Christopher Shank
Screenwriter / writer-director · Atlanta
I have spent most of my adult life writing things nobody asked me to write. That sounds romantic until you do it for twenty years. Most of the time there is no applause, no check, and no reason to believe the thing will ever leave the room. You make it anyway. Then you make it better.
The movies I keep writing begin when somebody can no longer live inside the explanation they built their life around. The marriage is fine. The grief is handled. The rules are real. Tomorrow will be different. Then something happens and the lie stops holding.
Sometimes I get there with two people in a room. Sometimes I need a ghost, a war, a pit bull, an AI wife, a black hole, or a man committing felonies because admitting his movie is dead would mean admitting something worse.
I want the movie to follow you home.
The film I’m building
After his mother's death, a Philadelphia musician returns to the Missouri town he escaped, where his estranged father, old friends and soldier brother's absence force him to confront how little he knows about the people he left behind.
There are scripts you write hoping somebody will buy them. And there are movies you keep trying to make because you cannot imagine leaving them behind.
This is the second kind.
Birdtown started as my MFA thesis. It has been through festivals, outside readers, bad versions, better versions, notes I fought, notes I ignored and notes that turned out to be right.
I am not keeping it around because it took a long time.
I am keeping it around because it is finally becoming the movie I meant to write.
This is the feature I am building.
Start reading here
A director risks everything to save his first movie. Then the financing clears.
When a financing review freezes his first film on the eve of production, an ambitious director begins forging, stealing and betraying the people who trust him to save the movie—only to discover the money arrived on schedule.
If Birdtown is the movie I want to build, Again is the script I would hand somebody who wants to know what I can do on the page right now.
Dark comedy. Filmmaking thriller. Bad judgment executed with absolute confidence.
One script should not have to explain an entire writer.
Feature · Near-future science-fiction / psychological relationship drama
A grieving husband reconstructs his dead wife with an AI service, but when the replica reveals a marriage he never knew, he must choose between preserving a version that agrees with him and accepting the real woman he lost.
Near-future science fiction built around grief, memory and the terrible convenience of getting exactly what you asked for.
Feature · Military family drama / war-era character drama
A punk Army Reservist facing deployment to Iraq turns to his active-duty younger brother, but after his brother is killed in action he considers vanishing rather than reporting—and must decide whom his refusal would leave behind.
A war-era family story about duty, refusal and the fact that rejecting one set of rules does not free you from every obligation.
Making now
A depressed rideshare driver realizes that his late-night fare intends to die at the destination, and finds that helping the stranger means finally admitting his own need for help.
A contained short. One car. One night. Two people who both need the other one to stay alive.
The point is not to wait for permission forever.
Follow Keep Driving
Selected Journal
This is where I try not to.
Family. Death. Movies. Books. Religion. Politics. Work. Failure. Taste. Ambition. Getting older. Trying to become somebody I can live with.
Occasionally I get several hundred words in and discover the asshole I was arguing with was me.
My dad had a pillow. It’s mine now.
Growing up, I thought acceptance was one of the highest things you could earn.
The first movie that made me want to make movies was not the kind of movie filmmakers usually cite when they are trying to sound impressive.
Other people have read the work.
Here is the record.
Every placement appears at the exact level the awarding organization published.
Represent it. Finance it. Develop it. Produce it. Publish it. Hire me to write something else.
Or tell me I got something wrong and bring evidence.
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