Matthew Reilly says his books would make good blockbusters
STAR writer Matthew Reilly, who self-published his first book 21 years ago, has dreams of seeing his popular character, Jack West Jr, as a Hollywood movie.
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YOU would expect a successful writer to tell of a childhood spent scribbling short stories for family and friends. Not Matthew Reilly.
Instead, the New York Times best-selling author of Ice Station and Scarecrow was busy making movie sets for his Star Wars characters. Chatting with Reilly as he sits in traffic on Los Angeles’ Sunset Boulevard, you get the impression he should have gone into filmmaking, not writing books.
And on the eve of his new release, The Three Secret Cities, Reilly is still hopeful he will make the book-to-blockbuster transition.
“I’ve found about seven different ways NOT to get a film made in Hollywood,” says the author who has had several books optioned by film studios, with none making it to screen so far.
“I’ve sold to Disney, Fox Studios, Paramount and ABC but the problem for me is one of the things that makes my books stand out — the scale. Basically, it will take about a $120 million commitment from a studio to get a film (of my book) made then a further $80 million to promote it.
“With a big budget movie, it’s a leap of faith. Disney went through seven screenwriters over 10 years and got nowhere.”
Reilly says his most frustrating tangle with Hollywood — where he now lives — came when he wrote an independent television script called Literary Superstars. It reached the stage where Darren Star (of Sex and the City fame) was on board as producer and Jenna Elfman (of Dharma & Greg fame) was signed on to star in it before it was killed off.
“I was literally in the room with Darren Star and Jenna Elfman and I got a call from my agent who told me there’s been a writers strike and to put our pencils down,” he recalls.
“I think that’s the one that hurt the most because were at the pilot stage casting actors.”
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Fans of Reilly’s novels will have their thirst quenched this week as the fifth novel in the Jack West Jr series comes out. The character was introduced in Seven Ancient Wonders, with subsequent novels following in descending numerical order — The Six Sacred Stones, The Five Greatest Warriors and The Four Legendary Kingdoms. All of this raises the question — what will happen when Reilly writes No.1?
“I think I will be done by the time I get to No.1,” he says.
“I never set out to write seven books in a series but when I made the decision to write The Four Legendary Kingdoms, I had to plan for three, two and one.
“I set up a few things in The Three Secret Cities that will finish in book one, which will be the natural end to the story.”
Reilly, who grew up in Willoughby on Sydney’s north shore, famously self-published his first book, Contest, at the age of 22. (He wrote it when he was 19 at Uni.)
In a move he describes as being “the longest of long shots” Reilly took out a bank loan and printed 1000 copies. He managed to get them into bookshops around Sydney after he was rejected by every major publisher in Australia.
The long shot paid off when Pan Macmillan’s Cate Peterson picked up the book and loved it.
She offered Reilly a two-book deal and kickstarted the young writer’s career in 1997.
“You only get one first book,” Reilly says.
“And Contest wasn’t the longest or most complex book, it’s a guy fighting aliens in a building.
“But I just honestly thought it was a really good book and sometimes being young and naive is a big advantage. And, 21 years later, Cate is still my publisher.”
The guy who owns a DeLorean, the car made famous in Back to the Future, finds a way to bring the conversation back to Hollywood.
“Ice Station catapulted me around the world,” he says.
“If someone built that set for a movie, all I would want is a photo of me on the set and you’d see me grinning like an idiot. The same with Jack West, that’s stuff I made up in my head.
“When I write I think in terms of a movie language and I figured out really early that readers think in terms of a movie. I’m still working on (the Hollywood blockbuster) but everything has to be in perfect alignment for it to work.”
* The Three Secret Cities, Macmillan, $39.99, out Tuesday