2016 - MAZ LAHOOTI

Second Runner Up : NOMAD by Maziar Lahooti

This  year we’ve decided to check in with past Finish Line winners. Though we’re in touch with all our past winners and many semi-finalists, we’re choosing a few to, we hope, add insight, enthusiasm and substance to the life of a working writer.

2016: THE FIRST YEAR OF OUR COMPETITION

Grand Prize Winner: FREEDOM AIN’T FREE by Charlie Jones (Charlie is currently a film critic in the UK)

First Runner Up: COACHING CLASS by Adite Banerjie (Adite has published several romance novels via Harper Collins. She is currently writing for a multi-season TV show about Indian cooking and culture starring Sanjeev Kapoor. One of her Harlequin Books is being adapted into an international television series.)

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Hello Maz — What’s going on in your career now?

The actor’s strike, unfortunately, put a feature film we were casting – one I have written and am attached to direct – DIE WELL - into a holding pattern, which, if I’m being honest, doesn’t look like it will recover from. It’s still currently under option by the production company, but I’m not sure it will get up right now.

Otherwise, I was writing for various production companies for years, and even a studio. The script I got into Finish Line with – NOMAD – was under option by a prominent production company for a while, and it was further developed, but market priorities changed, and feature film crime drama – at least in Australia – lost appeal. I got the option back, kicked it around as a limited series for a while, but am now developing it as a feature film again, into something more personal.

I wrote for Warner Brothers studios for about a year and a half and did several drafts of a really cool science fiction piece, but then when the development executive who was overseeing the project left, interest in the project lapsed.

I spent years on another family crime drama for another prominent production company, with a great director attached, which did turn into a fantastic script, but unfortunately, the script’s themes were a bit too related to current events going on at the time, and they began to feel stale by the time the script was ready. So that didn’t happen either.

I’ve spent time in writer’s rooms in development for various shows, which I enjoy but I honestly don’t find that conducive to my own writer’s process. Unless everyone in the room knows each other well, there’s always weird politics going on. And there’s a lot of tokenization, which comes with weird expectations from brown people. A lot of people seem to have formed ideas about who we are, or who we’re supposed to be, and when the reality of how diverse we actually are among ourselves becomes evident, many of us who don’t fit certain criteria (I don’t know what they are), become less interesting. This is fine, because it’s disappointing to realize you’re not there for your writing, but because of something else that you have no control over.

I also directed a feature film called BELOW with Anthony LaPaglia in 2019, which, although it had a distributor, and can be found on Amazon Prime, iTunes, YouTube rentals and on DVD, was released literally when COVID hit, so that just utterly killed its chances, though it was on streaming for a while. We managed to get a handful of reviews, all of which were good, but its momentum was squashed. And the subject matter, at the time, was kind of sensitive so there was some controversy around it that the producers and distributor backed away from. I didn’t write the feature, I was attached purely as a director, and it was a tonally heightened, really dark dramatic comedy, with an absolutely fantastic cast, so I valued the experience. But I also learned a lot about the state of film marketing and distribution that I didn’t like. At least in Australia.

Good thing about all this relative failure, as I got paid for it, sometimes even well, and it’s improved my writing massively. And I’m also increasingly writing novels (novelizations of my simpler features, of which I have so many by now), which is a big learning curve.

I also got tired of waiting in option and development hell, so I’ve written a super simple pilot for a super simple series, orbiting themes I have the experience to know would get whittled out if I took it through the traditional development process. I recently shot it, planning to use it as a proof of concept for investors (the whole show requires such little resources, I can almost shoot it without compromise for the same costs as a podcast series), but also a short film.

It’s a freeing experience since after years of writing, essentially for others, I’ve a noticed a heap of themes and subjects and general story territory that every bit of industry incentive steers us away from. Doing it completely independently and having developed the writing and directing skillset to be able to write compelling low resource driven content I can shoot over a few weekends, is kind of healing. I’m just letting sound post do its thing before I put it out, which I’ll put into a pitch package for producers, but also put out to festivals.

It’s all designed around a template where each episode focuses around a high stakes interview/interrogation, so it’s dialogue driven. It’s an idea that actually took me years to develop since it’s incredibly difficult to make that compelling cause the content itself has to be really interesting, which usually means educational too. But the podcast boom, and my addiction to podcasts, feel like they infused me with an innovative way to integrate some of the really engaging aspects of those podcast conversational interviews into aspects of the dramatic dialogue – the result being this idea.

Anyways, that’s what I just did, and what I’m doing (I have a 2nd episode, which tags onto the first, the two as one acting as a feature length pilot – or just an indie feature), which I’ll shoot next year some time if I still find myself in this industry limbo option hell. I kind of don’t mind because I feel like I’m finally getting to utilize my skills to make what I actually want, and say what I want to say, which, oddly, for me, mostly got whittled away on anything I ended up developing with producers.

I’m also story producing observational documentary TV shows, right now, pretty much full time, which is great because it’s an easy pivot for a screenwriter/director, pays well, utilizes most of the same story skills, and is a crash course (for me) in a form that I can utilize for my own dramatic writing.

I feel like with the rise of AI, high cost content will become increasingly difficult to justify, so as I venture into what I’m thinking of as phase 2 of my independent filmmaking career, I figure I may as well master the resources and forms that will probably be the last ones to go (the documentary form that requires real subjects, that is).

If this sounds traumatizing. I mean... it has been. But nobody said the life of an artist is easy.

What happened between then and now to move you forward in your career?

Honestly, my career feels like it moves forward when I decide to just do my own thing. Write what I want. Make what I want. Then somehow the industry seems to find me, and coerce me back into that whole thing. And then it goes well for a while until I kind of stop doing my own thing because all my time goes to work I’m doing as part of the “industry”. Then the work dries up, and I go back to doing my own thing, which is the only reason I ever started doing this.

One noticeable difference is that when I do my own thing, things seem to get done, and get done well. When the industry gets involved, a big part of my creative energy goes to navigating whatever all that is supposed to be, which I’m not saying isn’t important... for “industry”, but it does get in the way of good film-making.

That said, I still have my manager, Josh Kesselman at Sugar 23 for American stuff, and I still have my agent Needeya Islam, at Cameron’s, for Australian stuff, and that whole time, I’ve been steadily improving my scripts by sneakily submitting all my WIP’s to the Finish Line Competition for their fantastic notes.  

Get those notes by entering HERE .