Martyn Burke
Edited by Robert J. Elisberg
Screenwriter and novelist Martyn Burke both wrote and directed the TV movie for TNT, Pirates of Silicon Valley, about computer kings Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. He has also written Animal Farm, Pentagon Wars and The Second Civil War. His novels include Laughing War, The Commissar's Report, Ivory Joe and Tiara.
WGA: Were there any movies, TV shows or books that first got you interested in writing?
Martyn Burke: When I was growing up in Toronto, the large British population, of which my parents were a part, would often go to the International Cinema on Yonge Street where they showed the old Ealing comedies. I was raised on the great early comedies of Alec Guiness and Peter Sellers like The Lavender Hill Mob and The Ladykillers.
What also fascinated me were documentaries. Canada has had a long tradition of documentaries from the National Film Board and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. So deciding to write about what I knew, I headed for the CBC as soon as I got out of school and started roaming the world doing documentaries on everything from wars, the mafia, and revolutions to the domestic difficulties of a working family.
WGA: How do you work?
MB: I try to write every morning from around 9:30 to 12:30. I take the afternoons off and pretend to be doing constructive things. Then I start again around 5:30 and work till about 8:30 at night. Unless necessary, I don't believe in marathons. Your subconscious doesn't have a chance to contribute its share--which I believe is about two-thirds of what you end up with on a good piece of writing. When I'm not writing is when I'm doing most of my writing.
WGA: Are you a good procrastinator?
MB: It's taken me about four months to get around to answering your questions so on the face of it I'm pretty much hung out to dry on this issue. But--I have my own convenient rationale. I'm pretty good at mentally establishing a list of my work priorities and anything that's number two or three or lower on that list gets the Scarlett O'Hara treatment: I'll think about it tomorrow.
WGA: What sort of characters interest you?
MB: Flawed ones, obviously. (Which could be a way of saying practically everybody.) But in my pantheon of flawed characters are those who fit the old Shakespearian definition of tragedy: they know their own folly and weaknesses and yet cannot correct them. When I wrote Pirates of Silicon Valley the young Steve Jobs emerged out of the research as a figure of towering brilliance and volcanic self-destructiveness. Dramatically speaking, he was a gift.
WGA: How do you work through parts of a script where you hit a roadblock in the story?
MB: The roadblocks for me usually come when I'm outlining the script before I start writing it. It's a time of high tension for me because I'm mentally on the wire trying to keep from plunging into the abyss. In order to keep a fine balance of chaos and discipline--both of which I maintain are necessary to write anything of value--I try to play out the story in my head beforehand. If something isn't working I try to rely on the writer's best friend, his (or her) unconscious. I go for walks. I go hiking. I pretend to be engaged in conversations. I pretend to be paying attention at meetings. All the normal, aberrant things any writer must do in order to survive until you can sit down in front of the computer and hope the wheels have been silently turning while you were away.
WGA: What is your most memorable experience as a writer?
MB: Walking around Paris banging into walls for a week while I was totally stuck half way through writing my second novel The Commissar's Report--which I later adapted for Universal. It wasn't just being stuck, it was an existential (this was Paris after all) catastrophe. I was convinced that I'd been an idiot for ever thinking I could get a novel out of this fractured story. Nothing worked. I kept walking the streets expecting that "Voila!" moment. Never happened. So I just sat down and got on with it. And a week later wondered what the problem had been.
WGA: Was there any particular writer who acted as a mentor to you?
MB: I'm eternally suspicious of mentors, writing teachers, writing courses and all the rest of it. Writing courses to me are the Henry Ford school of creativity. Ford created the assembly line by figuring out that you can take an object, break it down into its component parts where it can be studied, taught, reproduced and then reassembled into basically the same creation over and over again. I sometimes think I see his ghost hanging over a lot of movies and scripts.
WGA: Why do you write?
MB: Because I have to. I've written since I was in my early teens. When they finally decode DNA I'm sure they'll find a writer gene. At the same time as I was writing, I was also fascinated by cameras, wanting to go into films. In my teens, I went to the Toronto Camera Club one evening expecting to be thrilled by hanging around all these people who were passionate about photography. I walked out three hours later with one guiding rule: No hobbies! Make your hobbies your work. All these people spent their lives working in jobs they mostly hated and once a week they'd huddle together in those few moments doing what they loved.
Read script pages from Pirates of Silicon Valley
Copyright 2000, Robert J. Elisberg. All rights reserved. Robert J. Elisberg has written about computers for such publications as C|NET, PC Games, CD-ROM Today, Yahoo! Internet Life, E! Online and the Writers Guild journal, Written By. A screenwriter, he is a member of the WGA Website editorial board.
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