For a screenwriter, to be featured on the coveted annual Black List is a tremendous accomplishment that has jumpstarted the career of many of the industry’s hottest writers. If you’re Mattson Tomlin, you’ve not only been featured on that list six times in the past four years, but you’ve done so before the age of thirty. Like the most accomplished athletes, Tomlin regularly exercises his creative muscles averaging anywhere from 8-12 scripts a year. While the writer himself acknowledges many of those scripts aren’t pitch worthy, they have led to the creation of projects such as Netflix’s latest film “Project Power.”
Set against the backdrop of New Orleans, “Project Power” is an original “real world” superhero story that centers around the use of a pill that gives the user unpredictable abilities for five minutes. The story follows a teenage dealer (Dominique Fishback), a local cop (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and an ex-soldier (Jamie Foxx) as they try to take down the organization responsible for creating the drug and releasing it onto the streets.
With “Project Power,” Tomlin confidently establishes himself as a writer who’s a true fan of comic books, graphic novels, and all the titans of pop culture many of us grew up obsessing over even stating that he considered turning his screenplay into a graphic novel had it not gotten picked up. Perhaps that’s precisely why the film is the perfect precursor to the slew of high profile projects Tomlin is attached to; namely, Matt Reeves’ “The Batman” and the upcoming “Mega Man” movie.
“It’s such a mindfuck,” said Tomlin on what it feels like to be attached to these projects. “It comes with a tremendous amount of responsibility. Because unlike something like ‘Project Power,’ people know what Batman is. They love it. They have a primal connection to it. It was on their PJs, when they were three, I know that it was on mine. I want to do right by people and not just when it comes to the DC stuff, but people love Mega Man. Anytime I’m on Twitter, and I post something that’s even remotely Mega Man related, people show up for it. I’m immediately like, ‘Oh, my god, there’s suddenly 1000 people asking me questions that I can’t answer.’ That’s kind of a head trip and I think the way to deal with it is to remember at the end of the day, what people want is a good story. They want to be thrilled. They want to see their characters doing stuff that they expect, but they also want to see these characters doing something new. They want to be surprised.”
During our conversation with Tomlin, we also discussed the responsibility on screenwriters to be honest in their depiction of films in the “cop genre” in 2020, the upcoming “Mega Man” movie, the greatness of “Batman: The Animated Series,” “The Batman,” how Bryan Singer’s “X-Men” influenced “Project Power,” why David Fincher’s “Zodiac” is one of the greatest films of the 2010s, and MUCH more.
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