Full Clip Productions’ Michael Schwarz talks “Damaged” and what’s next (Part 2 of 2)

We started you off on Wednesday with the first part of our interview with Full Clip Productions’ Michael Schwarz, but there was plenty more to be said! If you need a refresher, you can find part one of the interview by clicking here.

After the jump, Schwarz tells us about Full Clip’s influences, idols, and exciting plans ahead.

You said that you were all into comics. What did you see in comics growing up that drew you in and how are you putting that into the work for Full Clip?

I started reading comics back when I was first able to read and my brother, who’s seven years older than me, was really into Batman in a big way. I guess it was a transference on him. I took it a little bit further as I grew up. He’s always remained a comic book fan, but I always liked it as a storytelling medium in that you can get a lot done in comics that you just can’t get done in film and television. You can get away with a lot more. There’s something about long form storytelling that I really, really enjoy.

I look at something like Preacher as a favorite example. It’s how much the characters change over all of the issues. You look at where the characters are at the start and where they are at the end and you can’t get that in a film. You can possibly get it in a film trilogy, but it’s still hard. You can get it in TV shows when it’s done right, but there are just so many cooks in the kitchen with a TV show that it’s so easy for it to go astray during the fifth year, or whatever it is. With comics, it’s just down to a few core people. You can really just keep a great character arc going for so long and there’s something powerful about that.

A lot of comics can go on for years, and it’s just stuff happening to a person. You guys are really working on a slow progression. Growing up, was there anything that really stuck out, elements that you wanted to bring into the work now?

I always grew up the fan of characters with a moral center. Even if it’s not the moral center that I would necessarily agree with, as long as there’s a growing one. All three of us are big fans of the Punisher over the years, Batman as well. I guess that’s the main thing we wanted to bring to the table. The other thing that I always wanted to personally bring to the table was to take those ideas that have always been in comics, like vigilantism, and flip it on its head and look at it from almost a real world perspective. What are the consequences of actually engaging in this sort of behavior? We always accept that it’s okay to kill a bad guy, and I’m not saying that it is okay or isn’t, but if you are actually going to step outside the law and do this, what are the actual consequences? And that’s sort of what’s interesting me right now, and that flows into Patrios as well. Those are the kind of things that interest me and that I’ve brought from my years of comic book reading.

You guys do a lot of gritty, earthy stuff. Are you planning on sticking with that? I know you’ve mentioned doing things toward the younger crowd.

We’ve got our third book, Amelia Plum, which is being written, it’s nearly complete. It’s going to be a novella and I don’t want to give too much away of that. It’s about ninety percent complete, the first draft, and it’s definitely based to the younger crowd, it’s one of the darker kid stories along the line of Coraline. It’s actually my brother’s wife who’s writing it. It’s an idea that she had that we absolutely loved, and we presented it to the guys at Radical and they thought  it was really cool, too. So, she’s nearly completed that. It’s really cool. I hesitate to say it’s very Coraline-esque because it sort of puts it on a box and makes it seem like it’s a derivative of Coraline, and it really isn’t. But that’s the closest thing you could compare it to. It’s very dark. It’s actually about a young girl with Asperger’s. It’s got this really cool, fantastical, mythical element to it, which is really unique and we’re really excited about it.

Full Clip has worked with David Lapham, and now you’re working with F. Gary Gray on Last Days of American Crime. You have big names in there. Is there anyone you want to work with in the future that you’d really like to see?

There’s lots of things we want to do. I would hesitate to really say who too much, because we are targeting them. We announced at the Radical Panel that we’re working with Grant Morrison on a film which is incredibly exciting. He’s writing a film for us. There’s a 2000 AD property called Rogue Trooper, which we all grew up reading. It’s not very well known in America, but very well known in England and somewhat in Australia. Grant’s writing an adaptation of that right now which is really, really exciting. At the moment, he’s the only attachment that’s on board doing the script; we haven’t decided what we’re going to do with it – whether we’re going to go with a big studio, or whether we’re going to go with a smaller company. Working with Grant is a dream come true – he’s one of my favorite brains in the whole world. I really enjoy working with him.

I’m trying to think if there are other things we’ve got going that I’m actually allowed to talk about! We do have several other films set up. We have our Allen Quatermain film set up at Dreamworks, Steven Spielberg’s company. There’s always the hope that you’ll be working with Spielberg. You never know if it’ll happen, but you always hope it does. We’ve got great writers in Derek Haas and Michael Brandt writing for us. We’ve got a really big exciting project that has been leaked to the media that we’re not supposed to reveal. If you do some Googling, you might be able to find it. I could get in a lot of trouble if I talk about it, but it does have two very big attachments to it.

Since so much has happened already, are there any sort of things that you’d like to see happen that would really mark your success?

I guess people just enjoying our work is the main thing. We’re fans ourselves, so if fans are liking what we’re doing. We’ve got our TV department, which is running really strong. Once we get some actual TV shows on television, I think we’ll know. When we start seeing ads, I’ll be like, alright, cool, we’ve done it. It’s always a really long process. We’re still really in the world of development, so it’s all a long process. I think that once you start seeing some things actually start coming to the screen that we’ll know that it’s really on.

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