Brent Hanley is an everyman who remembers his roots. Slow to higher education, he warmed up to it out of his passion for the written word. As the writer of the screenplay for Frailty, he managed to create a central character simply called "Dad," played by Bill Paxton, who is not what he seems--a loving father who believes himself the hand of God and the killer of demons. What is amazing about Hanley's Dad character is that in addition to being a brutal killer he is both tragic and appealing but not for the reasons one might think. Obviously, the appeal is partially derived from Paxton's believable wholesome performance (his best work since One False Move).

After talking with Hanley, however, I'm convinced that the depth of Paxton's performance was more than acting ability. Hanley thought this thing through and it couldn't be literal or blatant, but, rather, subtle and lovely. Brent Hanley spoke to me from Austin, Texas by telephone. Our DVD review of Frailty is available by clicking here.

JWH: If IMDB is right, you’re six days older than me. What were you doing before writing screenplays full time?

BH: Actually, I was a bit of a loser.

JWH: Say it ain’t so!

BH: Dropped out of high school, just kind of avoided work until my early 20's. Married my wife, my high school sweetheart, we moved to Maine, spent two years in Maine actually becoming a writer working as an auditor in a hotel in Portland Maine.

JWH: I’ve done that job.

BH: Oh, have you?

JWH: Yeah, were you working for someone named Patel?

BH: No, no...I used to work for a little hotel there, and I did their nightly ledgers, their nightly and weekly ledgers.

JWH: Very, very, very boring work.

BH: Yeah, it is. It’s very, very boring. But also, you know, it was really easy as a writer because what it did is I had an 8-hour shift, and I usually worked for about an hour and a half, and then I’d have the remaining time to work on writing. So I wrote novels in Maine, which I never tried to publish or anything - a 3,000 hand-written page novel.

JWH: It’s an exegesis.

BH: Yeah, it really is! I’ve told people, I think I’m going to try and get buried with it. If I still have it, I’ve never tried to do anything with it.

JWH: Remember Wonder Boys? Have you seen that movie?

BH: Yeah, it was awesome. From there, I went down–in Maine. I always wanted to be a writer, since I was 12. Around 10 or 12, somewhere around there I wrote my first short story. And I’ve always wanted to be a writer...even when I quit school. I worked in bookstores; I self-educated myself. Basically, in Maine, probably around 1994, I decided that I wanted to write film, and that I wanted to be a writer/director. I went to school, I went from Maine to Boston, and I lied and wrote a really great letter to them as to why they should let me in their school. I happened to get this angel of a woman who read my essay and decided to take a shot on me and gave me all kinds of grant money to get into the school.

JWH: Wow...

BH: My dad, he basically hit some fortune and was able to help me as well. And then my wife, of course, who worked, and I worked while I went to school.

JWH: She put you through school.

BH: I went and got a GED. I lied to them and told them I had one, and then I went and got it a week before classes started.

JWH: Holy shit, that’s wonderful!

BH: Yeah...it’s so sad, though, really, to me, it’s such a sad statement on public education. The GED was...I didn’t even study for it. And I’m not boasting, I didn’t have time, I was working a full time job.

JWH: Well, in your defense, you’re a genius, right?

BH: Yeah, right! I did that, and then got into school, did the 4-year program in about 2, from Boston, it took me until 1995. I came out to LA in 1997.

JWH: What was the name of the school?

BH: Emerson College, in Boston. It’s an Arts College. They were one of the few at the time, I don’t know about now. They’re one of the few that has an undergrad film program. So I did that and then moved out with Emerson to the LA program, and graduated out there in the middle of the year, and just stayed. I worked an intern, wrote my first script basically, there in LA. I auctioned it to McConaughey, and I started my career.

JWH: Really? So it was McConaughey that was the one that discovered you?

BH: Essentially, yeah.

JWH: Not everyone liked Frailty. Were you surprised that some people were just turned off?

BH: No. You know, I’ve never...when I wrote Frailty, the first thing I wrote was a lot smaller. The second thing was...

JWH: It was smaller than Frailty? Was it a Twilight Zone episode or something?

BH: Well, it was a little tragic romance kind of thing, about these two kids that fall in love, and they’re childhood sweethearts, and they become lovers when they get older. It never stops, and they kind of lose each other in drugs. It was definitely more of a limited release kind of thing, like something that would play in LA and New York.

JWH: Absolutely.

BH: You know, even Reservoir Dogs started off that way.

JWH: So you're going to direct one of your scripts called He Dreams Awake?

BH: Yeah. That actually is a script that came back to me, and I’m supposed to be directing that hopefully this February.

JWH: Oh, wow.

BH: And we’re talking to financiers, trying to get the money in place. It’s a small movie, it’s going to be like 2-3 million dollars.

JWH: Where are you going to film it?

BH: Here in Austin, Texas.

JWH: Why Austin?

BH: I live here now, I just moved here two months ago, and it’s just always been my dream to come down to Texas and make films.

JWH: Is that where you’re from?

BH: I’m actually from Dallas.

JWH: Dallas. OK. What’s the scene like in Austin? I think I interviewed someone from Austin, I’ll have to look back through my archives. What’s the scene like there?

BH: Well, it’s the only probably liberal city in Texas. It’s very much a good, just a really nice community. Kind of a college town, with University of Texas here. And definitely a budding film community here, you know Richard Linklater, he shoots everything down here. Robert Rodriguez, who just made Spy Kids 2...

JWH: Right, they have a hangar, don’t they?

BH: He’s about to make Spy Kids 3 down here. There’s this guy Tim McCanlies who wrote Iron Giant, a great children’s movie. He’s actually making a movie with my producers from Frailty here in Austin. They’re starting their pre-production right now.

JWH: Cool. Have you been over to Linklater’s and Rodriguez’s hangar or hangars? Don’t they have a hangar or something?

BH: Yeah, over at the...they’ve turned the old airport into a sound stage. I have been over there. Texas Chainsaw Massacre, they’re doing a remake of that...

JWH: Really?

BH: Yeah.

JWH: Is McConaughey involved? Because I know he did one of the sequels?

BH: Oh, no, no...

JWH: Because I know he did a sequel with Renee Zellweiger.

BH: Yeah, he was in the third one, or something.

JWH: Yeah, that was...very bad. My next question...much of the film is told in flashback. This time period for the flashbacks is the 70's. Late, late 70's.

BH: It’s '79.

JWH: '79, right. I especially like your reference to Walter Hill’s totally awesome film, The Warriors.

BH: Yeah, I love that.

JWH: So, that is a favorite of yours, I take it?

BH: Yeah, it is definitely a favorite. I grew up watching that stuff. I was a cable kid, so I got to see all that. Didn’t you say I was 6 days older than you, or something?

JWH: Yeah, that’s right...it would have been cable for us. Rusty White, who’s one of our writers in Memphis, who did a huge thing on Walter Hill and that movie in particular. He saw it in the theatre.

BH: Well, what’s funny is originally...let’s see, it’s Meatballs and Warriors, right?

JWH: Yeah.

BH: Originally in the script, it was Meatballs and Alien. It was the very first because Alien came out in 1979.

JWH: He wanted to be more campy.

BH: It was originally in there, but when Paxton got involved, we talked about it and said, oh, man, we don’t want people thinking that we’re winking at them. Because he’s in Aliens, you know. But it was a total coincidence, but we didn’t want people to, you know, to jar them out of the movie a little bit, make them feel like we’re winking at them.

JWH: I like that.

BH: So we changed it. Paxton, he was great to me, and this goes kind of throughout the whole thing. I had pretty much complete control. Any time anything was changed in the script, I did it. This is a great example – you know, he wanted Alien out, he told me to just take a look at all the other movies that were in 1979, and pick one. So I came back and said The Warriors. And he loves Walter Hill, he was actually in a Walter Hill picture.

JWH: Which one was that, I’m trying to remember?

BH: Trespass, I believe.

JWH: OK. I remember that one.

BH: I like most of Walter Hill’s stuff, there are a lot of people take a shit on him, but I...

JWH: Well, yeah. We liked Undisputed, I mean, I thought it was all right. And of course, you were very lucky to work with Powers Booth here.

BH: Yeah, I know, that was, you know, Bill kind of brought him to the table, and that was really cool.

JWH: That is neat.

BH: Powers was in a Walter Hill movie.

JWH: Yeah, he was in Southern Comfort.

BH: It was just one of those things. There’s so many of those in Frailty where it was just like, I wasn’t aware that Paxton was in Walter Hill’s film, and that Powers was, and everything. It just made sense, and they loved it.

JWH: That’s why you need the internet, because if you had the internet, you’d be hitting IMDB every freaking minute, and you’d be able to know the stuff instantly. I’ve got it running right now, and I can do the searches.

BH: I’ve gotta say, IMDB, I’ve become pretty hooked on them in the past years.

JWH: Oh, OK. Well, you’d like our site, our site has a little more opinion than IMDB, which is–

BH: I can’t wait to check it out, I think I’ve learned about a lot of internet sites.

JWH: We have a lot of fun with it. We just enlisted comic book artist Mike Broom. Are you a comic book fan?

BH: A little bit, not a whole lot.

JWH: OK, we just enlisted Mike Broom, a comic book artist who’s supposed to do some DVD reviews for us. The neat thing about–the reason why we did this, just as an aside, if you have a minute, is that we did it for the free DVD’s and movies. And then it just exploded, and people are writing for us all over. But, anyway, the demons in Frailty are largely left to the audience’s imagination in the film. Was use of ambiguity important to you? And then as an aside, in an interview we did with veteran horror filmmaker Curtis Harrington, I don’t know if you’re familiar with his work. He did a movie called Ruby, What’s the Matter with Helen?, Who Slew Auntie Roo?, and the cult classic Games.

BH: Is that some of that William Castle stuff?

JWH: Well, in the same vein.

BH: I think I am familiar with some of his stuff.

JWH: It’s very Hitchcockian for you to use that ambiguity, wouldn't you say?

BH: Well, that was completely intentional. We used the violence off screen. Hitchcock-–there’s one movie in particular that’s influenced almost every single thing I’ve ever done, which is Shadow of a Doubt. It’s my favorite Hitchcock film, that’s the one with Joseph Cotton, Uncle Charlie, you know, the devil’s coming to town. The idea of a trusted family member–-there’s all kinds of thematic ties to Frailty in that. Yeah, it was very much done on purpose. Bill [Paxton] is a huge Hitchcock fan and that’s one of the reasons why we hit it off so well. And he really got that about the script, and loved that about the script, and really, I think, honed it...maybe a little more than I would have, in my own personal taste. Even in the demon imagery, there’s no real carnage, it’s still somewhat open.

JWH: Oh, yeah. That makes it more horrifying.

BH: Yeah, but at the same time for me, I would say, I agree with that 100%. What I can make you see in your mind is far more terrifying that what I can show you. That happens all throughout Frailty. The actual demon imagery originally in the script was just pure carnage, and it was very quick, almost like Natural Born Killers, in that it moved-–the imagery was flash imagery. It moved so quick, you would have been so disturbed by what you saw, although you wouldn’t have been completely 100% sure of what you saw.

JWH: I’m glad you did it the other way.

BH: It would have just been carnage. You know, you would have seen like, faces, the demons’ faces, the people that were the demons, their faces covered in blood, that kind of thing. We did shoot some of the blood stuff that I had shot, but we never really got that right for me. It still works. Look, that’s some disturbing-ass imagery, like, with the legs. I wrote that, you know, with the leg on the seat and everything. I wrote all the demon imagery, but at the same time, I would have opted more for carnage and not to give them MO’s. I thought giving them an MO, one of them have a nurse’s outfit on, the other guy is obviously kind of a pedofile. People have said that pedofiles and nurses that kill people are demons, and that’s not what I was saying at all with the demons. Demons, to me, were people that...were creatures that looked like people, that could function in society like in person, but underneath it was really a vile, killing machine. Someone who killed without remorse or reason. That was always kind of important to me, and it kind of got lost a little bit in the movie. It’s still great, I love the film, I think everyone did a fantastic job, but that was just one little thing I would have opted. We’re not in 1950, and even in the 60's, you know, Hitchcock was always pushing what you could see. Even in Psycho, the great shower scene, which you do, you know, you see it without seeing it. That’s kind of what I wanted to happen in the demon imageries, I wanted it to be carnage because the shower scene is Psycho is very much about all that blood you see, and very much about those sharp, really quick cuts. That’s what I wanted. I wanted something that blew that out. And here in 2002, we could have really shown a lot of carnage. But very quick, and again it wouldn’t be carnage for carnage’s sake, but to really nail the fact that these are, in essence, killing machines.

JWH: I tell you, when I saw this movie Horror, have you heard of it?

BH: Which one?

JWH: Horror. It’s a new horror movie by Dante Tomaselli.

BH: No, I haven’t heard of it.

JWH: I took it in about two weeks ago. Rent it, I mean, you can’t rent it, it’s not even available. Look at the review on our site, I don’t know if we have one up yet, and if you e-mail me, I’ll dup you a copy and send it to you.

BH: Oh, I’d love that.

JWH: It’s a wicked first day in hell film. Real quick, tell me about Holes.

BH: Holes. While Frailty was going on, it went into production the month Frailty went out for theatrical distribution. Coming up this December, I’m hoping I get credit on it, not quite sure.

JWH: OK, so you weren’t involved in script changes?

BH: Well, it was a novel.

JWH: Oh, it was a novel.

BH: Yeah, it was a novel by Lewis Sachar. Lewis Sachar wrote the first draft. They gave me the script, I did structure, character, all kinds of work on it.

JWH: Have you seen any of it at all?

BH: No, I haven’t been involved like that at all, they didn’t want to keep me involved.

JWH: It’s got quite a nice...people involved, Andrew Davis, Sigourney Weaver.

BH: Andy was cool, I worked directly with him. They’re just, you know, it’s more like...see, Frailty was mine, I created Frailty from nothing. Holes was a novel and then it was a screenplay that needed work.

JWH: I’d like to e-mail you when it comes out, if you get on the site.

BH: This month we’re supposed to find out the..it’ll go into arbitration this month, and I’ll find out if I’m getting credit. I should, though, because I did a lot of work on it.

JWH: I don’t know if I have enough time, but I do have a couple of questions that you might chew on, I’ll just throw them out there. I wanted to ask you about Shyamalan and how he uses children, and then how you use children in Frailty. You’re more over the top, you don’t need to comment on that. I also wanted to ask you if you’d seen Peter Berg's Very Bad Things?

BH: Oh, yeah.

JWH: I thought that movie didn’t work with a lot of the same imagery, in terms of carving up bodies and burying them. Where yours worked, and you didn’t see much blood. I thought that was interesting. Last question, if I have a minute or so. Have you seen the Mosquito Coast?

BH: I have.

JWH: One of the questions I wanted to ask is, Bill Paxton plays wholesome so well, that it makes him even more terrifying in Frailty. The comparison to Harrison Ford’s character in Mosquito Coast, any comments?

BH: Not deliberate whatsoever, but I certainly could understand that reference. The thing about me for Paxton, for the character’s dad, at least, is the quintessential Texas man who is a good man, who is a simple man, who loves his children, who does his job without bitching and moaning. He puts his head down and he does it. He’s the type of man that digs a ditch and doesn’t whimper, doesn’t complain, and that’s essentially what I went with. The idea of him being a good father, that was always the built-in flip, was that he is a good father, this is true, this is happening, he’s not what you think he is. Actually, if you watch the film the first time, it’s a horror movie. If you watch the movie a second time, and you remember what you learned from the first time you watched it, it’s going to be a tragedy.

JWH: I thought it was a tragedy after watching it last night. And then I had to watch a film called Snipes, cause I interviewed the Director today. An urban genre film, and right before I spoke to you, I had just finished an interview with him, so...that was really a big change. It was a movie with that rapper Nelly in it. Well, you’ve been an absolute pleasure. I would like to continue this by e-mail, but I’ve been told that I only had three minutes more, so...

BH: Definitely, we’ll keep in touch by e-mail.

JWH: Sure, sure, and I know we can get you a copy of Horror.

BH: Yeah, I would love that.

JWH: I think you’d really be shocked by it, it is wicked stuff.

BH: Is it an American picture?

JWH: Yes, it is. It’s made by a pretty heavy duty guy who made a movie called Desecration. Are you into horror movies?

BH: Oh, yeah.

JWH: Well, then you’d dig this. Guess what our critic said of it? He said "This is the nightmare that you would have in hell." So...

BH: I’ll definitely check that out. It was nice talking to you.

JWH: Good working with you.

Jonathan Hickman