Exclusive Interview: Screenwriter Craig Titley on Percy Jackson & The Sam Raimi Produced 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea

How did you get started writing screenplays?

Titley: Let's see, I was fresh out of undergrad where I went back in Illinois where I was an English and a business major. I came out here for the Peter Stark Producing Program at USC, thinking that I wanted to be a producer more than a writer. Also, I was incredibly naïve thinking that as soon as you graduated you would get some office space on Wilshire and hang up a sign that said 'Craig Titley, Producer' and Tom Cruise would walk in, like, 'Hey, I hear you're producing.' Low and behold that didn't happen and I became a PA on some films. Then I thought, 'Well, I have all these ideas. Maybe I can write a draft that will get a real writer excited and then I can be a producer.' So I kind of started writing from that angle but the first thing that I wrote got me an agent and a manager and actually Chris Columbus, way back, I ended up writing a movie for his production company which is where this relationship sort of began. Then I just kept getting hired to write things and so eventually I was like, 'I guess I'm a writer and not a producer.'

What was the first thing that you wrote that got everyone's attention?

Titley: Something that never got made. It sold but it was kind of like 'Goonies' –esque type adventure involving the legend of 'Sleepy Hollow'. This was before the Tim Burton 'Sleepy Hollow' thing which effectively sort of killed this but more 'Goonies'. That was kind of like my calling card. It was the first and only spec that I've ever done. I've been doing assignments ever since.

They're remaking everything like every five years now so now you never know.

Titley: I know. I keep thinking, 'Jeez, how long has it been since the Burton film?' Whip this thing out, polish it up and see what happens.

Did you actually take a break from the whole writing thing to go to school because you have a PhD in mythology, right?

Titley: Yeah. Almost a PhD. All but the dissertation and I'm about halfway through my dissertation and so I'm not official until that's done and signed off on but all the classroom is done and everything else and it's just finishing this formality of having it all signed off on. But no, I actually didn't. I continued writing while getting my PhD. The classes were organized in such a way that we'd go up to Santa Barbara for three days once a month. So you'd have like one class all day Monday and the other class all day Tuesday and the other class all day Wednesday and then sort of go home and repeat next month so that you get all the classroom hours.

But why mythology?

Titley: It's just something that I've always loved. It's mythology that sort of comes from the Joseph Campbell/Carl Jung arena. So it's comparative religion. It's mythology. It's the hero's journey. It's narratology, like why do we tell stories the way that we tell them and why we've been telling them in the same way since the dawn of time. So it's a mixed bag of all those things which I just love. I was reading this stuff just for fun before I found out that there was actually a school where I could get a PhD. I kind of did it just for my own edification because I just love learning and I knew that it could not but help make me a better writer. My writing sort of pre-PhD work and post is like two different guys. I was doing 'Scooby-Doo' and 'Cheaper By The Dozen' and stuff like that and now I'm doing stuff with a little more depth and like '20,000 Leagues Under The Sea' which I did. I'm lucky in that I got to reinvent myself as sort of a big movie writer.

So Chris contacted you about writing 'Percy Jackson'?

Titley: Yeah, because they knew about the PhD thing and I think when the book came across his desk, either he or someone else in his office was like, 'Hey, Craig is getting his PhD and would be perfect for that.' So they sent me the book and of course I was like, 'Oh my God!' because I had just finished all my classroom stuff. I was like, 'This would be so perfect.' I grew up on the Ray Harryhausen sort of Greek god movies and I thought that this was sort of a way to pay homage to those in a lot of ways and also it was for Chris a way of kind of returning to his roots of what I call the Amblin Holy Triumvirate of 'Gremlins', 'Goonies', 'Young Sherlock Holmes'. This film is a good sort of force to that group. It sort of feels like it fits in with those films. He even used the same director of photography that shot 'Young Sherlock Holmes' which is really cool. So it's my way to kind of get to play in both those sandboxes at once, sort of vintage action/adventure Chris Columbus and Ray Harryhausen.

Did you have to change a lot from the books regarding the Olympians or were the books well written in that regard?

Titley: Well, the biggest change are that the books skew very, very young, even younger than the 'Harry Potter' books. The protagonists in the books were like nine years old and they would hurl insults like 'You seaweed brain.' So the first thing we decided to do, and this was where we were both completely in sync, was up the age of the characters, making them like seventeen years old. Once that happened the adaptation sort of all fell into place. Then things that needed to change were like you needed to up the intensity of the action scenes which in the book were kind of cute and silly at times. We got to develop deeper characters and character relationships, things like that, just because you're making them seventeen and they have real world issues as opposed to just kids on the run and having fun.

And you have to do that to get the movie to attract adults as well.

Titley: Yeah, very much so. We got to play with a lot of those things and in my mind my way into it was this character of Percy Jackson. He's kind of a troubled kid. He's at a school for troubled kids and it was like, 'What if we took Holden Caulfield from "Catcher in the Rye" and threw him into a Ray Harryhausen Greek monster movie.' That was kind of my way in. That kind of became my tonal lynchpin. I think that we kind of wrote it more as like a PG-13, a pushing the envelope PG-13 but the base of fans of the book are so much younger that the final film has kind of skewed back to a PG. But it's still has the feel of being much more – I don't know if grownup is the word but it's not as cute and cuddly.

I'm sure you wrote it leaving a sequel in mind. Are you signed on to write a sequel?

Titley: I am not signed on. There are five books in all. So I think that Fox has an eye towards, if this does well, of sort of doing the other books. So, yeah, I would love to come back and work on more of it. We haven't really had those discussions yet. They're purely focused on trying to make this one a hit.

Is this one based on just one book?

Titley: Yeah.

So then there are no elements from other books?

Titley: Right. It's the first book of the series, kind of like 'Harry Potter' in that if this does well they will do book two and three and four and five.

There's been a lot of drama surrounding '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea'.

Titley: Oh, yes.

How did you get involved?

Titley: Well, there are two competing '20,000 League' projects. There's the one that was at Disney with McG and then there was the one that I did that we sent up at New Line before they were downsized with Sam Raimi producing. So it was always a bit of a race. We were in the lead at one point and then sort of New Line collapsed under us and they weren't going to make these giant movies. But this was when they were like, 'Oh, no, we're still going to make these things,' trying to stall and then the Disney thing got the McG attachment and moved forward. Then nobody wanted to see ours even though we got it in turnaround eventually from New Line. We couldn't set it up because they were like, 'Disney is going to be making one.' But then when Disney pulled the plug a few months ago now we're alive again and now we're sort of back out to directors. It's this constant game of pole position.

Are you adding elements from just the first book or from the follow up books as well?

Titley: From '20,000', it's pretty much an adaptation. The Disney movie was like a prequel of [Jules] Verne's '20,000 Leagues Under The Sea' and I adapted '20,000 Leagues Under The Sea' but had invent quite a bit of story material because there's really no story. I mean, I love '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea', the novel and the 1954 Disney film but it's really very episodic. It's like Rubba-dub-dub, four men in a sub, trying to look around going, 'Oh, look, it's the lost city of Atlantis and off to your right we have the polar icecaps.'

'And when we're bored we'll sing a song and dance with a seal'.

Titley: Yeah, and that's how Disney fixed the problem in '54. Like, 'It's kind of episodic. Well, we'll throw in a song.' So I tried to really invent this whole story of what Nemo was up to other than just 'I hate mankind and I'm going to live in the ocean and now you're stuck with me and I'm going to be your tour guide,' which is the book. We had to give Nemo a sort of plot, and what I did, and this is where my work at Pacifica and in mythology helped; in Verne's 'Mysterious Island' novel we find out that Nemo was actually an Indian Prince. Indian from India and not Native American. So I created this whole story that sort of started with his back story, a brief scene of why he turned his back on mankind and then really sort of played with some motifs and things and ideas that come out of Indian mythology, specifically with the God Shiva. Ironically, or not so ironically is Shiva as well as Poseidon. It was this whole kind of trident world for a while. So I had to develop the whole plot sort of around that Hindu mythology, especially with Shiva being the god who is the creator and the destroyer. So it's kind of like Nemo wanting to wipe the human race off the face of the planet and start over which is kind of what Shiva would've done or did do.

So, who is your main character that's trying to stop him from doing this?

Titley: Well, it's Ned Land, the character from the book. The harpooner who is hired on the first deck because no one is sure that this is a submarine. They think it's a sea monster or something.

So nothing in that regard has changed.
Titley: No. The setup is the same. It's once Ned and Professor Aronnax and we replace Conseil, the Peter Lorre character, with a girl this time so that it wasn't just a sausage fest. Once they get on the sub then the story sort of unfolds as to what Nemo is up to and there's a whole realization that they're more than just prisoners, that they have to stop this thing from happening.

Does this take place in present day or in the future?

Titley: No. It's period. It's very, very 'Pirates of the Caribbean' in tone.

Ok, so it's not what they thought the future would be like in the '50's, like TomorrowLand-ish, that kind of thing.

Titley: Well, only the sub but it's clearly period, set in the Victorian era, the late 1800's. I didn't go into too much detail describing the sub because to me the perfect nod was the one from the Disney film in '54. I mean, how do you improve on that? So I just said a really cool sub and let some production designer deal with all of that.

Did you leave in one giant squid or are you going with the several smaller ones that I think were in the book?

Titley: The one giant squid is owned by Disney which is something that they created for their film. So we went with a mass of squid but in a cool and unique way of how they stumble upon them. So in the sequence it's like underwater but right out of 'Aliens', the [James] Cameron movie. They're in this underwater temple and someone sees something zipping past and they realize that they're inside with like a hundred of these giant killer squid.

Is there anything new that we wouldn't expect that you might've added to the story?

Titley: Oh, yes. There are many things, many things indeed in the second and third act because, again, I tried to use sort of iconic things from the novel, great moments that we all know about. The south pole. The squid. The sort of island with the cannibals and all of that stuff but find a reason for them to exist and make them bigger and not so episodic.

It sounds cool.

Titley: I am quite proud of that and the script was so well received that it allowed me to reinvent my career which I've been very lucky with. Like I said, if you look at my pre mythology resume and it's kind of like hack and then you look at the post mythology degree and you have '20,000 Leagues' and 'Percy Jackson' and a couple of other things that I'm working on.

So 'Leagues', I'm assuming you also wrote this with a sequel in mind should it go through, get green lit and make tons of money, right?

Titley: Yes. Definitely when I got started getting further and further into the story I realized that there was a – it's kind of cliché now – three movie arc. I don't know why it always works out that way but there's a three act thing that's in all of our brains forever.

What's the progress then on this project now that Disney has put their project on hold?

Titley: Well, this all happened so fast right before the holidays. So I think it's new but I'm hoping that now everybody is back from Sundance and people have their heads back in the game that we're going to be moving full speed ahead to attach a director and find a studio because we still have it in turnaround from New Line.

Big thanks to Craig for the great interview. Check out his profile on IMDB.