Cassava Films: Writing Claustrophobia

WRITING THE SCREENPLAY
It all started back in the late 1980's, when I was still in high school. One morning I had a bad dream. In the dream I was hanging out in my younger brother's bedroom with my mother and stepfather. We were working on the room - painting it, cleaning it, something like that. It was a weekend afternoon in suburban California, the weather bright and sunny outside. I looked out the window and saw the shadow of our house's overhang on the ground. Then I saw something moving - another shadow. I instantly knew that there was a man on the roof and he was going to kill us. The dream ended there, but the thought creeped me out for years to come: That it could be an ordinary Saturday, you're minding your own business, and out there, on your roof, in broad daylight, is somebody who's going to kill you. Years later, I decided to turn that unsettling feeling into a film.

After I completed my first feature Foreign Correspondents, I was anxious to make Film #2. I wrote a satirical college comedy called Sharky Baby in early 2000. Two years later I admitted that I wasn't going to find the money to shoot that film anytime soon. Still, I was dying to make something. A couple of story ideas had been kicking around in my head, but it wasn't until the end of 2001 that I decided to write a story that could be filmed cheaply, with a small cast and few locations, and in a more marketable genre than my first film. The memory of that nightmare inspired me to write a very simple story about three women in a house with a man on their roof who was trying to kill them.

Why simple? So I could focus my energies on the story and the characters instead of trying to make grand statements. Why three women? Because I find female characters more interesting to write than male characters. Why a killer? Horror movies are easier to sell! However, I didn't want to just make your average slasher flick. With a budget as low as what I was working with, I knew I'd have to shoot the picture on digital video. Handheld for reasons of aesthetics, budget and convenience. So I needed a story approach that would fit that style: Something realistic, straightforward, unfolding in real time.

I started writing Claustrophobia - which briefly had the title Stalemate - on a bunch of Post-It notes, so I could easily sort all the big events of the story sequentially. On January 8, 2002, I started writing the actual script - in my office at my former place of employment, Paramount Pictures, after business hours. (I didn't have a dependable computer at home yet.) Using my own form of discipline, which is to have as many people as possible nagging me to finish, I wound up completing the first draft on February 12, 2002. I'd never written a screenplay so quickly.

I'm the kind of writer who prefers to iron out all the story bumps before putting words to paper, so I rarely write many drafts for my scripts. Usually it's just the first draft and then a few dialogue polishes. I don't understand people who have to re-work their scripts over and over again, changing things drastically. I mean, didn't they plan their stories out ahead of time? Well, some people just feel they have to start working intuitively, reshaping their stories later. Anyway, I finished my polish on February 25 and sent it out to several friends to be read. Positive responses all around - especially from a couple of people who were going to work on the film - gave me the encouragement to move forward with the project. Casting was next.