Interview: Alex Conn

 

Welcome back for another edition of Interview! This time around Last Resort Films president Phil Dolan sits down with writer Alex Conn to discuss his latest film, Kill Bin Laden, and the failure of Diary of a Wimpy Kid....

PD: Your Diary of a Wimpy Kid adaptation didn't seem to connect with audiences or critics. What do you think went wrong?

AC: That was not a shock. I try to write stuff sometimes that’s unconventional or weird and sometimes you get successful with something like The Vegan Movie. Sometimes you get Diary Of A Wimpy Kid. I was not shocked by the critical reception there. 

PD: You've tackled political stories before with mixed results. What lessons - both creatively and from audience reaction - did you learn from those and use when crafting Kill Bin Laden?

AC: I don’t view kill Bin Laden as a political story at all. I view it as a human story about a group of people debating one of the most consequential decades of the last few decades. I was 10 when Bin Laden was assassinated. I still remember that day and feeling a sort of catharsis that is so rare in life which there’s parts of the film that allude to that feeling. I watched the documentary American Manhunt on Bin Laden. And the last episode was basically what we see dramatized on screen. I found the idea of a debate about whether to go after this lead or not to be a fascinating plot for a movie and as for other political stories I think Mises was me being too overconfident.

PD: After the commercial disappointment of Watchmen, do you see yourself taking another shot at a comic book film someday, or did that experience cool your interest in the genre/format?

AC: Probably not. There’s really no other comic book I'm ever passionate about. 

PD: You’ve bounced between political drama, comedy, horror, romance, thrillers — just about everything. Which genre do you find yourself enjoying most as a writer, and why?

AC: Probably I enjoy political dramas especially like I’ve when I was a kid canvassed and worked on local campaigns. But I enjoy working in other genres.

PD: What's next for you?

AC: I have a film that’s based on the 96 Everest disaster. Then I have a film adaptation of the app hay day I also have a film of the Stanford prison experiment. There’s a lot of new stuff revealed since the 2015 film about manipulation of the experiment by Dr Phillip Zimbardo.