Stephanie Bruder speaks to writer and director James Mottern, whose film TRUCKER stars Michelle Monaghan as a long-haul trucker. Monaghan received Oscar buzz for the role, and TRUCKER has been called “a revelation” by the Huffington Post, “wonderfully unconventional” by the L.A. Times, and “a knockout” by the Detroit Free Press.
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Stephanie: Welcome to the New Video download, I’m Stephanie Bruder. You can also hear this show at blog.newvideo.com. It’s not often that a first-time director hits his stride so well as to garner Oscar buzz, but my guest did just that. His film Trucker stars Michelle Monaghan as a long-haul trucker who lives life on her own terms. The film has been called, “a revelation,” by The Huffington Post, “wonderfully unconventional,” by the L.A. Times and, “a knockout,” by the Detroit Free Press. Welcome, James Mottern.
James: Thank you, Stephanie.
Stephanie: You’ve written a lot of documentaries and you won the Nicholls Screenwriting Award. How many scripts led up to Trucker?
James: How many scripts did I write and never saw the light of day? Plenty, you know, a lot. But I’d been working on documentaries for about ten years and I really loved it, it was great, you got to travel and meet a whole bunch of people and just hear real stories, you know, a lot of travel in the United States too—a lot of strange sorts of documentaries. And really anything anyone would hire me to do, if I got to go travel, it was a great thing: a lot of fun. And so I’d written many, many documentary scripts and I tried my hand at a few screenplays as well. I’d started out really wanting to be more like a playwright, you know, within the Sam Sheppard and Eugene O’Neill kind of world, I really liked those kind of American stories. But they’re all around you, in the documentary world they’re just sitting right there like little diamonds, where, if you travel…I’d been living out in the California desert and I’d come across this truck stop—and truck stops are always a good place to kind of get some ideas—and I’d seen the lady truck driver, you know, like a real teamster, all in denim and her hair kinda bleached out and real kinda pale blue eyes and on her dark skin—you know, she’s white—but on her dark skin it kind of really stands out. And she was just an interesting character. She’s sort of like so many people I’ve come across, [she] sort of implanted herself in my brain and I just kept thinking about her. And I love California, and I love the California desert and what California means to people, beyond just sunshine and relaxing in the sun or about the movie business, it means a lot. There’s a sort of very American kind of metaphorical thing about California, I wanted to capture that in it. And so the story comes from my own experience living, more or less, with a single mother and not having too much growing up at certain times in my life. And so this script just kinda came to life out of that and I wrote it while I was out there, out in the desert, and then someone said, “Oh, you should send this over to this fellowship that The Academy of Motion Pictures puts on.” And so I did and got a fellowship and just took it from there and eventually it got made, [which] took a while but [I’m] real glad I got to do it.
Stephanie: Well, congratulations! Michelle Monaghan is a really luminous and varied actress and I feel you brought something completely new out in her in this film. Tell me about collaborating with her.
James: Well, you know, Michelle is unusual actress. I think that a lot of times with women in film where everyone hopes that it’s going to be Julia Roberts that walks down the street because it makes people a bunch of money and, you know, people like it and whatever it is. And she’s got some of those qualities. She’s got a very, kind of, fun-loving personality, she’s got a great laugh and sort-of real star quality but there’s also something about her that kind of runs a little deep, that’s a little off, just a little different…I’m not gonna say it’s a dark side because I don’t think in terms of light side or dark side but there’s a real humanity to her and you can see that in a movie called Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which a lot of people haven’t seen but it’s got a little cult following and I attribute some of that to her. And also in a movie called, North Country where I’d seen a couple of scenes with her that really spoke to me as far as this character goes. But when I offered her the part, she took it pretty quick. She kind of understood what I was trying to do with this small movie, you know, there’s not a lot of money for anybody. But it’s really kind of a good part for somebody and so she saw it and liked it and what I really—I think it’s coming from the documentary world where, in the script everything’s kind of set up: it’s all done. You know what the ending, the middle, the beginning—all that sort of thing. And in a documentary, what you do is, you very often have an idea what it’s going to be, going in. You hope that, in your mind, it’s gonna be just what you think it is but I would say probably 85-90% of the time, you take a right turn and it’s something you didn’t really think it was going to be. It tells you something. And so if you do it long enough, you kind of have to open your heart up to the possibility that what you thought about it is going to be wrong. And that you might have to change and it’s always the living, breathing thing, with documentary. And so I think that maybe, I’m not sure if I did exactly, in a sense, I kind of applied that to this, with her. And I really wanted her to feel putting on this jacket of Diane Ford and not be her as being a character actor or mugging for something, but really kind of created with her, on her own and make it something that was just her—it was coming from inside of her, not that she was trying to impress anyone or fulfill some vision I had or whatever. So, you know, I’m not very much into rehearsal so I don’t get too much out of it unless it’s more for blocking or for a sense of a tone or something so we did that a little. But really what we did [was] with the script. We sat down on her balcony up in her house up in Hollywood and we went through the script right on the ground, moment by moment, to see what it was really doing and every script’s got its dirty little secret about what’s not working or what’s working. People can kind of put it aside and hope it works itself out or whatever. So she’s somebody who’s got a lot of guts, she’ll easily say, “This doesn’t sound right,” or “I don’t know if she’d say this,” or whatever it is, so you’ve got to really be on your game with Michelle Monaghan. You’re gonna do your best work because she challenges you; you gotta kind of bring your game to the table. And I hope I’m a little bit that way too. And so we spent about 4 or 5 sessions just going through the script from top to bottom and then I rewrote it sort of with these tonal shifts—and it was more tonal shift, it wasn’t big sweeping dialog changes it was just a tone, it’s a recalibration. I always think that, by percentages: you change something so that it’s in the subtext of it, there’s none of these great epiphanies of change but just enough to make it so that it seems real or organic. And one of the things I discovered about Michelle, and it’s a very important thing for me and actors and that’s why, when I compare her to Gena Rowlands or Sally Fields or Ellen Burston, you know, these sort of great actresses…I also kind of compared her to Jack Nicholson because Jack Nicholson is somebody who performs very much, you know, you see him doing the lines and he’s funny or whatever, but he’s doing two things at once. He’s doing the sort-of outward veneer of this character—the character the world sees in the film (and maybe some people see in the audience) but he’s also playing, sort of, in a minor chord, he’s playing another part, which is the truth of the character, underneath. And so what you’re getting is the top and the bottom of this character: the inside and the outside all at once. And, to me, it’s always a fascinating way of performing because it’s very entertaining and you feel like you’re being let in on this kind of wonderful club with Jack Nicholson as he takes you to these parts and Michelle is very similar to that, she understands the subtext of what she’s saying. What really the scene is about: she plays the subtext, the words are whatever—funny or not-funny—but if she (we talked about this) plays the subtext, she plays the meaning of what it is. And not to, you know, try to be cute or funny or smile or mean or angry, whatever. In that way, you bring the truth of the character out, you bring the reality of it out. So that’s how we collaborated on it and then when we showed up on set, we only had 19 days to shoot in. So, there were no dirty little secrets in the script, or things we had to get over. We all knew what to expect and so then she just went with it and I was just there to, like I said, kind of recalibrate or to maintain the feeling—the tone of it, and so forth.
Stephanie: Fascinating. One of the subjects that you guys collaborated so well on, that you can’t avoid in this film, is gender identity and identity in general, but you’ve got this petite little woman playing a trucker and she’s really trying to define her identity. At some point in the film she says, “This is not who I am,” or, “That is not who I am.” Did you know who she was when you began writing her or was it a discovery for you as you went?
James: Well, I knew this woman once who—very nice, sweet woman—and for about two weeks once in her life, three weeks, when she was about twenty, she got a job as a dancer—she was a stripper—because she didn’t have any money. And she didn’t like it, I’m not sure whatever it was—she didn’t make enough money—I don’t really know, doesn’t make much difference but: she stopped doing it, right? She came from a nice family and she’d done a couple things she wasn’t too happy about—whatever, just like anybody does. But then whenever anybody talked about her, or whatever relationship she was in, whatever it was, people would say, “She was a stripper.” [Laughs] It was like: that was her identity. It became that; something that she’d done for three weeks in her youth followed her. And it happens with women a lot, I’ve seen over the—I mean, I’m not gonna speak for women, I can only say what I’ve observed. I live with my mother and I live with my twin sister and my other sisters and I’ve seen it very much is that, as a woman, you can’t win. You’re either too fat, too thin, too dumb, too smart—whatever it is—it’s just like you’re kind of up against it all the time because you’re constantly in this kind of gauntlet of categorization. And so, for me, when I started writing this character, it was that feeling like: Shit, you know what, I’m writing this story, it’s gonna be like—yeah you can look at it like this sort of binary world where there’s man-woman, good-bad, you know, male identity-female identity and then you can also have [someone watching] this and say, “Oh, it’s getting turned on its ear. Most truckers are men.” So you can look at it very surface that way, if you’d like to. But really, this whole idea about identity is like, it’s gender identity but it’s also very particular to each person, each person has their own identity that’s been assigned to them by the people they love or don’t love or the relationships they’ve had—it’s changed them. And they’ve changed themselves and so, for me, it was that feeling like, yeah it is gender identity-shift, in a certain way. But, you know, throughout history women have worked really hard building this country, farmers, doctors, whatever it is, I thought, you know, people are going to look at this and they’re gonna say, “Oh, she’s a trucker, you know, she’s a slut—sleeps around—she abandoned her children,” whatever it is, you know, she couldn’t win. And so, going into it, I was like, yeah it’s about identity but it’s about human identity, it’s about personal identity that each person has to sort of struggle to fight against and to define themselves and Diane Ford, in this film, you know, she’s always fighting against this. To me, she’s a hero in that sense, is that everyone is telling her who she is, you know, even the title of the film Trucker is like—yeah it’s about a trucker, and you can assume what you want about her because a lot of people have opinions about truckers anyway—that they’re poor and trash and didn’t come from nothing, whatever it is. But Diane Ford, in this film, is always kind of fighting that. I don’t like to reach into my own film, I leave it to everyone else but something when I was writing it occurred to me: the kid asked her what he should call her and she says, “Whatever you want,” you know, it’s sort of like a small recalibration of her, or adjustment in, her temperament, she’s sort of came to peace with like, “You know what? There’s nothing I can fucking do about this, you know, it’s just the way it’s gonna be and I’m just gonna have to live with it and carry on and be the person I think I am.”
Stephanie: And you mentioned Nicholson before and I know that you’re a fan of some of his 70’s films, The Last Detail and Five Easy Pieces, and those both really look at identity through occupation and habit. So tell me a little bit about, you know, were you thinking about those films in particular when you were writing this?
James: Yeah, you know, those movies from the 70’s are sort of like a blip in film history, in a way. And a lot of those are riffing off Godard and all the French films of the 60’s and then the French films are riffing on the films of the 40’s and it’s sort of one feeds into the next and creates these new generations of styles but they all, kind of, are grounded in what I would consider, like, a cinema of emotionality, I guess. (I don’t want to make it sound too academic because I don’t really think of things that way.) But these stories are—Five Easy Pieces,The Last Detail, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore—they’re about these characters, but these characters’humanity. In a very organic way, there’s not a lot of mugging, there’s not a lot of cutesiness, they’re very human stories. They play like documentaries in many, many ways. You know you can think of Harold and Maude, these are all Hal Ashby movies that I like, because a lot of these movies play to the lighter side of it. You see a lot of modern independent dramas where they come in very, very low in the sense that they come in very dark and they come in very—I’m not gonna say depressing, because I like movies that would be considered depressing, there’s a great movie called Come and See, a Russian movie, that has those elements that you look at it and you’re like, “Holy shit, is this really happening?”—But these films of the 70’s, there’s a certain kind of lightness to them when they come in with these characters and then there’s some place to go. I always think of it, there’s some place to go down, deep into something. When you come in on it higher, there’s a depth to it that you can find, whereas when you come in very low and depressed and dark, there’s really no place to go except up and then sometimes it doesn’t play right. It’s not really the way people are, especially in my travels in the documentary world. People want to love life and they love life and they try to get through the best they can but this shit happens to them and everybody’s got their inner life that’s a little troubling, you know, it doesn’t quite fit with what they’re doing from day to day. And those films of the 70’s, they really explore that with the characters that aren’t really fitting in too much. Nicholson’s in the navy in The Last Detailand in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he’s in a mental hospital or whatever it is. But they touch something that’s very much a human experience and, you know, in a lot of films now—I don’t want to go in this realm of judging other films, but I do have a sense that very often you see people in movies and they don’t really seem like they have a job. You know, they’re an ad executive or they’re an architect or whatever, it’s always kind of secondary. But, you know, the people that I’ve traveled around and seen and, you might call, in Middle America, whatever like real people—their work is who they are very often. They’re farmers, they’re truck drivers. It’s an integral part to their personality, it’s why they’ve chosen to do these things or why they wish they wouldn’t do them or whatever it is. But it’s something that is very much a part of this country and also people in general and so, in exploring Diane Ford as a truck driver, yeah it was sort of like, well, she’s a truck driver but she’s not just a truck driver because it’s seemed cute or funny or like it would look good in an article. Her being a truck driver reflects her desire for freedom and to not have anybody tell her what to do necessarily and kind of fulfill a lonesomeness she’s got in her soul and so it’s integral, it’s not something I just layered on there. So, yeah, when I was writing it, her being a truck driver was very organic to her character.
Stephanie: I definitely see the correlation with Five Easy Pieces there.
James: Yeah. In the quality of those films, you look a lot of them and they’re great, you know, there’s a certain—I’m not gonna say there’s a B quality, it’s not that—it’s just there’s a quality to them that’s very accessible. They’re not tricked out, they don’t have huge production values, there’s a lot of handheld stuff, they were done for not a great deal of money and so there’s a feeling—you feel like you can get in, that you’re in that club with those characters and that you’re part of it. And that’s what I try to go for in Trucker a little bit, I wanted it to be beautiful, I didn’t want it to be gritty for the sake of it, so I shot it at 235 aspect ratio, which is very wide and sort of fills—you know, the truck fits perfectly in there—but I wanted it to have a feeling where you could be access it, that you were a part of it.
Stephanie: It is a very gorgeous film.
James: Thanks. My [Director of Photography] Larry Sher, he’s terrific and he had shot Garden State, which I really liked, the look of it and also, just as a cinematographer and a DP on set, the feeling that he brings to the crew and the cast and to me, it was very important that that person be who he ultimately was, and he’s gone on to shoot The Hangover and a bunch of other stuff but I’d always really appreciated his work in this film, absolutely.
Stephanie: And more with the sound in the film, which is so delicately done and restrained and didn’t push your feelings in any particular way, and it seems to me like you paid a lot of attention to that. How important to you—coming from a documentary background—would you say sound is?
James: Sound is, a lot of times, it’s timing. It’s like if you played the piano, you play with the left or the right hand or whatever it is and very often, I would think of the sound as being one of those hands. The way it’s treated, you can make it big or small or whatever but it’s in conjunction with the picture. There’s a film 8 1/2, a Fellini picture, where there’s a scene that I always remember and I do carry it with me, cause it’s a beautiful scene. It’s when the character is young and I think he’s in a winery and he’s being put to bed, all the children are being put to bed at night by, I guess, must be like people in the town, or the mothers (it’s been a while since I’ve seen it). And so the children are running around and trying to get away, and I think they’re giving them a bath, and the way that he did it is very layered, it’s almost as if he shot it without sound and then added it later. It’s very finely done if you hear it, each thing is very musically done, it’s quite beautiful and I highly recommend it for anybody whose interested in that aspect of it, you know. And it’s done very tenderly. But it’s got guts, too. There’s something bigger than life about it, about the way that the sound is done in that part of the film—throughout—but in that part of the film. And so it’s something that, with Trucker, like I said with the script, just cutting dialog, first of all. Most people don’t talk as much as they do in movies, generally there’s a lot of communication with their eyes or just, what have you, and so there was that. I allowed it to be quiet, we all did, that there was silence in it and that the silence is what is replaced by the dialog, not that the dialog replaced the silence, if that makes any sense. [There’s] this undercurrent of silence in it, and from that you can build it and, you know, everything from that to the score. With the score it was that feeling Mychael Danna—a great composer—did the score to it and we talked about, it was always that feeling like (and a good composer’s this way anyway) that I didn’t want to create emotion. I didn’t want to try to create sentimentality, which is, if you could pick an emotion that I find just despicable, it’s sentimentality because it’s a constructed emotion. It’s not fear or joy or anything like that, it’s false, it’s, to me, a movie construct anyway. And so, for me, I wanted to not create anything. I wanted it to be drawn out organically from the film and the experiences of the characters and to have it be something you felt, not that you were given. That’s something that you could come to. And so with that I felt that with the score and the way we did the sound, is it kind of draws you to it, the idea was that it draws you to it on your own terms, in a way. You can either like it or not like it or whatever. But I didn’t want to be somebody who is there to, like, command your emotion at particular moments in the film. Through the composition but also through the audio and there’s some source music that I liked and that nature as well.
Stephanie: Right, I mean, it almost makes me think of Days of Heaven, in the way that it has this opening to listening to the open spaces in America. For me, there’s some kind of correlation between the way that Days of Heaven reads and the way Trucker reads.
James: Yeah, [Laughs] yes. This was the other part of it that I always had in the back of my mind, when you talk about that it reminds me of it. It’s usual, when you drive, you drive and you’re by yourself very often you’ll drive down the highway and you’ll drive for hours and hours in this country cause it takes a long time to get from one place to the other and if you decide you’re gonna drive across country or drive a long distance, you really have to commit, you know, and there are points where it’s just completely boring and you wonder why you didn’t fly and you can’t take another cheeseburger from the interstate, or whatever it is, but you drive and drive. And sometimes, when you’re driving, you come into a rest stop or you come into a gas station and it’s nighttime and you’ve been alone and you’re listening to the radio, or whatever, and, for me, when I step out of the car and I’m suddenly in like a well-lighted place with the reflection on the back of the trucks and the cars and the people talking. Everything is very clear, everything has its own particular cadence and look, you know, everything is brighter and sharper and, for me, and you also sort of muscled feeling like you’ve been someplace, like you’ve been out in a satellite, you’ve been brought back down into earth and it’s such a kind of lonesome but good feeling. It’s very quiet but at the same time you can hear all these very sparkling things around you and see them. And so, on the audio, I mean, that’s the real—I’m sure it’s a feeling you get anywhere in the world—but to me always makes me feel more like myself, more like a human being, grounded in the world when I have that feeling. And so that was a feeling I wanted to convey in Trucker, too, was that sometimes kind of muffled sort of lonesome feeling, but that there’s these moments where certain things you hear just kind of pop or certain things you see, they just sort of strike you so that’s what we tried to do a little bit, if that makes sense.
Stephanie: Yeah, you did. I should mention Benjamin Bratt, also, because he gives a memorable turn in the film as the father of Diane’s child and also former professional athlete. When you were building his character, were you thinking about counterbalancing Diane’s character?
James: Yeah, maybe it’s me, but I think a lot of people I know and a lot of people, they have a longing for something. It’s either, it either takes the form of, regret or they’re hoping to do something or they’re hoping for someone they love to come back or, whatever it is, whether it’s a relationship or someone that’s died. But a lot of people, in their inner life, there’s a longing that they have for something that has been lost or something they can’t have or whatever. It’s not a greedy feeling, it’s not a self-indulgent feeling – it’s a real human kind of feeling. It’s a real thing, it means something, this kind of hope, or whatever it is. A lot of people carry that around with them. And so, the character of Diane Ford in this film may or may not carry that kind of thing around, at least not on the surface, she does maybe underneath. But that Benjamin Bratt character, I always found compelling because he has that feeling, he kind of longs for her, you know, he was a professional baseball player, maybe he wasn’t that great, you know, he had hopes and dreams, just like anybody else and maybe he was a little bit ahead of the game in some way. But one thing that you get a feeling from (and I don’t know if it’s true because I didn’t want to be so pointed in the character) is the relationship between men and women, very often what draws a woman to a man, what he finds compelling or interesting or exciting: later on in the relationship it drives him crazy. It’s what makes him want to get rid of her, it makes him want to control her or shake that out of her, or whatever it is, very often a man will be drawn to a woman who’s a free spirit, who is funny and people love her and she wants to go out and have a great time but when he gets her, it changes. It bothers him, you know, like maybe she’s gonna cheat on him or maybe she’s not paying enough attention to him and then there you are suddenly identifying this person as this person or that person and what you thought made your love great is what destroys it. And so, for me, it was always that thing with the character of Benjamin Bratt where he’s a good guy, you know, he took care of his kid, he did all these things, but he wanted too much. He wanted too much from her and what drew him to her was also what drove him crazy, what also kind of destroyed what they had. I mean, that was always my feeling about it. And so, I always wanted to have him be a counterbalance to her in the sense that she had given it a go. You know, she’d done that thing that people do—gotten in a relationship, had, whether they were married or not whatever it was, and had a kid, and she was somebody in a way that got out like a lot of people, I think, especially women in relationships, you know, especially with children, where it’s not that they want to abandon anybody, its just that it didn’t turn out like they thought it would and so, for me, it was always that feeling like she was a hero because, in a way, she did get out. You know, she kind of fucked up a lot of things and abandoned people or whatever it is, but, in a way there’s a certain degree of heroism in the sense that she went against what everyone was expecting her to do as a woman, in the categorical way that she was identified, and was like, “Fuck it, I’m gonna go do something else,” and so you can see that he was a good guy, it wasn’t a bastard, he wasn’t trying to beat her, you know, he was none of that kind of stuff, but still, she was who she was, it wasn’t that she was driven away by some bastard, some asshole, it’s just that she chose to leave, in spite of the fact. So, yeah, I dunno if it’s a counterbalance but it always informed the character of Diane Ford. To me, that was always a somewhat profound moment of relationship between a man and a woman: that scene in the hospital, you know.
Stephanie: Definitely. You’ve worked previously with the Slamdance Film Festival, right?
James: Yes.
Stephanie: How did that experience and career inform making this film?
James: Yeah, I worked on the Slamdance Film Festival a few years ago and I had done it, more or less, as a favor, you know. And I’ve always been interested in independent film and Slamdance is an organization that serves first-time filmmakers, really. And it’s sort of in conjunction with Sundance. They’re not related but it happens at the same time. The reason I liked Slamdance is it kind of works outside of any kind of system that you’re familiar with. Sundance is an organization that is great and they have good films but it’s really a marketplace and there’s commerce going on. Slamdance—although it’s great when they sell a film or two in there—really it’s a place for filmmakers to come together and, kind of, discuss movies without that—even though there always is that, sort of, grinding feeling that you wish you had money and whose ahead of you, got their movie made, whatever—at least in the structure of it, it’s a place where you come together to really figure out movies and discuss movies and it’s place where ideas can germinate and, for me: that’s filmmaking. I talked to an actor about a role and they had said, you know, “I would like to fulfill your vision,” and I said, “Well, let’s be very clear that I have no vision, it’s not my vision, you know, it’s a collaborative thing.” I have my ideas about the tone of it and what I would like to see and what I enjoy seeing, what I appreciate but to me it’s really people coming together to make something that becomes its own culture within the film, it’s its own kind of planet, spinning out there, and you all build it together and so, for me, that’s what Slamdance always was: a place to build a planet.
Stephanie: So what planets are you building next?
James: Right now, I’m careening headlong through space [laughs], inertia, I’m sure I’ll hit the sun at some point. Yeah, right I’m now I’m casting this film that’s gonna be in Boston about a Boston firefighter who, after an accident on the job, he becomes addicted to prescription painkillers and ends up going back to criminal life that he had avoided for so many years in south Boston. It’s a great tale and it’s a script that came to me and we’ve been working on it all together and it’s a lot of funny kind of stuff. And then I’ve a bunch of other things, including a script for Michelle, who I’d of course like to work with again, and it’s different than Trucker but it’s sort of—I’m not gonna say it’s a Western, cause that kind of pigeonholes it in certain way but it takes place earlier in the 20th century, pretty early on, and it’s a pretty harrowing tale in parts and I sound like a carnival barker, I said this before, maybe, but really there’s some stuff on there that I really don’t think you’ve seen too much on film before. I’m excited about it and I think she’ll do it and, you know, working on the script with that. And other things.
Stephanie: Well, I’m really excited about both of those and everything else you have coming up.
James: Well, thanks.
Stephanie: Again, my guest today was James Mottern. Thank you so much for speaking with me.
James: Thanks, Stephanie.
Stephanie: The film is called Trucker and it is available on DVD and you can download it on iTunes.
James Mottern has written and directed award-winning documentaries for a variety of media outlets including BBC and Discovery Networks. He is the former producer of the annual Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. He is the recipient of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Don and Gee Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Mottern has several projects in development with studios including an original screenplayBoomerang financed by Mandate Pictures and produced by Bona Fide Productions.