I wrote a film script for Brendan Gleeson

Back in 2013 I wrote a screenplay with Brendan Gleeson in mind for the lead role. At the time, I was hitting a creative slump. I was working at Storyful, and I needed a creative vent. One morning en route to work I watched the trailer on YouTube for Martin McDonagh’s movie ‘Seven Psychopaths’ with Colin Farrell and Sam Rockwell, and I remember thinking ‘Well, shit, I can write something that funny”, which is a supremely arrogant though, but I immediately texted a friend:

“We should write a f**king movie,” I said - and oddly, he agreed.

So we both started off together, but he lost interest and I just kept going. I wrote my Brendan Gleeson screenplay in pencil scribbles on the train, I wrote it Google Docs on my laptop. I wrote it whenever I had time. It was way before the advent of generative artificial intelligence, so it was a real analog creative outlet.

I hired a script consultant to poke holes in it and I rewrote it some more. I move to New York where I was lucky enough to work with Win Rosenfeld, who now heads up Jordan Peele’s MonkeyPaw productions, and he gave me some great notes on it, and I rewrote it another time. I bought my friend out of the copyright and registered it.

It draws on my personal travels in Kenya, my desire to see Pierce Brosnan play a truly smarmy bad guy (I wrote the bad guy part for him), and my love for movies that tap into the Irish wit & psyche.

Then I submitted it for a review on The Black List and it got shat on by a reviewer who didn’t understand the Irish wit & psyche.

And then I had two kids and life got very busy. But it’s a great script!

Here it is! Send it to Brendan Gleeson! Help me get it to Brendan Gleeson! Help me get it to Pierce Brosnan!

Buy it and rewrite it and cast Brendan Gleeson in the lead role and Pierce Brosnan in the bad guy role!

Working with AI to write the book

I’m currently using AI as a brainstorming partner to adapt the screenplay into a novel. That’s quite a process. I don’t believe in outsourcing creativity to AI – human originality is still something unique – but I do think AI adds value in the brainstorming process (á la Chris Anderson).

Asking AI to flesh out a script has mostly helped me understand how I want the book to sound, by giving me something to push back against. Four chapters in, not a word of AI-generated text has survived the edit/re-write, but its straw-man copy has helped shape the book it will become. The AI copy was relatively true to the structure, but more useful as an editorial consultant/confidant than as a co-writer.