Andrew Foley's "Cowboys & Aliens" Writing Adventures

Canadian writer Andrew Foley is living his dream. Andrew was a writer on the “Cowboys & Aliens” comic that generated the new action film out this week. The process has launched his writing career in new directions and Hollywood has been encouraging his pitches for new projects.

We corresponded with Andrew and got great info for teens who want to draw or write comics, some funny stories about his dealings with Hollywood and his feelings about the movie (which neither he nor I have seen yet). It’s a fun ride! Check it out.

TeenHollywood: Andrew, you came in for rewrites on the "Cowboys & Aliens" comic. You didn’t co-write with Fred Van Lente, you re-wrote him?

Andrew: The credit says Co-Writer, but I didn’t work directly with Fred and was, in fact, strongly discouraged from communicating with him. The first time I ever got in touch with him was two years after the book was published, when we got on a conference call interview for the movie.

TeenHollywood: Did the book’s publisher just want to go in a different direction? Explain your involvement.

Andrew: Fred had written a draft of the C&A comic script that was a lot of fun, but was very talky. The more text you put on a comic page, the longer it takes a reader to get through the page. As the editor put it to me “Fred made a steam engine, we need it to be a bullet train.”

Making matters worse was that a lot of the dialogue had a humorous element in it. I liked that element, but the owner of the property didn’t. This was largely due to a film called Wild Wild West (the Will Smith movie). As a sci-fi/western mashup movie that was perceived to have failed, "West" was an albatross around “Cowboys & Aliens’” neck from the minute it opened. Pretty much everything I did on the book was aimed at making it as unlike Wild Wild West in tone as possible.

That meant reworking the story in various ways, though the characters and plot were locked in before I arrived. It also meant cutting a lot of fun, entertaining dialogue that I really liked. I kept as much of Fred’s material intact as I could while doing the job I’d been assigned, but as I’ve said elsewhere, as a reader, I preferred his version of the comic. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the version the owner wanted to publish.

TeenHollywood: How stoked were you when you heard about the film’s casting (Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford)?

Andrew: For the most part, I was never that stoked about any of the announcements made about the film, mostly because I was convinced it, like the vast majority of scripts and concepts that have been optioned by Hollywood, it would never get made. My response to each new development went roughly along these lines:

THEM: We’ve got the writers of the Transformers and the Star Trek movies!

ME: Sounds good, but it’ll never get made.

THEM: Spielberg and Ron Howard are on-board!

ME: Interesting, but it’ll never get made.

THEM: We’ve got the director of Iron Man!

ME: I liked Iron Man. Too bad it’ll never get made.

THEM: We’ve got James Bond!

ME: That would be fantastic news if the movie was actually going to get made,     which it isn’t.

THEM: We’ve got Olivia Wilde!

ME: I don’t watch “House” so I don’t know who that is, sorry.

THEM: We’ve got Harrison Ford!

ME: Huh? This might actually get made.

So I wasn’t particularly thrilled by any of the announcements of the cast and was pretty sure it wasn’t going to happen up until primary filming was done. At that point, I had to admit that it was going to exist as a movie; a movie starring James Bond and Han Solo. A movie starring James Bond and Han Solo inspired by a comic I co-wrote. My movie that stars James Bond and Han Solo, who did I mention are in my movie?

TeenHollywood: Hilarious! Let’s go back to yesteryear. You drew your first comic with crayons on your mom’s wall? How did she take to that?

Andrew: It might have been the floor. I’m lucky if I can remember what happened 15 minutes ago, so I really couldn’t tell you. I can’t imagine it went over well at the time. But not too long ago, I told her I sometimes regretted not getting into something more lucrative and glamorous than writing, like professional accounting or garbage collection. She put an arm around my shoulder and said, “We raised you to be an artist.” I’ve been extraordinarily lucky in that pretty much everyone in my family has and continues to support me in this lunatic endeavor.

TeenHollywood: You wrote a letter to a comics editor in the early days and pissed him off? Tell that story.

Andrew: I sent a letter of inquiry to several editors at DC Comics looking for work, or, failing that, information on what it would take to get writing work from the company. I figured these guys must get dozens of these sorts of letters a day so, to make mine stand out a little bit, I spent a paragraph introducing myself in a jaunty, tongue-in-cheek fashion before launching into my questions. (After getting a response) I (called the editor and got) “Oh right, the guy with the letter. So listen, the reason I’m calling is to tell you you’re an a**hole.” And he proceeded to tell me my letter was incredibly unprofessional.

TeenHollywood: But didn’t that letter lead to better things?

Andrew: Nine months after I sent out the letter, I got a personal letter from an editor in the Batman offices. It began with the line “Loved your letter.” A while after that, I got my second phone call from a comics editor--the guy who’d eventually give me the job on “Cowboys & Aliens”. During our conversation, he asked me if I’d ever gotten to talk to other editors and I said I had and told him who. “I used to work with that guy. The thing you have to understand is, that guy’s an a**hole.”

TeenHollywood: Funny! You have an art degree. When did you start writing and were comics (graphic novels) your first writing choice?

Andrew: I’ve been writing pretty much from the time I could write. My mother likes to talk about the time she got called in by one of my elementary school teachers who was concerned about dark stories I was writing and drawing about monsters and robots, which was basically terribly primitive Star Wars fanfic.

I wrote my first comic in grade 4, I believe. In grade 6 I and a couple other guys posted a new page of a comic in the school hallway every week. In my commercial art class in high school I produced a terrible fantasy comic--though one of the characters in the story stuck in my head and became a part of another project an artist should be starting on shortly, knock on wood. So comics were always there.

I love painting and drawing, but I’m nowhere near consistent or patient enough to be able to create a commercially appealing comics page, never mind an entire story. When you first start trying to get into comics as a writer, you pretty much need to come in with a complete creative package.

It’s not enough to have the idea and write the script, you also need to have a penciler, inker, colourist, probably a letterer. That’s an awful lot of creative talent that needs wrangling, and if you can’t offer them money upfront, well, it’s an uphill battle. It was only after I stumbled into enough money to be able to offer an artist a page rate that I focused my attention on comics again and got my first graphic novel, “Parting Ways”, made.

TeenHollywood: Early reviews are saying that the film version is not just effects but a nice story that develops the character relationships yet you have said the trailers are way more “serious” than what you wrote. Was your version more of a comedy?

Andrew: Maybe, in the same way that A Fistful of Dollars is more of a comedy than Unforgiven. That’s the way the first few teasers and trailers made it look. I was actually concerned by the fact that there was no evidence at all of a sense of humor at play in the early marketing for the film, to the point that I called someone at Platinum and asked if this thing was as bleak as it was coming off. I was reassured that no, it actually does have a sense of humor, but that wasn’t being emphasized in the early going. Why? Wild Wild West.

TeenHollywood: If you had to choose…. You could either draw and paint or you could write, not both. Which would you choose and why?

Andrew: It would depend on how I could make a living just doing one. All things being equal, I prefer to paint. It’s like meditation, it relaxes me, I don’t really know how it works but after I paint for a few hours I just feel better about life. Unfortunately, very few people are interested in having an original Andrew Foley hanging in their living room, and I like painting too much as it is to want to alter the process so I could become more commercially viable as a painter. I’d rather give it up altogether than turn it into something I don’t get to do 100% under my own terms. And while I do approach writing more as a business than “art”, it’s something I enjoy doing, even when I’m rewriting according to someone else’s notes. It’s also the main way I communicate with the outside world, which is something I wouldn’t want to lose.

TeenHollywood: Why will teens especially enjoy the movie and enjoy reading the graphic novels?

Andrew: I expect the movie will be a rip-roaring action adventure tale with two actors well-known for their action films and an actress whose star is just beginning to rise, by the guy who directed Iron Man. It’s absolutely the kind of movie I’d go see half a dozen times in the theatre when I was a kid. I tried to make the comic the sort of rollicking, balls-to-the-wall cover to cover action story that would excite and engage me when I was a teenager, and I think I succeeded.

TeenHollywood: What are you working on now?

Andrew: The bulk of my time at the moment is being spent promoting my horror satire comic “Done to Death”, which is being collected in a new edition by IDW Publishing in September. Beyond that, I’ve got a spec pilot script being shopped around Hollywood by an established movie producer and a director whose films I’ve actually seen, which is very cool, if a little daunting. I’ve also got a couple different comics projects on the boil with some very talented artists, and I’m constantly having meetings with Hollywood folk to pitch ideas at them. It’s a very busy but very exciting time.