About
Christopher
Shank.
Screenwriter. Writer-director. Atlanta.
The work has been noticed. The work still has to work.
People trying to fix what can’t be fixed.
My younger brother, Army Cpl. Jeremy Shank, was killed in Iraq in 2006, and I have been writing people who try to undo a death or get time back ever since.
Something is already broken when the movie starts. A dog is bred to fight and won’t do it. A marriage is over and neither party has said so out loud. A block of Atlanta is being sold off under everyone standing on it. A man dies and leaves his friends a camera and a weekend in the desert.
Nobody in my scripts accepts the situation. They get to work on it — badly, stubbornly, sometimes brilliantly, usually too late — and what they do next is the story.
That engine runs in any genre. In a horror script it looks like a man arguing with a ghost about what happened on a road. In a comedy it looks like a grown man competing with a movie star for a woman who is not a prize. In science fiction it looks like a widower paying a monthly fee to keep talking to his wife.
Same writer. The situation is what changes.
Drama when the truth is enough. Horror when it isn’t. Comedy because people say funny things at funerals and unforgivable things in kitchens. Near-future science fiction when somebody figures out how to charge money for the wound. Adaptations and private specs when somebody else’s world is worth trespassing into.
The tone moves. The construction doesn’t.
Characters who want something specific and are wrong about how to get it. Dialogue that carries weight instead of explaining the theme. Jokes in the scripts about dying and long silences in the scripts about violence, both on purpose. An ending that doesn’t apologize.
I like films that trust silence, punish sentimentality, and leave the bruise unexplained.
I hold an MFA in screenwriting.
My scripts have been recognized by Austin, Nashville, Vail, Richmond, Atlanta, and other film festivals and screenplay programs.
I’m currently moving Keep Driving toward production. It started with a trailer I misread, which is a stupid origin story and also the true one.
I grew up in the Midwest and I write about it often — small towns, factory shifts, bar bands, and families with a real talent for talking around the thing in the room. That material came south with me.
I work fast, I take notes without flinching, and I hit dates.
Based in Atlanta. Open to assignments, development, and directing anywhere the work is.
CHRISTOPHER SHANK
