You know him as Agent Phil Coulson from The Avengers and “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.“, but Clark Gregg is more than a geek icon, he’s also the screenwriter of the hit thriller What Lies Beneath and the writer/director of Choke and this weekend’s new release, Trust Me. Gregg stars as Howard, a former child star who now works as an agent to other children in his position. When he meets the most talented young actress anyone’s seen in years he thinks it’s his ticket to the big time, but she’s got a secret that forces him to go above and beyond the line of duty.
I sat down with Clark Gregg at a steak house in Los Angeles (sans the steaks, unfortunately) to discuss his screenwriting style, the eight-hour film treatment that spawned Trust Me, and finally get some teasing tidbits about Season 2 of “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” Enjoy!
CraveOnline: I feel like this might sounds a little bit pretentious, but I feel like we’ve all felt a little bit like Howard.
Clark Gregg: No, I say the same. We’re both pretentious. [Laughs.]
I found myself, even at the beginning, when it was playing gentler, my nerves were getting raised just because he’s having such a stressful day.
That’s funny, that’s so perceptive. So much of the process, especially the editing process, was about keeping the noir in the opening and keeping some of the lightheartedness through the end so it stayed a thing.
There’s a Sunset Boulevard vibe to this. There is an old school moral and ethical quagmire of Hollywood element to it. It’s always interesting to me that people within the industry can be so… I mean, there’s a cynicism to this. It’s very dark and very dramatic, but the same time very hopeful. I feel like I do with a lot of characters in noirs, where I just want them to turn out okay, and navigate this really dangerous path that they’re on.
Yeah, I think you put your finger on the core element of sorting out Howard’s journey, which is like, what does it mean to turn out okay? And does it mean a fully happy ending? What’s the currency of his redemption, is it about getting something back that he lost? Does that mean he necessarily survives?
You open the film with a moment from the end, and then you flash back. We’re wondering is it going to turn out exactly the way it looks or is there going to be some sort of dramatic reversal? “Oh no, he just spilled cranberry sauce on his shirt!” Did you feel like we had to see that early in order to get a sense of the tone the movie was going to go?
Yeah, exactly right. It did. It was always a part of the script. I had to modulate it in the editing to kind of… how much do people need to understand where this is headed? It’s funny because people are like me: you kind of forget. You put it out of your mind a little bit, you know what I mean? You watch Titanic and, god, I hope this boat isn’t going to sink. And yet you watch the comedy scenes differently. I found that the more information I gave you about where the movie might be headed, it shifts what people are watching from, “Oh boy, what’s going to happen next?” to “How is this going to go down?” And you watch the scene with a different focus.
There is always a sense of how we think a movie is going to go. Even just from the cover. The cover for Trust Me is sort of friendly, or the…
The poster.
The poster is friendly. I wonder if – and I realize that you don’t always have control over this – but I wonder if you’re thinking “we’re going to get them in with this friendly poster, and then oh, drama!”
How can I artfully and yet honestly answer this… [Thinks.] There’s a lot, and in this case so much that I have control over, and I get to kind of realize my vision. And yet when it comes to a point where someone’s putting up money to release the movie, they know more about how to get people interested in seeing the movie than I do and I have to, to a certain extent, defer. And I also… it’s a complex movie. Sometimes when you try to market a complex movie it ends up just being confusing and no one wants to see it.
They don’t know what to make of it.
They don’t know what to make of it and no one goes. So you know, I try to really defer in terms of… there’s parts of this that we really want to show people. I feel like the trailer, I felt like the trailer really gave a hint as to the more emotional parts of the movie.
When you write a screenplay do you go just purely from what you want to see as an artist, or do you think to yourself, “I’ve got to put something marketable in here. At some point somebody’s got to put up money for this?”
I think I try to keep that kind of calculation out of the phase of creating it. It’s almost impossible if you think about it. I’m never going to make this if this guy now ends up going to the space station. But definitely after you’ve done that you go, okay, I think it’s indulgent, dilettantish t go “Look, this is my thing, man. Deal with it.” There’s a reality not just in the writing process but in everyday shooting to go, “Okay, well that’s what I intended. What’s the essence of that and how can I make that work in terms of the resources I have?” Because otherwise I can sit there with all these great ideas, being another guy ranting about my movie that didn’t get made in Hollywood, or I can suck it up and take half the budget, less time than the first time, and get a chance to make it. You don’t get to stand around going, “Oh, no, you don’t understand. This part was going to work so much better if they didn’t take away all my money.” No one gives a shit. You’ve got to do the best with what you have.
That ties into some of the stuff you’re talking about in the movie. Howard is torn between pragmatic success, or he could do things the right way. In the end it seems like it comes down on “going with your” heart being a little more important.
A little bit. There’s to me, it’s one of the many benefits of working with smart people who are friends. I bring Felicity Huffman in to play Agnes Dieter, you know, a couple of scenes but she finds a real depth there and says, yes, but this plan he has to save the day won’t work. And she points out that there’s a pragmatic take on this. Yeah, you’re going to do the right thing and it’s going to hurt everyone more.
You have a lot of people you worked with before in this movie. Did you write for them specifically?
Sort of. Different ones to different levels. I find that I kind of write, I don’t know, I write with the characters in mind and then later when I start to go into the next phase of it I kind of go, “Oh, I know who might be great for this. Let’s see if I can get them interested.” But at the same time you want to send them a script that you feel like they’re going to say, “Oh, I see how I can do this.” So I sort of tailor it.
But when you’re writing, that’s one of the things they tell you in screenwriting classes, to picture who exactly will be saying it and that keeps everyone’s voices different.
It really helps, but there’s more freedom to it than that. I’ll be writing something and go, “This is for a 28-year-old Chris Walken, but this moment of his is totally Frank Langella.” Do you know what I mean? I’ll go, “And that moment is when he’s acting a little bit like Patty Duke.”
Do you have influences in your writing? Because I could look at this script and see, “Oh, he’s worked with David Mamet a lot. There’s an element of that I could see in the dilemma Howard ends up by the end of the film.”
Definitely Mamet was a big influence. His writing I fell in love with when he was my teacher in college. I’ve been lucky to work with some amazing writers. Aaron Sorkin, Paul Thomas Anderson, there’s a lot of writers that I think I’ve been lucky to say a few of their words, and then I don’t know. I’ve kind of been trying for a couple of years to have those be in there and really let my own characters define the way they talk, the way I hear the world. That’s what I’m after.
That’s what it should be. You’re the artist. You’re expressing.
Right.
Was this the only film you could have made after Choke or were there other projects?
No, this started… Well, I don’t know. It’s the only one I had. I knew I wanted to write an original. I started to write this very P.T. Anderson or Nicole Holofcener influenced multi-character kind of… I don’t know, L.A. story about suddenly finding myself in my 40s with a kid in Los Angeles, and I wanted to write something about that and I had these characters and these stories and I don’t know where they came from. They all just kind of kept swooping out of this bizarre 50-page outline that was going to be an eight-hour movie about grown ups and children and children who were grown ups and grown ups who were children, and innocence in Los Angeles. And I realized it would be an eight-hour movie and no one would make my second film.
So again I got pragmatic and I said there’s one of these that sticks out, is tonally different. I think it could be a noir and the others aren’t, and that became Trust Me. I just pulled it out and said I want to make another film. I want to continue to learn. I want to make a second film, and I don’t want to peddle around an eight-hour non-makeable thing for ten years.
Are there other characters you came up with in that process that you could turn into their own motion picture, and you could have Howard come in from the side just for one scene and never talk about it?
That’s a great idea. I thought about that. I do have scenes where Howard walks in. I definitely started to… There’s two things that I’m considering doing next and one of them is the remaining six stories, and finding a way for them to bleed back and forth. Although I kind of wonder if it isn’t an eight-hour cable series.
You could always shoot it and cut it down. That happens a lot in those movies, where there’s a lot more to Magnolia than we actually ended up seeing.
Oh, I think there’s a lot more.
Right? Or The Thin Red Line. There were whole major actors who were cut out of that movie.
I know!
All you have to do is cast wonderful people and just slice ‘em out without mercy.
I definitely cut 15 minutes out of this movie. It’s only 85 minutes long without the credits, or 84. I love to cut stuff. It’s really where you find the movie, but I actually think sometimes that if you try to cut an eight-hour story down to 90 minutes it doesn’t make sense to anyone.
Did you see Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret?
I haven’t seen Margaret yet. I’m dying to see it.
It’s so good!
I know. I just bought it!
The extended cut is so much better.
He’s also a guy from my era of New York theater whom I admire tremendously.
Tell me everything that happens on Season 2 of “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”
If anyone in the world knew that I would possibly share that, but I had a meeting with them and they’re all saying, “Okay, we have a big job so we’re going to rest for two weeks.” They just want a vacation. When they come back they’ve got a couple of new writers. What I gleaned from that meeting was, I have the great honor to be he director of an organization that effectively is outlawed and no longer exists, and yet I think Agent Coulson takes being given this task seriously enough that one can bet that next year is going to get low-fi, old school, brass knuckles. And also maybe there’ll be some middle of the night alien screenwriting going on as well.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
