Film Courage: Why do you like twist endings?
John Gray, Writer, Director, Producer: I guess I love them. As a kid growing up I loved trying to see the twist coming, trying to solve it. I rarely could as a kid and I just love the idea of your expectations and your experience kind of being turned on its head and with something else all along, I love that. On Ghost Whisperer, we started developing this idea of twists with every episode and then twist upon twists and all kinds of things. I got very comfortable within that and loved it. Now in these short films I’m doing it all the time almost all of them have had at least one twist. I usually try to get three twists in to really confuse the audience so they don’t see it coming.
In a short film it’s particularly difficult because you have so little time to lay the pipe for a twist and so the audience if they know there’s going to be a twist they know they’re watching this film because it can’t possibly just be this there’s got to be something else going on with this character so you have to it’s a delicate balance of having to try to redirect the audience and sort of have a red hairy twist that they think it’s going to be and then the actual twist which they can never see coming and every movie I do it becomes harder and harder to come up with that twist of well we never saw that coming but it’s fun it’s a great challenge to do it.
Film Courage: Why would you say it’s become harder? Is this because so much has been done?
John: So much has been done and there’s a thing of trying to top yourself and again it’s the short film format and sometimes I just start with the ending. If I’m trying to develop a twist I…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
BIO:
Brooklyn born John Gray is an award winning writer-director-producer of films and television, and the creator of the long running TV series, Ghost Whisperer. He has written and directed many feature films and movies for television, including White Irish Drinkers, starring Stephen Lang and Karen Allen; Martin And Lewis, starring Sean Hayes and Jeremy Northam; the Emmy® nominated A Place For Annie, with Sissy Spacek; the Emmy® nominated mini-series Haven with Natasha Richardson and Anne Bancroft; Helter Skelter, and many others. Gray has directed numerous episodes of broadcast and cable series, including multiple episodes of the NBC series GRIMM and was also the producing director of the CBS series RECKLESS. Gray’s acclaimed short films have played and are currently playing in film festivals all over the world including FRENCH KISS, which has also notched 6.3 million views to date on YouTube. He is married to writer-filmmaker Melissa Jo Peltier, and they make their home in New York and Cape Cod, MA. John’s new novel The Desecrated follows Jennifer, a college dropout hoping to regroup, who joins the night shift at the NYC Morgue.
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