Writing ‘Buried’: Talking with Screenwriter Chris Sparling

Last week I reviewed Rodrigo Cortes’ minimalist gem, Buried. I thought it was one of the most well crafted and smartest thrillers I’d seen in a long time, and gave it an unflinching endorsement. Buried expanded to a larger selection of theaters on October 8. In the wake of this expansion, Chris Sparling, the film’s screenwriter and adjunct professor at BU, spoke with the Quad over the phone to discuss what went into writing the film, as well as what he’s working on now.

For those unfamiliar with Buried, it’s a minimalist film in the strongest sense of the word. The entire movie happens inside a coffin buried in the Iraqi desert, where US contractor Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) wakes up to realize he has been kidnapped, and must find a way to escape before his oxygen runs out. However, while film takes place in Iraq, Sparling hardly wanted to make a grand political statement. Instead, the film came about from a very different set of circumstances.

“The very, very beginning of the idea came really from a financial set of parameters,” Sparling says. “It was something I was going to write, direct and self finance.”

Sparling was able to allot himself $5,000 dollars for the project, but didn’t want to create a found footage movie ala Paranormal Activity. “I wanted something that was truly a cinematic experience. So I just started thinking smaller and smaller until I was left with a guy in a room, or in a this, or in a that. And then I said what about a guy buried alive. You can’t get much smaller than that.”

After Sparling had his initial idea, he decided not to go the route of a traditional horror film where someone is being tortured. “I felt that’s the expected way a guy buried alive movie goes…100 out of 100 times that’s the kind of movie you have.” Instead, Sparling started to do research hoping for a spark to give him a direction, which is when he began to discover stories of civilian contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan that were being held hostage. He decided to put the two ideas together. “What if my guy is buried alive and given til 9 o’ clock to coordinate his own ransom or his just gonna stay there?” And thus, Buried was born.

Despite the film taking place in Iraq and being set around events resulting from the war, Sparling wasn’t aiming to make a political film. “There isn’t a major political message to the film by any stretch,” Sparling says, but adds: “There are certain undertones that are there.”

Sparling said after talking to a number of contractors who had jobs similar to the one Conroy has in the film. He said he heard horror stories of contractors who had been  injured or traumatized while working in the Middle East, then had come home to realize that their employers or insurance companies were finding ways out of taking care of their returning employees when they needed it most.

“What they were being told was…you actually didn’t work for us, you worked for a subsidiary of a subsidiary. So you’re gonna have to talk to them.” Sparling said he heard many of these stories, where the contraction corporations were “just turning a blind eye and deaf ear to these people.”

The frustration after hearing these stories shows in the film. It isn’t exactly anti-war, but it does offer a scathing criticism of contracting corporations and how they treat their employees. There is one wrenching scene in the film when Conroy speaks with the head of his company in the coffin and learns how they’re handling the his kidnapping. It’s one of the most powerful and troubling scenes in the film, and elicited numerous groans from the audience.

Sparling was lucky not only that his Buried screenplay was produced, but also in that he was able to be a part of the production, which is unusual for a screenwriter. “Alot of times screenwriters will turn in the script, make a little bit of money, and then hope for the best,” he says. “In the case with Buried, I’ve been involved every step of the way. 99.9% of what you see on the screen is what I wrote.”

Following the success that Buried has enjoyed, Sparling has kept busy with other projects. Another minimalist thriller of his, ATM, is currently in production, and he also just finished writing a script for Reincarnate, which will be produced by M. Night Shyamalan as the next installment in The Night Chronicles (the first of which was Devil).

With so much going on Sparling isn’t sure when he’ll be able to return to teach at BU, but for the time being, it’s a problem he enjoys having.

“I’m talking about maybe coming back for the spring semester,” he says. “It’s a high class problem to have, where you know, I don’t know if I have the time right now, cause I’m very busy with other projects. I really enjoy teaching. I’d like to continue doing it, it’s just a matter of whether my schedule in the future will allow it.”

Buried is in theaters now.