Earlier this month, Kent Jones’ quiet and introspective indie film “Late Fame,” starring Willem Dafoe, examined what makes an artist’s life and the dangers of losing yourself in chasing admiration and recognition.
This Friday, Dave Green’s “Coyote vs Acme,” an explosively silly comedy starring Wile E. Coyote, examined the dangers of losing yourself in chasing a roadrunner while using faulty products from an evil corporation.
The connective tissue between these two is screenwriter Samy Burch, whose first film, Todd Haynes’ “May December,” drew from a real-life scandal to explore the warping ways of celebrity and power dynamics in relationships.
That script landed Burch her first agent and then earned her (along with her husband Alex Mechanik) a Best Screenplay Oscar nomination. Burch spoke recently by video about how she moved from that script to these very different screenplays, as well as which Looney Tunes character landed on the cutting room floor and the controversy that initially engulfed the film.
“Coyote vs. Acme” is set in Albuquerque and also stars Will Forte as a hapless version of “Breaking Bad’s” Saul Goodman and John Cena as a bullying corporate lawyer. It gained renown three years ago when Warner Bros. shelved it for a tax deduction, offered to sell the film to other companies after industry outrage, then shelved it again before finally selling it to Ketchup Entertainment.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. Did you try to take the Coyote’s story seriously despite the inherent silliness?
I was always trying to balance those ingredients, making sure the characters and the corporate conspiracy had some amount of truth that you could balance the antics on top of.
I wanted to take the wryness and straight-faced comedy and mix it with the legal thriller films we’ve all seen and balance that with the gags and silliness. I think the funniest moments are when you get sucked into the drama of some of the scenes that reflect our world in some way, and then you remember what it is you’re watching.
Q. It must have been fun writing Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner bits.
The cartoons were fun because I’d never done anything with animation. There were words like “splat” that hadn’t been in scripts I’d written before. It was also just an interesting challenge because Wile E. Coyote doesn’t speak, so I had to find ways to make sure he’s not sidelined in his own movie.
And I’d write scenes where Dave Green would take it to the animators, and they would do pre-visuals or rough sketches of the gags, and I would see those and fold their work back into my script. It was a very collaborative process.
Q. You worked so many legendary Looney Tunes characters into the scripts. Bugs Bunny is, naturally, the wisecracking hero and Daffy Duck has gone crazy, of course. Who were your favorites to write for?
We thought of the characters as a theater troupe. It was important to me we were always trying to put any richness we could for, like, real Looney Tunes diehards. We had to fight really hard for the Peter Lorre character as the scientist.
There was a lot of shifting over time. The Tasmanian Devil got upgraded. They shot the courtroom scene with another character, Miss Prissy, a chicken from the Foghorn Leghorn cartoons, and then Dave had the idea to make that Taz. The scene was just so much funnier when we put him in there.
But Marvin the Martian had a funny visual gag, but it didn’t make it in the end. And Michigan J. Frog had a supporting role at one time.
Q. You grew up in Los Angeles with a mom in casting and a dad in film development. ”] How did that shape you?
My dad is a cinephile and taught us about movies from a very young age. We didn’t watch movies willy-nilly. It was a curated experience. My love of movies was instilled there. And I spent a lot of time in my mom’s office where I learned the functional side of making a movie. I had the advantage of knowing how much failure and fickleness there is in this industry, so my tolerance was extremely high.
Q. That must have helped while you were writing scripts for a decade in college while working in casting and making short films with your now husband.
“May December” is not the first screenplay I wrote — it was my 12th screenplay. I spent a lot of time writing spec scripts no one will ever see. Everything felt like it was leading up to that.
Q. Do you look back at those earlier scripts and want to revisit them now that the industry sees you as a legitimate screenwriter?
I think a lot of them are experiments of tone and of me trying to figure that out. There’s one from a long time ago that I’ve continued to think about as a kernel of something, but I’m kind of a “leave it in the past” person anyway.
Q. Did your background and experience with those earlier screenplays prepare you for what happened with Warner Bros abandoning “Coyote vs. Acme”?
No. All the test screenings were going great. I didn’t even have any intuition that something bad was going on. Then it was a big Bam! Even with my background, I was still surprised.
I kept thinking about all the people who worked on it, starting with Dave Green at the top, and all the craftsmen, all the people in Albuquerque, the local actors who had one line. And that was overwhelming. I’m so happy that Ketchup saved it.
Q. Your three films are so different. Which one represents the real you?
“May December” and its dark comedy is more my sensibility. “Late Fame” and “Coyote vs Acme” were me taking steps in different directions to try and find where the walls are. I never thought I’d get to work on a family film like “Coyote vs Acme,” and “Late Fame” was also my first time adapting a book. I read it five summers ago and wanted to write it, so I adapted it on my own as a spec script.