About
Christopher
Shank.
I am a screenwriter and writer-director in Atlanta.
My younger brother, Army Cpl. Jeremy Shank, was killed in Iraq in 2006. I did not set out to spend the next twenty years writing people who want a dead person back, one more hour, one more phone call, one version of the past they can still fix, but here we are.
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.
I write across genres because I get bored easily. The emotional machinery is usually the same.
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 Professional Screenwriting.
The Battles of Birdtown is my current priority: an MFA thesis screenplay developed over years, with recognition from Atlanta and Richmond. The public slate is selected work, not a list of everything I have written.
My scripts have been recognized by Austin, Nashville, Vail, Richmond, and Atlanta.
For a long time the job was finishing scripts. Now it is getting them made. The selected scripts have been submitted, read, recognized, or are moving through outreach. I am also developing smaller projects I can produce and direct myself — starting with Keep Driving, which began with a trailer I misread. That 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
