Roger Roberts Avary (born August 23, 1965) is a Canadian-American film and television director, screenwriter, and producer. He collaborated with

Quentin Tarantino Quentin Jerome Tarantino (; born March 27, 1963) is an American film director, writer, producer, and actor. His films are characterized by stylized violence, extended dialogue, profanity, dark humor, non-linear storylines, cameos, ensembl ...

on ''

Pulp Fiction ''Pulp Fiction'' is a 1994 American crime film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, who conceived it with Roger Avary.See, e.g., King (2002), pp. 185–7; ; Starring John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, Tim Roth, Vin ...

'', for which they won

Best Original Screenplay The Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay is the Academy Award for the best screenplay not based upon previously published material. It was created in 1940 as a separate writing award from the Academy Award for Best Story. Beginning with the ...

at the 67th Academy Awards. Avary directed ''

Killing Zoe ''Killing Zoe'' is a 1993 crime film written and directed by Roger Avary and starring Eric Stoltz, Jean-Hugues Anglade and Julie Delpy. The story details a safe cracker named Zed who returns to France to aid an old friend in performing a doomed ...

'', ''

The Rules of Attraction ''The Rules of Attraction'' is a satirical black comedy novel by Bret Easton Ellis published in 1987. The novel follows a handful of rowdy and often sexually promiscuous, spoiled bohemian students at a liberal arts college in 1980s New Hampsh ...

'', '' Lucky Day'', and wrote the screenplays for ''

Silent Hill is a horror anthology media franchise centered on a series of survival horror games created by Keiichiro Toyama and published by Konami. The first four video games in the series, '' Silent Hill'', ''Silent Hill 2'', ''Silent Hill 3'' and '' ...

'' and ''

Beowulf ''Beowulf'' (; ang, Bēowulf ) is an Old English epic poem in the tradition of Germanic heroic legend consisting of 3,182 alliterative lines. It is one of the most important and most often translated works of Old English literature. The ...

''. In 2022, Avary reunited with Quentin Tarantino to launch a podcast called The

Video Archives Video Archives was a video rental store located in Manhattan Beach, California, and later moved to Hermosa Beach, California, owned and managed by Lance Lawson and Rick Humbert. Filmmakers Quentin Tarantino, Roger Avary and Daniel Snyder worked t ...

Podcast. The first episode premiered on July 19, 2022.

Career

''Pulp Fiction''

Avary &

collaborated on the 1994 film ''

'' for which they won the

Academy Award The Academy Awards, better known as the Oscars, are awards for artistic and technical merit for the American and international film industry. The awards are regarded by many as the most prestigious, significant awards in the entertainment ind ...

for Best Original Screenplay. According to Tarantino, Avary originally came up with the plot of the boxer Butch Coolidge and his gold watch from a screenplay named ''Pandemonium Reigns'' he had written himself.

''The Rules of Attraction''

In 2002, Avary directed ''

'', from his adaptation of the

Bret Easton Ellis Bret Easton Ellis (born March 7, 1964) is an American author, screenwriter, short-story writer, and director. Ellis was first regarded as one of the so-called literary Brat Pack and is a self-proclaimed satirist whose trademark technique, as a ...

novel A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itsel ...

, which he also executive produced. ''The Rules of Attraction'' was the first studio film to be edited on Apple's

Final Cut Pro Final Cut Pro is a series of non-linear editing, non-linear video editing software programs first developed by Macromedia, Macromedia Inc. and later Apple Inc. The most recent version, Final Cut Pro 10.6.4, runs on Macintosh, Mac computers power ...

editing system. Avary became a spokesperson for

product, appearing in Apple print and web ads worldwide. In 2005, Avary, at the request of his friend, actor James Van Der Beek, played the part of a peyote-taking gonzo film director Franklin Brauner in the film '' Standing Still''.

''Silent Hill''

In 2006, Avary wrote a screenplay adaptation to the

Konami , is a Japanese multinational video game and entertainment company headquartered in Chūō, Tokyo, it also produces and distributes trading cards, anime, tokusatsu, pachinko machines, slot machines, and arcade cabinets. Konami has casino ...

video game, ''

'' (2006), with French director and friend, Christophe Gans, and ''Killing Zoe'' producer Samuel Hadida. Avary and Gans being long time gamers and fans of the ''Silent Hill'' series, collaborated on the film.

''Beowulf''

Avary and novelist Neil Gaiman wrote the screenplay for the 2007 film ''

'' which was directed by Robert Zemeckis.

''Lucky Day''

In September 2017 Avary directed his own screenplay, ''Lucky Day'', a semi-sequel of ''

.'' The Video Archives Podcast (2022–Present) In 2021, Quentin Tarantino announced that he and Roger Avary would launch a podcast titled, 'The Video Archives Podcast'. The point of the podcast is to discuss films from the actual Video Archives collection that they would recommend to customers when they worked there. The set is surrounded by actual VHS copies of films from

that Tarantino bought after the store went out of business. They are joined by podcast announcer, Gala Avary, Roger Avary's daughter. The first episode premiered on July 19, 2022. The duo discussed John Carpenter's Dark Star and Cocaine Cowboys.

Manslaughter charge

On January 13, 2008, Avary was arrested under suspicion of

manslaughter Manslaughter is a common law legal term for homicide considered by law as less culpable than murder. The distinction between murder and manslaughter is sometimes said to have first been made by the ancient Athenian lawmaker Draco in the 7th cen ...

and

DUI Driving under the influence (DUI)—also called driving while impaired, impaired driving, driving while intoxicated (DWI), drunk driving, operating while intoxicated (OWI), operating under the influence (OUI), operating vehicle under the infl ...

, following a car crash in Ojai, California, where a passenger, Andrea Zini, was killed. The Ventura County Sheriff's department responded to the crash after midnight Sunday morning on the 1900 block of East Ojai Avenue. Avary was released from jail on $50,000 bail. In December 2008, he was charged with, and pleaded not guilty to, gross vehicular manslaughter and two felony counts of causing bodily injury while intoxicated. On September 29, 2009, he was sentenced to one year in work furlough (allowing him to go to his job during the day and then report back to the furlough facility at night) and five years of probation. However, after making several tweets about the conditions of his stay on

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

, Avary was sent to Ventura County Jail to serve out the remainder of his term. In a 2012 interview with

IndieWire IndieWire (sometimes stylized as indieWIRE or Indiewire) is a film industry and review website that was established in 1996. The site's focus was predominantly independent film, although its coverage has grown to "to include all aspects of Hollyw ...

, Avary said, regarding the crash and incarceration, "Incarceration didn't change me," and after a long pause, "In many, many ways, incarceration galvanized me. The totality of the experience helped me." He went on to say, "I spend every waking moment thinking about how I can live my life in such a way to honor this terrible loss that occurred." In 2019, Avary said about the crash, "When something like that happens and an atom bomb sort of goes off in your life, it either blows you into pieces—if you allow it to—or you use the force of the blast to propel you forward."

Filmography

Film

Television

Short films

Other credits

References

External links

* * *
Roger Avary talks to Edge Magazine about Silent Hill

Roger Avary Interview on Suicide Girls

* ttp://www.joblo.com/index.php?id=11029 JoBlo.com Interview on Silent Hill {{DEFAULTSORT:Avary, Roger 1965 births 21st-century Canadian criminals Best Original Screenplay Academy Award winners Best Original Screenplay BAFTA Award winners Living people People from Flin Flon Film directors from Manitoba Canadian screenwriters Canadian film producers Writers from Manitoba Canadian people convicted of manslaughter 21st-century American criminals 21st-century American male writers 21st-century Canadian male writers 20th-century American male writers 20th-century Canadian male writers Canadian people of German descent American people of German descent