Ask the Author: Mike Binder
Answered Questions (6)
Mike Binder
I think it's all about who you are what your track record is. Lee Child would get $1.5 or so to write a script. I think someone that had a track record in that world. Could be as low as $150K if you're new at it. It's really all over the map.
Mike Binder
It's a different medium really. A script is more or less a blueprint, a road map to give to others, (directors, actors, production, etc) A book is a standalone piece. Much more of an intimate and final work that's meant to only entertain the reader. More like a painting than a sketch.
Mike Binder
I love thrillers and I love political thrillers. I love the Grey Man series by Mark Greaney, I loved Day of the Jackal when I was a kid, and Eye of the Needle and all of Ken Follet's early books. That's the feeling I wanted this to have.
Mike Binder
I did a lot. Yes. I have always read a lot about the British govt. I don't know why but I have always been inerestred in the workings of Parliment. I loved Andrw Rawnsley's two books on New Labour. One is called 'The end of the Party.' I also loved Tony Blair's book and several books about he and Margaret Thatcher and have read abou Winston Churchill my whole life. There was a good book by a British politican called Roy Hattersley, 'Fifty Years on' that I read a few years back that helped. I also have a good friend, the historian Peter Thompson who lives over there and knows the world so well. (He was editor of the Daily Mail in Thatchers time.) He helped a lot.
Mike Binder
Since this was my first novel and I had written so many scripts it was a new muscle but at the end of the day, it's story telling. With a book you need to do more of the job than a screenwriter, but it's still a similar discipline. It's still how much do I tell, how much do I save until later, how much have I hooked the reader in. With scripts, you're writing for studio people and actors and financiers, but you're still telling them a story.
Mike Binder
Good question. I had the main characters, Adam Tatum and Davina Steel set in my mind. I knew I wanted Keep Calm to be a cat and mouse chase across England with those two. Georgina came in the writing. I like a good treatment before I start. I read Lee Childs has no idea where he's going. That would scare me way too much.
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