AARON HUCKLEBERRY
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Where do you live (City, State, or Country)?
I live among the mountains, the olive groves, the good-hearted, honest and hardworking people of Andalusia, in Southern Spain.
 
Your script stood out among hundreds of others. What was the inspiration for your story and why did you write a script instead of a short story or a novel?
I had three sources of inspiration for my feature script, Victor. 

1. ‘The Bhagavad Gita’, an Indian spiritual text from 1000 BC, and the concept that we are not physical beings having spiritual experience, but rather are spiritual beings having a physical experience.
2. The 1968 novel ‘It Happened in Boston’ by Russel Greenan in which the unreliable first-person narrator is a disillusioned and paranoid painter who strives meet God, hold Him accountable for the evils of the world and kill Him. The book starts with the wonderful first line, ‘Lately I have come to feel that the pigeons are spying on me’ and the main character is delightfully weird and single-mindedly zealous in the pursuit of his extraordinary goal.
3. The sense that any sentient person of our times has - that everything is going incredibly wrong and that there must be some greater meaning than the banalities and obscenities that confront us, each day.  

 
How long did it take you to write your script...and what is your writing process? Do you outline...use index cards...white board...or just start with FADE IN?
A couple of months of reading and research, daily listening to script podcasts, reading killer scripts, then a couple more months thinking the story broadly into existence and finally about 3-4 months writing and re-writing (I had a full-time day job, so worked early mornings and evenings). 
The opening image was key to getting started, and my sense of where in the story it would reoccur was the light to which I knew I was heading.  With the pulse of the story clear, I found I could start with fade in and write tolerable first draft at a fairly slow pace, with little spurts of longer content as things began to gel. 
 
What is your ultimate ambition as a writer?
The same ultimate ambition as most aspiring screenwriters, to see my story produced, come to life. But there are many other ambitions that sustain me, like expressing some of what it is inside, like writing something that gives me satisfaction and hope, like engaging and moving people who read the material.
In the end, I just want to write bloody good stuff, of which I can be proud, that has a shout at being produced.
 
Was your entry at The Wiki Screenplay Contest a full script or “the first ten pages”? Why did you make that choice?
I already had the full script completed, and the payoff of the piece is in its final 15 pages, so I wanted the whole piece to be seen.
 
What’s your all-time favorite movie or television show...and why?
There’s no way I can reduce to one. The best I can do (from the recent catalogue only) is: Three Billboards, Michael Clayton, The Whale. Each of these scripts, stories, films are masterpieces to my mind, with the mathematical precision of Bach and the majesty and colour of Mozart.
 
What advice do you have for writers hoping to win a contest or place as a finalist as you have?
Be your unique voice. Don’t submit your script until you have spoken it, lived it, fought with it, made up with it and it is so much a piece of you that you are as vulnerable as hell pushing it forward.  
 
What else are you working on that the world needs to know about?
I am interested in ancient ideas and cultures and what lessons they have for us in our modern, disconnected lives. The next project involves the intersection between mysticism, belief and the indelibly human. I also have a poignant comedy in mind, which has very different challenges to what I have faced so far.
You’ll have to ask my other personalities about their ideas, they all have them!

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