When screenwriter Ian Shorr was twelve years old, he wasn’t just dreaming about making movies, he was already writing them. “I was one of those weird little kids that knew exactly what they wanted to do when they grew up,” Shorr says. “I wrote my first feature in 7th grade.”
That script, a Trainspotting-inspired drama called ‘Zero’, came about after a thwarted attempt to see the R-rated film. “I’d heard about the movie Trainspotting from some depraved summer camp counselors, and I tried to go see it when I was twelve, and they wouldn’t sell me a ticket,” he says. “So I went next door to Barnes & Noble, and I found a copy of the script in there. And, reading the first few pages, I was just mesmerized by it.”
Inspired, he went home and wrote his own version despite having never encountered drugs, disgusting toilets in Scottish pubs or anything else in the movie. But he was determined to get it read.
“I grew up in Park City, Utah, where they host Sundance, so when I wrote that script, I actually put on my cool, black trench coat and went running around Main Street in Park City with a paper copy of the script, trying to get directors to read it,” he says.
One director humored him. “One guy said, ‘Okay, I would love to see what a drug movie written by a middle schooler from Utah looks like,’ and I thought, ‘Great, my career has begun!’ And then I never heard back from him.”
While his first pitch didn’t pan out, the dream never faded. “All the Sundance premieres were held in the auditorium at my high school, the Eccles Center was our performing arts center,” Shorr says. “I’d walk out of class during that festival week and there’s Roger Ebert interviewing Steven Soderbergh. It was a really exciting place to live if you're into movies.”
From USC to Selling His First Script
Determined to make screenwriting his career, Shorr attended the USC Film School where he wrote a monster movie called Splinter that still airs every Halloween. “It was designed for my experimental narrative class,” he says. “Originally that movie took place in real time, in one location. Because it was so low-budget, and something people hadn’t seen before, that got made.”
Even then, representation didn’t come right away. His senior thesis script, Exempt, which he describes as “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off set in the world of Grand Theft Auto,” finally opened doors. “I pitched to a room full of agents, managers and producers at the USC Pitch Fest, just before I graduated,” Shorr says. “I signed with Benderspink off of that script. They sold it a couple weeks later.”
Pivoting to Genre
Like many emerging writers, Shorr had to adapt to a changing market. “I was playing mostly in the teen thriller space that was having a moment back in 2007, 2008,” he says. “Then I had to pivot genres and start writing in more sellable arenas like action, horror, sci-fi.”
He also learned the long game of the industry. “I did a ton of assignment work, sold a lot of specs, wound up on the Black List a few times,” he says.
His first major studio release came with Infinite, a $150 million sci-fi action film starring Mark Wahlberg and Chiwetel Ejiofor. “Our trailer was supposed to drop the same week that COVID hit,” he says. “Instead of coming out in theaters, they shelved it for a while. I woke up one morning to find out that, A, something called Paramount Plus exists, and B, we're now on that. It was not the big kick-down-the-door party that I thought it was going to be.”
Writing the 'Love Actually' of Shark Attack Movies
After Infinite, Shorr spent several years developing his next spec and found unexpected inspiration far from Hollywood. “During the pandemic, I had moved out to Kauai,” he says. “We meant to stay three months, and we’re still there five years later.”
“What I noticed when I was out there was that every surfer and every fisherman that I talked to all had a shark story,” he says. “So I started keeping a journal of the stories they would tell, just to see if maybe there was a movie in any of those ideas. Because, you know, it's been a while since we had a really good shark film.”
After collecting months of stories, he had a breakthrough. “I realized, I don't want to do one of these stories, I want to do all of them,” he says. “I was remembering how Richard Curtis, when he was writing Love Actually, he just dumped out his notebook of romantic comedy ideas into one movie. So I'm like, yeah, I want to do the Love Actually of shark attack movies.”
To weave the stories together, he leaned on a familiar genre trope. “I thought a time-loop movie could have all these little crazy moments that I've heard about in these various stories, done by constantly resetting the clock.”
The Pitch: “'Edge of Tomorrow' Meets 'Jaws'”
The result was ‘Shiver’, a high-concept thriller that quickly caught Hollywood’s attention. “Matthew Vaughn, who made the Kingsman and Kick-Ass films, read it and was like, ‘This is exactly my kind of evil little movie,’” Shorr says. Vaughn optioned the script, brought in Deadpool’s Tim Miller to direct, and soon, Keanu Reeves joined the project.
“This is the fastest that anything’s ever happened for me,” Shorr says. “Most of my stuff that’s been made took five years. I had one script that took ten years to get made, it went through three different presidential administrations.”
He describes ‘Shiver’ as “Edge of Tomorrow meets Jaws.” “You’ve got this sleazy ne’er-do-well smuggler who gets hired to transport a mysterious piece of technology across the Pacific,” Shorr says. “On the second day of the trip, this catastrophe leaves him stranded at sea with this army of sharks surrounding him. Our hero gets eaten and dies on page 20, and then pops back to life on the surface of the ocean. Because that piece of technology he was transporting has trapped him in a five-hour time loop – and unfortunately for him, that five hours just happens to be during a massive shark attack,” he says with a laugh.
Shorr leans into the mix of horror and humor. “The first time you kill your movie star with a shark, it's scary,” he says. “But by the 80th time it happens, it becomes something more like slapstick comedy.”
Staying Focused
Though Shorr began writing scripts on Microsoft Word, he’s since graduated to Final Draft. “I’ve been using nothing but Final Draft since the first release of it,” he says. “I got tired of having to use the tab bar to space everything over to get the dialogue and character stuff in the right place. It’s a big step up.”
When asked what keeps him motivated, his answer goes back to the same passion that began in Park City. “This was the dream job from day one,” he says.
For emerging screenwriters also trying to break through, ‘Shiver’ is a reminder that inspiration can strike anywhere, from childhood obsessions to Hawaiian shark tales -- and that persistence, not luck, is what builds a career.