Writer/Director Statement

I’ve been a screenwriter for a decade, and have had the opportunity to work with some terrific and deservedly acclaimed directors. Writing for directors is much like acting for directors; you come into the process with your own ideas, but ultimately your vision is subordinate to their vision. That’s not whining—I love my job. I work a lot because I’m good at hiding my own voice. You want it funnier, scarier, more romantic? I can do that. Pushing words around is a craft. It’s like acting, but with more typing.

As you’ll see, the film blurs the traditional boundaries between real and unreal, scripted and unscripted. The whole story couldn’t be told on the page. It needed to be written as it happened, cameras rolling.

Screenwriting is often compared with architecture: the writer provides the blueprints, but he’s not that involved with constructing the final product. By that analogy, The Nines is the house I built for myself. I had terrific collaborators, but the structure itself is deliberately and peculiarly designed to fit me. Consider this the housewarming party. It’s a pleasure to invite you in.


John August






The Nines consists of three inter-linked stories, each featuring the same actors in different —and sometimes overlapping— roles.

“The Prisoner” tells the story of a troubled television star (Ryan Reynolds) who finds himself under house arrest, with his chipper publicist (Melissa McCarthy) and disillusioned next-door neighbor (Hope Davis) providing his only links to the outside world. Mysterious events lead him to question whether one or both women are deceiving him about the nature of his incarceration.

“Reality Television” is a half-hour episode of “Behind the Screen,” a Project Greenlight-style documentary series tracking the process of creating a network television drama. Having shot the pilot, creator/showrunner Gavin Taylor (also Ryan Reynolds) faces post-production with the help of his best friend (and lead actress) Melissa McCarthy and development VP Susan Howard (Hope Davis).

“Knowing” finds an acclaimed videogame designer (also Ryan Reynolds) and his wife (Melissa McCarthy) facing car trouble deep in the woods. Their daughter (Elle Fanning) uncovers information which leads to a difficult and irrevocable choice.

Together, the three stories form a single narrative that explores the relationships between author and character, actor and role, creator and creation. Alternately funny and unsettling, The Nines is like a riddle where the answer is the question: “How does it all add up?”


An Unconventional Structure

Like John August’s first film, 1999’s critically-acclaimed Go, The Nines is divided into three named sections. But whereas Go’s non-linear narrative found time looping back on itself, The Nines is even more ambitious, with its three stories seeming to exist in parallel realities.

“With Big Fish, I got to play around with levels of reality,” says August, referring to his adaptation of Daniel Wallace’s novel, which Tim Burton directed in 2004.
“There was the real world of the father and son, but also the fantasy world of the father’s stories. As the story moved back and forth between them, you realized the boundaries weren’t quite as defined as you’d assumed.”

For The Nines, August wanted to push the split between reality/unreality further.
“The three stories all take place in the ‘real world,’ yet they’re overlapping in impossible ways. Gary is living in Gavin’s house; Gavin’s television pilot seems to be about Gabriel. And all three characters are played by the same actor (Ryan Reynolds), for reasons that aren’t at all coincidence.”

August says the impetus for the overlapping structure came from watching—and misunderstanding—a dubbed Hong Kong drama. “The movie was really two separate stories, but as I watched it, I kept trying to make the pieces fit together. I think that’s human nature. You’re constantly trying to connect the dots, even if they’re completely random.”

For The Nines, August wanted to use the audience’s desire to draw connections as one of the “engines” of the film. “As you watch it, you notice aspects that are repeating between the three sections: a line of dialogue, an image, or a tiny action. It’s almost like rhyming. Or music. There are three different verses, but it’s all one song.”

Inspiration(s)
As suits a movie with three storylines, The Nines has three distinct origins.


► Part One: The Prisoner

It began with Melissa McCarthy, who had a small role in August’s first produced film, Go. Explains August, “I liked her so much in dailies I decided to write a short film starring her, even though I barely knew her.”

McCarthy was surprised by the attention. “I ran into John at Starbucks, and he said he’d written a short and wanted me to be in it. I thought he wanted me to play a small part, but it was basically all me.”

The short film, God, is a comedy about a young woman named Margaret’s tumultuous friendship with the Almighty. “It became my reel, basically. To this day, casting directors will pull me aside and quote lines from it.”

McCarthy went on to play roles in many of August’s projects—“D.C.”, Charlie’s Angels and its sequel. “I try to write her into everything,” explains August. “But since she became a regular on ‘Gilmore Girls,’ it’s been hard to get her free.”

August wrote The Nines expressly for McCarthy, including the Margaret character from the short film. “Before I wrote it, I sat down with Melissa and figured out some backstory about what’s happened to the character in the intervening years.

Margaret is lots of fun, but kind of lives to take care of other people, which to me screams publicist.”

Part One finds Margaret taking care of a television actor who’s found himself placed under house arrest. As their relationship develops, it becomes clear that
Margaret knows more than she’s letting on.

“I read an article about house arrest a few years ago, and how Los Angeles was testing a new voice-recognition system,” says August. “I liked the idea of a computer confirming someone’s identity, when the character himself started to question who he was.”

The third main character in Part One is the next-door neighbor, a new mom who feels trapped by her infant daughter. August could relate: “My partner and I had just had our first child. A newborn is like a cuddly warden: you’re torn between your instincts to nurture and to flee.”


► Part Two: Reality Television

The second part of The Nines began with a nervous breakdown in 2000.

August had co-created the television drama “D.C.” for The WB network, and found himself living on airplanes, flying from the editorial offices in Los Angeles to Toronto and Washington D.C., where the show was shot. But the real drama was behind the scenes, where tensions were high between the studio, the network and the other executive producer. August was the “showrunner” in title, but crucial decisions were often being made without him: “I was in ostensible control of an out-of-control show. I remember the studio sent an executive up to Toronto to try to make peace between me and the other executive producer. As he was talking to me, I sort of floated out of my body. I heard myself saying things, but I wasn’t really there.”

More troubling, August started to have difficulty distinguishing between the real world and the show. “Because of the stress, because of the hours, you start to exist only for the show. You hear a song on the radio, and you’re thinking, ‘How can I use that on the show?’ Someone will say something to you, and you’re already rewriting it in your head as dialogue.”

The television showrunner is in a unique position, explains August. “Essentially, you’re responsible for maintaining this alternate universe 24/7 in your head. With features, you’re writing scripts months or years before they shoot. But with TV, it’s immediate. I would write a scene on the kitchen set, then we’d be shooting it an hour later, and editing it the next day. You have a god-like amount of control, but also a god-like amount of responsibility.”

Before shooting the pilot, August had been approached by a filmmaking friend, who proposed shooting a behind-the-scenes series much like Project Greenlight. “I regret not saying yes,” says August. “The shouting matches were much better than the show I’d written.”

Ultimately, August got fired from the show he’d created. Back in Los Angeles, he felt responsible both to the characters he created and the cast he’d employed, unable to do right by either of them.

“The actors had all become friends. I’d even written Melissa McCarthy into the show. She’d signed on as a favor, and now she was locked into this doomed show that I wasn’t even writing.”

But it was leaving behind the imaginary universe he’d created that was hardest for August. “To me, those characters were stuck in a kind of limbo, their creator having abandoned them. They weren’t my only literary orphans—most of the characters a screenwriter creates exist only in 12-pt Courier. But in a very real sense, I felt a responsibility to them.”

August’s experience on “D.C.” and two other television projects became the inspiration for Part Two, which consists of a reality TV program documenting the process of creating a drama pilot. “Gavin is a fictionalized version of me—very
slightly fictionalized, honestly. He lives in my house; he has my dogs. He’s basically me when I was single and childless.”

Melissa McCarthy plays Gavin’s friend and muse...Melissa McCarthy. “Before I gave her the script, I had to warn her that she’d be playing herself. That tends to freak an actor out. But I knew I wanted to smudge the edges of fiction and non-fiction. Her backstory with Gavin is her backstory with me. Her husband is her husband.”

The third character in the section is Susan Howard, a development executive who August stresses is not based on any one person. “She’s a composite of a lot of development people I’ve worked with,” says August. “She’s smart, ambitious, passionate and afraid of losing her job. Ultimately, that’s a rough combination.”


► Part Three: Knowing

The third section of The Nines is the pilot Gavin would have been shooting in Part Two. The action follows a family facing car trouble in the woods.

“It’s a pretty straightforward thriller premise,” says August. “An ordinary day takes a dark turn.”

But it’s the details that make the day-trip-gone-wrong distinct. The father is a videogame designer—like Part Two’s Gavin, a creator. And his mute daughter, Noelle, discovers secrets that suggest a dead battery is the least of the family’s troubles.

The outdoor setting was one of the main draws for August. “The last pilot I shot was largely outdoors, shooting in Vancouver as a stand-in for Alaska. There’s something very unsettling about the forest. Something’s always lurking in the shadows.” Going outside was also an opportunity to expand the scale of the final section. “The movie gets claustrophobic in Part One, and Part Two is a lot of ‘people-talking-in-rooms.’ I wanted to take away the walls and give a sense of space and isolation.”

In Part Three, the overlapping aspects of the three sections finally come together.
“But the answers lead to some bigger questions,” says August, “which extend beyond the boundaries of the movie.”

August likens the feeling at the end of the film to waking from a dream. “Sometimes on a Sunday afternoon, you’ll fall asleep while it’s still light out, but then you wake up after it’s dark. It’s unsettling, but it’s kind of exciting. You’re not sure where the edges of reality are.”

August says he’s fine leaving certain questions unanswered. “You walk out of some movies and they’re just done. There’s nothing left to say. What’s exciting to me is when I can spend the next two hours debating and discussing the film with others, either over coffee or online.” Indeed, the film is deliberately set up to suggest alternate possibilities: “[The movie] exists in sort of an expanding universe. There are exactly 87 other stories I didn’t tell, and that’s an invitation for viewers to come up with their own.”

THE NINES, directed by John August is released on DVD on 31st March.