We talked with Russell recently about his projects and how he began working with the legendary scream queen.

Your stories seem to embrace awkwardness and discomfort. What's pulled you in that direction?

I appreciate that observation because I don’t think of it consciously as “awkwardness,” but I totally see it. I like discomfort. A lot of my work involves wringing tension out of everyday encounters that people find themselves in, in ways that can make you laugh or really tense up. 

I've always loved dark comedy…I’m trying to think of where that stemmed from. I was not a socially confident kid, but it was finding community in the Theater Department at Potomac that put me on the path toward really finding my own voice and ultimately coming out of my shell. It was exciting to me and everyone in the Black Box to embrace strangeness, explore new pieces of art we’d never seen before. And it’d manifest on and off stage. I would write these parody scripts of the shows we were putting on, and we’d all read them over opening weekend. They were silly and morbid and had all these running jokes we’d spent months collecting as a production. It felt like an homage to the communities that those plays and musicals created.

I've always loved being able to balance comedy and horror, not necessarily in a “horror comedy” way but in a way where a laugh disarms you so that a scare becomes so much more effective, or a scare freaks you out so much that a well-timed laugh afterward hits much harder. That's something I love. There's tension but also balance if you're looking at it from both of those perspectives.

How did your association with Jamie Lee Curtis come about?

Jamie was looking for help learning a software program called Final Draft, which helps you write screenplays in a format that is standard in the entertainment industry. I had just downloaded and taught myself how to use it days before I heard there was an opportunity to assist her. If it wasn’t for a software discount that day, I never would’ve had the career I did!

My first day with Jamie was meeting in her office and hearing about a treatment for a movie she’d had in her head since she was younger than me. She had just finished the 2018 Halloween film with David Gordon Green and felt revitalized working with Blumhouse. She loved their fun and collaborative approach to making movies and wanted to bring them an idea of her own. 

I helped her with one version of the movie; a year and many other small jobs later she asked me if I wanted to try taking the reins on a rewrite of the movie, and that’s how we ended up as co-writers. That’s how our whole company really started. Just the fact that we hit it off on my first job with her meant that she gave me more opportunities to rise to the occasion and exceed her expectations.

Tell us about Mother Nature.

It's an eco-horror movie set in Four Corners, New Mexico. When I started working with Jamie and Blumhouse, I went on a few research trips to that area to understand how energy worked there, how it was extracted, and how it impacted communities, particularly in the Navajo Nation. There are legacies of severe environmental racism that haven’t been explored much in the media, especially in big genre stories. We brought in a lot of voices from that community to advise, and they’ve ended up really shaping the story in the best ways. 

And how did Mother Nature become a graphic novel?

It was an idea that Jamie had relatively early in the pandemic, when everything was hitting a pause. We didn’t know when we'd be able to get resources together to go film the movie. So we’re releasing Mother Nature as a graphic novel next year with Blumhouse and Titan Comics before the film goes into production. And beyond making the movie better, I think the novel is shaping up to be this incredible piece of art on its own thanks to Karl Stevens, the fabulous visual artist who has been illustrating our screenplay entirely by hand. I’ve been seeing Karl’s work on the novel for over a year now, and it’s been an incredible process to actually see the images I’ve had in my head and have been writing and rewriting for a while. It's exciting to have these amazing images to see and react to.
 
What advice would you give a young person interested in a career in the entertainment industry?

This will sound broad, but I would say to be kind to yourself as you enter a world that does not make much sense at all and has all of these gatekeepers. I’ve been incredibly lucky early in my life, and I still struggle with kindness toward myself and patience in what I want to create, but those are both key. The things that you make will take both time and a lot of your emotional resources. It's a unique industry, where you will be rejected all the time for business reasons - but because it’s your own creative work getting rejected, it can feel personal.

When I arrived in LA, I thought I needed to start excelling and impressing people immediately; if I didn't, I had already failed. That metric can carry over to any post-college career path, not just entertainment. But it’s good to remember, especially in the high school-to-college and college-to-real world transitions, that you should take a moment to figure out what calls to you and if that's something that you would want to wake up for every single day.