Unveiling Untold Secrets: Gary Whitta’s Most Shocking Storytelling Revelations
9 hours ago
My conversation with the 2007 Black List writer.
Gary Whitta’s screenwriting credits include After Earth, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and The Book of Eli. That script was named to the 2007 Black List. Gary also wrote the novel Abomination. Here is my conversation with Gary.
Scott Myers: So, you’ve been a journalist. You’ve managed and been editor of magazines. A video game designer and consultant. You written comic books. You’ve hosted podcasts. You’ve written movies and TV. And now with “Abomination,” you’ve added author and novelist to your list of accomplishments. My first question is, did you plan all this, or did it just happen?
Gary Whitta: It kind of just happened. I always knew I wanted to be a writer. As a kid, I was an avid writer of short stories and my own little comic books, and at school English was the only class that ever interested me. I never went to college, pretty much straight into the workforce at the age of 15. I knew pretty early on that I wanted to try to make a living as a writer because it was really the only career I could imagine for myself that wouldn’t bore me to death. But what shape that would take, I wasn’t sure.
I flirted for a little while with being a video games programmer, because when I was growing up the two things I loved were movies and video games, but the idea of making movies seemed a very distant possibility for a kid growing up in England. I would watch Hollywood movies, but the idea of ever going there and making films seemed like another world entirely, very unreachable.
But making video games… in the 1980s when I was growing up, computer games were mostly made by a single person sitting in a bedroom and coding. So I thought maybe I could do that. I picked up a book about machine code, assembly programming and I immediately realized, my brain’s just not wired that way at all. I’m not good at math. I’m not good at science. I’m very much more right‑brain than left‑brain. I’m good with words and creative things and imagination, but logic and math and numbers, I’m awful. So I was never going to be a games programmer.
But I also loved reading video game magazines and I thought, “Maybe I could do that. I could be a game reviewer.” I started bashing out my own video game reviews and…
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