Winning the Screenwriters' Lottery
BY DENNIS KING
NEW YORK – Will Fetters is living every aspiring young screenwriter’s dream.
His first script, completed while he was studying political science and prepping for law school at the University of Delaware, just finished a Cinderella journey to production and is set to open in theaters nationwide on Friday.
It’s titled “Remember Me,” and is directed by Allen Coulter (“Hollywoodland”) with a heavyweight cast that includes Pierce Brosnan, Lena Olin, Chris Cooper and the currently hot Robert Pattinson (of “Twilight”). It was Pattinson’s participation in the film as star and executive producer that finally secured financing and gave the movie an invaluable publicity boost, the screenwriter said.
But it wasn’t Pattinson that Fetters had in mind as he was writing the script.
“When you’re a 22 year old and you don’t know anyone and you’re writing your first script, you have ideals in your head,” he said during a recent press junket. “When I was teaching myself to write, I read `American Beauty’ and Chris Cooper was actually the guy that I had in my head for the cop’s role when I was writing in my apartment in Delaware.
“And when I heard that he was going to do it – that was actually one of the last roles that we cast – that was pretty cool,” he said. “His performance in `American Beauty’ stayed with me, and to see him cast in my first movie, that was very, very cool.”
Fetters said he never dreamed that his first screenplay, loosely based on an incident in his own life, would attract the kind of heavyweight talent that it did.
“I always thought that if I were lucky this would be a small independent film that would go to Sundance without a distributor,” he said. “But to have this actor (Pattinson) at this moment come on board …. It’s wonderful, but who would have thought?
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