2017-18, included Rolling in The Deep, a horror movie about lascivious, man-eating mermaids, written for producer J. Todd Harris, director Mary Lambert, and Millennium Films, currently set to film in Malta in the spring of 2020.

GENRE HACKS

Thursday, March 24, 2011

A Filmmaker's Life: If they're gonna be bad, they better be very, very good....

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