![]() But the best education he received came from reading scripts for HBO.Īs a freelancer, Fergus learned how to do coverage and read hundreds of scripts that were being considered by HBO. He worked for the Fox-Film Company in accounting for several years, and he continued to write scripts. Fergus’s journey has been a challenging one, but he owes his success to his self-taught education and to his experiences at CineStory.Īfter graduating from college, Fergus returned to New York and did everything he could to learn more about the film business. Fergus and Ostby also won the CineStory Screenwriting Award in 1999. Fergus and his writing partner Hawk Ostby wrote the scripts for Consequence (2003), First Snow(2006) and Iron Man (2008), and they were nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay for Children of Men(2006). Today, he is an Academy Award nominated screenwriter, as well as a successful director. “I just kept going from there, learning how to write and learning how to not write, how to make your mistakes and learn from them.”įergus did learn. “I wrote some pretty bad scripts, and I wrote some slightly better ones,” Fergus said. From high school through college, he learned by doing. His education came from writing constantly, as he tried to become a better writer with every project and competition. His film school was watching films and reading scripts. Film courses were reserved for film students, and as a business major, Fergus was shut out from most classes. Fergus attended Boston University, which had a film program, but he had trouble getting into the classes. “It just kind of came out of necessity.”īut there weren’t a lot of opportunities to learn how to write scripts. “If you didn’t know how to write, you really didn’t know how to make a film,” Fergus said. The writing came later, when Fergus realized he needed to learn to tell a story first. “Who knows how much of it was true, but it made you think, here’s this kid who just wanted to do it, and start to feel like it was possible.” “Steven Spielberg’s story was pretty mythologized back then about the way he busted in, just kind of waltzing in and deciding he was going to be a filmmaker,” Fergus said. But that’s what he wanted to do – make movies. He couldn’t believe making movies was really a job. Mark Fergus grew up wanting to be Steven Spielberg.Īs a teenager in New York City in the ‘70s, he saw Close Encounters and was awestruck.
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