(Highlights) MICHAEL MAREN

Michael Maren is a journalist, filmmaker and former aid worker. He’s written scripts for HBO, Sony Pictures, and many independent producers. His film, A Short History of Decay was a funny and moving examination of a writer  Bryan Greenberg visiting his ailing parents, played by Linda Lavin and  Harris Yulin. His forthcoming film is an adaptation of Chris Belden’s novel Shriver. It’s a comedy set at a writers conference and stars Michael Shannon, Kate Hudson, Don Johnson, and Zach Braff.  Maren has taught screenwriting at Wesleyan University, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Taos Summer Writers’ Workshop, and co-directs the Sirenland Writers Conference. He created the film screening/discussion series Under the Influence: Writers on Film.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I don't know how you like to define yourself, you're a writer, you're a director. You came up as a foreign war correspondent, as a volunteer. It's quite an interesting trajectory, I think, for anyone who might want to become a director. Could you describe how you fell in love with telling stories?

MICHAEL MAREN

When I was in fifth grade. We used to have a little creative writing class, and people would write stories. And I don't know why I did this, but I remember when I was in the class, they started their student stories with–so I woke up in the morning and I went to the... I just thought, I'm nine years old, I just cut to the chase and talked about being in the air with the go-cart rolling over, and the teacher was blown away. In fifth grade, she said, "You're a really good writer." And I never forgot that.

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So, I'm very, very much a natural journalist in that way. I had a lot of opportunities to get involved in things overseas, whether it was to stay in aid work or to work for, when I got out of graduate school, offers to like join financial institutions and World Bank kind of stuff or investment banking. I have a masters from Columbia, but I took a job for seventeen thousand dollars a year writing for this little magazine about Africa.

And it gave me the opportunity to keep traveling and keep reporting. And I just loved it. I loved it for years and years. And part of my interest in Africa came from watching movies set in Africa as a kid. And I actually tried my hand at writing screenplays during the 1980s a couple of times just by myself and actually trying to option them. I was reporting out of Uganda in the mid-80s when Yoweri Museveni, who's now the president, was still a guerrilla leader fighting against the regime.

And during that time, I was sort of sleeping outside and doing a lot of stuff. I read a copy of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, and I thought, "Wow, this would make a great movie." When I got back to New York, I at one point I called, but I ended up realizing that the rights had been owned for many, many years, and I wasn't about to get the rights to make the screenplay.

My mentor in journalism was it was a guy named Richard Ben Cramer, one of the great journalists of all time. And I met Richard in Africa in the early 1980s. And Richard taught me one thing. He said every five minutes as a journalist, stop and ask yourself, what's the story? What's the story? And the point is, you can walk into any world and kind of get lost in the details. But when you know the story you're trying to tell, you know what the details are and pay attention to them.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Katherine Vasiliev. Digital Media Coordinator is Yu Young Lee. “Winter Time” was composed by Nikolas Anadolis* and performed by the Athenian Trio.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process.

MICHAEL MAREN

Michael Maren is a journalist, filmmaker and former aid worker. He’s written scripts for HBO, Sony Pictures, and many independent producers. His film, A Short History of Decay was a funny and moving examination of a writer  Bryan Greenberg visiting his ailing parents, played by Linda Lavin and  Harris Yulin. His forthcoming film is an adaptation of Chris Belden’s novel Shriver. It’s a comedy set at a writers conference and stars Michael Shannon, Kate Hudson, Don Johnson, and Zach Braff.  Maren has taught screenwriting at Wesleyan University, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Taos Summer Writers’ Workshop, and co-directs the Sirenland Writers Conference. He created the film screening/discussion series Under the Influence: Writers on Film.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I don't know how you like to define yourself, you're a writer, you're a director. You came up as a foreign war correspondent, as a volunteer. It's quite an interesting trajectory, I think, for anyone who might want to become a director. Could you describe how you fell in love with telling stories?

MICHAEL MAREN

When I was in fifth grade. We used to have a little creative writing class, and people would write stories. And I don't know why I did this, but I remember when I was in the class, they started their student stories with–so I woke up in the morning and I went to the... I just thought, I'm nine years old, I just cut to the chase and talked about being in the air with the go-cart rolling over, and the teacher was blown away. In fifth grade, she said, "You're a really good writer." And I never forgot that.

-

So, I'm very, very much a natural journalist in that way. I had a lot of opportunities to get involved in things overseas, whether it was to stay in aid work or to work for, when I got out of graduate school, offers to like join financial institutions and World Bank kind of stuff or investment banking. I have a masters from Columbia, but I took a job for seventeen thousand dollars a year writing for this little magazine about Africa.

And it gave me the opportunity to keep traveling and keep reporting. And I just loved it. I loved it for years and years. And part of my interest in Africa came from watching movies set in Africa as a kid. And I actually tried my hand at writing screenplays during the 1980s a couple of times just by myself and actually trying to option them. I was reporting out of Uganda in the mid-80s when Yoweri Museveni, who's now the president, was still a guerrilla leader fighting against the regime.

And during that time, I was sort of sleeping outside and doing a lot of stuff. I read a copy of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, and I thought, "Wow, this would make a great movie." When I got back to New York, I at one point I called, but I ended up realizing that the rights had been owned for many, many years, and I wasn't about to get the rights to make the screenplay.

My mentor in journalism was it was a guy named Richard Ben Cramer, one of the great journalists of all time. And I met Richard in Africa in the early 1980s. And Richard taught me one thing. He said every five minutes as a journalist, stop and ask yourself, what's the story? What's the story? And the point is, you can walk into any world and kind of get lost in the details. But when you know the story you're trying to tell, you know what the details are and pay attention to them.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Katherine Vasiliev. Digital Media Coordinator is Yu Young Lee. “Winter Time” was composed by Nikolas Anadolis* and performed by the Athenian Trio.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process.

ROB NIXON

Rob Nixon is a nonfiction writer and the Barron Family Professor in Environmental Humanities at Princeton University. He is the author of four books, most recently Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Nixon is currently writing a book on environmental martyrs and the defense of the great tropical forests. He writes frequently for the New York Times. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Guardian, The Nation, London Review of Books, The Village Voice, Aeon and elsewhere. Much of his writing engages environmental justice struggles in the global South. He has a particular interest in understanding the roles that artists can play in effecting change at the interface with social movements.

ROB NIXON

There are some recurrent threads in indigenous cultures across the world. One of those is–We don’t own the land. The land owns us. It’s not seen as property first. It’s seen as inalienable in that sense because you don’t own it in the first place. What we’re seeing now is a kind of movement where more and more indigenous people are living kind of amphibious lives. On the one hand, they have their indigenous cosmologies. And the other hand, in order to increase the likelihood that they can keep out big corporations, mining, logging, and so forth, their presence on the land needs to be bureaucratically recognized is to have recognition that “this is your property.” So in one sense many of these communities I find are both inside and outside private property regimes.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk & Phil Kehoe with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Phil Kehoe. Digital Media Coordinator is Phoebe Brous.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).