W Files

Profiling Screenwriters at Work

Esta Spalding’s Midas Touch

By Philip Moscovitch

Esta Spalding got the best break of her life after Chris Haddock refused to hire her.

Newly arrived from Ontario, she says she “knew Vancouver was a big film town and I thought, I’m going to take a year and see what this world of film is like.”

She had already made a reputation for herself as a poet, but was looking for a change after seven years teaching high school and university. So Spalding applied for “random film jobs,” including one as an assistant in Haddock’s office, where Da Vinci’s Inquest was in development.

“Chris called me a couple of days later and said ‘I’ve looked at your books, and it’s great talking to you. I can’t hire you as my assistant because you have absolutely no secretarial experience, but you’re welcome to come sit in on our writing meetings.’” Spalding says she “ended up talking non-stop and Chris hired me to work in the story department.”

She would go on to serve as executive story editor for the first three seasons of the show, with writing credits on 23 episodes. She also picked up three Gemini nominations and a trio of WGC awards.

After three seasons of Da Vinci’s Inquest, Spalding went to work on her first feature screenplay, the adaptation of Barbara Gowdy’s novel Falling Angels. It went on to earn a Gemini nomination and won a Leo.

“Adaptation is an extension of a kind of reading. I love to read, and when I read I’m inside of the world of these characters. I’m empathizing with the characters. I’m putting myself into their lives and situations. When you’re adapting it’s like playing paper dolls. You’re picking them up and moving them around.”

Now, with three seasons as executive story editor on The Eleventh Hour behind her, Spalding has another Gowdy adaptation in the works. This time it’s The Romantic, in
development with Rhombus. “I didn’t want to be pigeon-holed as the person who always adapts Barbara Gowdy,” she says. “But I could not resist that book. It’s such an extraordinary book and it’s so essentially different in its tone and its world from Falling Angels. And I thought, this is silly, to resist. They are completely different books and different challenges.”

Though she always loved books and grew up “in a house basically built of books”– her mother is novelist Linda Spalding and her stepfather is Michael Ondaatje–it took a while before Spalding came around to considering a writing career. (She did her undergrad degree in biology–which came in handy on Da Vinci’s.)

Slipping into a writing life felt comfortable, she says. “It’s natural when you’ve grown up in a house where people revere books and you were read stories for hours every night.” At the same time, because nobody in her family writes for film and TV, Spalding has always found screenwriting exciting, and “it got to be my own in a way that poetry wasn’t.”

For years, Spalding’s writing method involved getting up early, sitting at the computer and working flat-out.

“I get my best work done early in the morning–it’s like I’m less self-censoring then. My ideal writing day is pulling myself out of my computer at two in the afternoon and realizing I haven’t taken a shower or eaten lunch yet,” she says.

Those days vanished once Spalding gave birth to her daughter, who is now two.

Her writing is now done during the hours in which she has child-care, in a “monastic” office with “one dying plant” and no Internet connection.

This means Spalding has to channel her writing into set hours–something she had never done before. But it turns out there are advantages. “It’s different to have to turn it on at a particular time and turn it off,” she says. “But I also find I’m much more efficient at getting the writing done. It doesn’t spill over into all of my peripheral thinking.” Another side effect is that she doesn’t find herself writing poetry. “I think it has to do with my thinking that if I’m going to be away from my child, I had better be doing it to help earn a living.”

Though she has a novel to her credit–Mere, co-written with her mother–Spalding has no interest in writing any more prose fiction. She says the book was really “an excuse to get together and work together” after she had moved to Vancouver, and while it was fun, the genre was also “inhibiting.”

“Getting characters to come in and out of rooms and pick up cups of coffee and have natural conversations in the prose form is really difficult for me,” she says. “You have to paint the entire room. You can’t just come into and out of a scene in that quick brushstroke way you do in screenwriting… I found it really cumbersome.”