Roger Avary

 ( Official Website ) 

Avary and Quentin Tarantino worked on the 1994 film Pulp Fiction, for which they won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. According to Tarantino, Avary originally came up with the plot of the boxer Butch Coolidge and his gold watch from a screenplay named Pandemonium Reigns, which Avary had written himself.

In 1995 Avary wrote and directed the science fiction film Mr. Stitch for Sci-Fi Channel, then The Sci-Fi Channel. Loosely a modern take on Frankenstein, the film features Wil Wheaton, Rutger Hauer, Nia Peeples, and Ron Perlman.

In 2006, Avary wrote a screenplay adaptation to the Konami video game, Silent Hill (2006), with French director and friend, Christophe Gans, and Killing Zoe producer Samuel Hadida. Avary and Gans being long time gamers and fans of the Silent Hill series, collaborated on the film.

Avary and novelist Neil Gaiman wrote the screenplay for the 2007 film Beowulf which was directed by Robert Zemeckis.

After Pulp Fiction, Avary had a falling-out with Tarantino that lasted nearly twenty-five years. The two rekindled their friendship after Tarantino heard Avary being interviewed on a 2019 episode of Bret Easton Ellis's podcast. In 2021, Quentin Tarantino announced that he and Avary would launch a podcast titled The Video Archives Podcast. The point of the podcast is to discuss films from the actual Video Archives collection that they would recommend to customers when they worked there. The set is surrounded by actual VHS copies of films from Video Archives that Tarantino bought after the store went out of business. They are joined by podcast announcer, Gala Avary, Roger Avary's daughter. The first episode premiered on July 19, 2022. The duo discussed John Carpenter's Dark Star (1974) and Ulli Lommel's Cocaine Cowboys (1979).

In the late 1990s, Avary reached out to Don Coscarelli and expressed an interest in writing a Phantasm sequel. Entitled Phantasm 1999, the film would have taken place in an apocalyptic future United States divided into three zones: Los Angeles, California; New York, New York; and the Plague Zone. The Plague Zone would be controlled by the Tall Man where he infects people with his "bag plague". Reggie must lead a secret government operation, called the "S Squad", into the Plague Zone to defeat the Tall Man. Avary and Coscarelli spent years trying to get the film made and even had financing in place in 1997 before that company changed hands and the deal evaporated. Eventually, Coscarelli made Phantasm IV without Avary, although as of 2022 Coscarelli still had interest in filming Avary's script, now entitled Phantasm’s End as 1999 has come and gone.

Through the 90s and early 2000s Avary attempted to direct a film based on the life of Salvador Dalí that had Al Pacino attached to star as the painter at one stage, but the project fell apart and never came to fruition.

After The Rules of Attraction and Glitterati, Avary had intentions to film his screenplay of Bret Easton Ellis's 1998 novel Glamorama. Kip Pardue was attached to reprise his role as Victor Ward. The project never moved beyond the pre-production stage. When asked about the film's status in a 2010 interview, Ellis said: "I think the days of being able to make that movie are over." However, the following year Ellis confirmed that Avary was planning to shoot the feature in 2012.

In 2006, French director Alexandre Aja was set to direct a feature film adaptation of the Black Hole comics, with Neil Gaiman and Avary attached to adapt the screenplay. By 2008, it was reported by MTV that Gaiman and Avary had left the production and that their script would not be used for David Fincher's planned version, which was ultimately not produced. He was also attached to write and direct a Castle Wolfenstein film adaptation both in 2007 and 2012.

While in prison, Avary came across an "old Penguin Books paperback" on a book cart of a Robin Hood story written by E. Charles Vivian and decided to adapt the material, sending the pages he wrote to his lawyer to have his daughter type up into a script. "I was crying when I wrote it," Avary noted. "When you're writing like that and you're feeling that much, it's not a bad thing."

Following his prison sentence, Avary had worked on adapting Paul Verhoeven's book Jesus of Nazareth for Verhoeven to direct, oversaw rewrites on the screenplay for a planned Duncan Jones-directed biopic on James Bond creator Ian Fleming, and additionally had plans to adapt the early William Faulkner novel Sanctuary. Also in 2012, Avary was planning to reteam with author Bret Easton Ellis to direct an adaptation of his novel Lunar Park, with financing from Wild Bunch. Ellis himself took to Twitter in 2011, praising Avary's script as "great" and saying he "hopes he makes it." Also according to Ellis, Avary planned to shoot the project in September 2012, and hinted about Aaron Eckhart's potential involvement.

At some point after John Milius' stroke, Avary, along with his daughter Gala, worked with Milius to retool his unproduced feature script on Genghis Khan in the form of a limited-run series. As of 2018, Avary was slated to direct Unwind, co-written with his daughter Gala and based on the dystopian novel of the same name. Avary has also written an as-yet unproduced script based on The Devil Soldier by Caleb Carr, which was in development with Antoine Fuqua directing and Mark Burman producing.

Unreleased film

• Roger Avary talks to Edge Magazine about Silent Hill
• Roger Avary Interview on Suicide Girls
• Webwombat.com Interview
• Screen-It deconstructs the sex, drugs, and violence in The Rules of Attraction
• JoBlo.com Interview on Silent Hill