We recently connected with Matt Graham and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Matt thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Everyone has crazy stuff happen to them, but often small business owners and creatives, artists and others who are doing something off the beaten path are often hit with things (positive or negative) that are so out there, so unpredictable and unexpected. Can you share a crazy story from your journey?

I was living in Athens, Greece, when I received an astrological reading: it was a prediction that soon I would suffer a great personal disaster that would destroy everything in my life.

This reading had been taken without my knowledge – behind my back, using some personal information of mine that had been stolen by someone who wanted to find out more about me. The culprit was an American I’d befriended, a former poet from the Midwest who’d had a nervous breakdown in Japan and moved to the Greek Islands where they became a drug dealer – and had finally wound up in Athens working as a travel agent. Feeling guilty after hearing the reading and its implications for my life, they felt obliged to tell me me of the prediction over the phone. My Stars were deeply troubling.

Hearing it, I felt violated at first – my private information had been stolen and used against me. Then the dread set in – a cloying immovable, unshakeable dread when I overcame my anger and started to understand what it meant for me. The Disaster: I began silently waiting for it to happen. Every day, it became part of my routine. I’m a writer, so I have a fertile imagination, and the possibilities became endless. I became obsessed with The Disaster, somewhere out there, waiting for me – already predestined. I didn’t know when it would show up, but like the monster from the movie It Follows, I knew it was coming for me.

As Oedipus knew, you can’t change your fate – but its human to try. I started to try to anticipate the disaster – but it was impossible, because I didn’t know form it would take, or how it would come. I was suffering from severe depression at the time, and this made everything a constant battle. The Disaster was in my future – it had already happened in a way, so it was pointless – as the Ancient Greeks understood – to try to resist it. Nevertheless I did.

To try to reassert control over the future I did what any other writer would do – I Wrote. I published a short story about a depressed TV Writer – which seemed to only confirm my present state. I wrote on a show. I pitched and sold a TV show, and a year later was fired from my own creation. I wondered at the time, whether this wasn’t the Disaster, but the show was too far creatively damaged by that point so it didn’t seem a likely candidate. I tried to write a novel about a doomed relationship – and aborted the attempt during Covid, which came a year or so later. Nothing seemed to work. Disaster it seemed, was part of my life, in whatever form.

I ended up just waiting: secluded in my old turn of the century house in Los Angeles’ Echo Park during Covid, wondering when Fate would catch up with me in the form of the disease that was destroying the world. Later, I found myself living in Tulum, Mexico, and it seemed obvious that Fate would find me there, and I’d be destroyed by its agents in the form of a Cartel death squad, marching me out into the jungle. Around the same time, walking THROUGH Mexico City, I felt like I’d been followed in the narrow, gloomy streets of Cauhtemoc, and I knew it must have been Fate toying with me.

I’m writing these words from high above Joshua Tree, in a remote ranch. I’m still waiting – but after a while, I’ve become fine with the journey. I’m used to it. At some point, I expect Fate will find me, in the form of a pair of headlights approaching the ranch after dark, bringing with them my long held appointment with Disaster.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I’m a TV and feature film writer. I got into this business by running away from England when I was in my early twenties, because all I wanted to do was be a Writer. I knew I had to do it, and there was never any serious question of doing anything else at all with my life. I’ve written a novel and I’ve worked on lots of stories here – films and TV, some have been produced, some haven’t. I’ve been on shows and in Writers’ Rooms – but I hate TV industry boasting and won’t do that here. Perhaps the thing I’m most proud of to date is the series I wrote with Oliver Stone about eight years ago, The Untold History of The United States.

I love to write stories about History and Crime, which I believe are essentially the same thing.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

When I was twenty eight, I abandoned my career as a Hollywood Assistant (the traditional path to success for a long time in our industry) and moved on a whim to South America. I had no money, didn’t speak Spanish, and was abandoning everything I’d built in LA, my adopted home. I knew I had to do it.

I landed in Mexico City in a thunderstorm for a layover of three days, before flying onward further South. I lived in Buenos Aires for many years following, and also in Ecuador, briefly in the Amazon Rainforest. It was the most authentic thing I’ve ever done, because I knew that my development as a writer depended on it, and that the pressure to conform would destroy it. Looking back, taking that plane, was perhaps one of the the bravest moves of my life.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Persistence is essential in creative work as in Life – never giving up – on anything – is my maxim, but when something’s not working, there’s no shame in putting it down. I spent more than a year absorbed in writing a script about a psychotic LA arson investigator who starts fires himself under cover of the 1992 LA Riots because he hates the modern world (based loosely on a real life case) but the reality was the story wasn’t coming together – even though I could see segments of it vividly and I felt like it was “my voice” – a script so dark and shocking and demented that only I could have written it. The character spoke to something deep and dark about the nature of our society today…but I just couldn’t make it come together. It was my brand too – history as crime – but I was hitting a wall and it was ruining my mental health. Failing to finish it was hard for me. I even turned up at my agent’s Beverly Hills office unannounced I was so conflicted. I still think about that script.

Sometimes you have to know when to move on from something that isn’t working. If it doesn’t come out in one go almost fully formed, then it probably isn’t ever going to. And that’s a hard lesson to learn – because it applies to life too, not just creative work. Admitting defeat is tough.

Matt will be a visiting professor of writing at the Nostos Screenwriting Workshop in Italy at the end of April.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @muzurphulus
• Twitter: muzurphulus
• Other: https://worldoftopia.com/hollywood-night-creatures/ https://worldoftopia.com/writers-block-fitzgerald-ten-top-writers/

Image Credits
Xarene Eskandar