Flint Dille owns a big part of 80s (and 90s) kids childhoods. As a writer, producer, director, and designer the man has had his hands in a good many entertainment industry pies over the years. Flint was doing "transmedia" work before that term was even coined, and continues to be a pioneer in that field to this day.
From his IMDb page:
"Flint started his career writing and producing television shows ('Transformers,' 'G.I. Joe', etc.) while writing interactive novels ('The Sagard Series' with Gary Gygax, creator of 'Dungeons and Dragons). By the early 90s, Flint was designing games ('Battle for the Future') and writing movies ('American Tail II: Feivel Goes West'), wondering how he was somehow going to turn two careers into one. Flint's Gulf War I simulation, released, coincidentally, the same day as the actual bombing began, got him invited to the Air War College as a Speaker for seven years running at the 'Connections Conference'. When CD-ROMS came out, Flint worked on a variety of experimental interactive movies in a variety of roles, from Game designer/Writer on 'Double Switch' (a cinematic game) and director, ('Terror T.R.A.X.', which ended up as a television pilot for Fox).
"In the commercial sector, Flint has worked as a designer and/or writer on numerous games which have either turned platinum, received awards, or both: 'Soviet Strike,' 'Nuclear Strike,' 'Dragonstrike' (1993), 'Tomorrow Never Dies' (1999), 'Dead to Rights' (2002), and 'The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay' (2004).
"In 2004, Flint and John Zuur Platten made history by selling a game design document as a feature film called 'The Reaper' (later changed to 'Venom') which was released by Dimension (Miramax) in 2005. Flint and John were Executive Producers and have a 'first look deal' at Dimension.
"Flint has written four interactive novels, five regular novels, graphic novels and comic books. He actually appears as a character in a graphic novel, Frank Miller's '300' (as the only Spartan, Dillios, who survives the battle of Thermopylae).
"Flint has a BA from U.C. Berkeley in Ancient History and an MFA from USC in Cinema (Professional Writing). He even taught a class at the Art Institute of Los Angeles and enjoys teaching, viewing it as a place to audition material for an upcoming non-fiction book about media design and talent recruitment.
"He has been a speaker/guest lecturer/panelist at AFI, USC, The Air War College, the ICT, DICE, E3, ComiCon, GenCon, BotCon and all sorts of other Cons."
Flint was gracious enough to take some time out of his busy schedule to answer of few of HNGN's questions:
HNGN (Jerry Bonner): You've worked/written across several different mediums (games, film, TV, comics, etc.) and genres. What is your favorite? What medium/genre are you most comfortable working in?
FD (Flint Dille): Good question. Depends on the project, really. Script and novel come easier than comics.I'm very comfortable telling a story in time, not so much in space (on paper). I'm not an artist. The real thing is that I just have to find a style hook. That scene or image or line of dialogue. Sometimes a whole project turns on one little thing. It's like a key. Unlocks the whole project.
But to your question, I don't have a real favorite. Right now, I'm having the most fun doing "Alternate Reality Storytelling." It's more about creating a world than a linear story. It's a game you play with your readers. Every piece of it is like a puzzle piece. It connects to pieces that have already been played and the big picture starts to become more clear. Makes you wonder what is going to happen next or what happened before or what somebody's real motives are.
HNGN: You wrote some of the episodes of the "Mr. T" 80s cartoon...how hands on was Mr. T himself in that project?
FD: He was invisible to me, except at the wraparound shoots and I only went to one of them. I never saw notes from him, but that doesn't mean he didn't make notes. They just didn't make it down to the writer. Might have been subsumed in network notes.
HNGN: What's was the best part of working classic kids TV shows like "G.I. Joe" and the "Transformers?"
FD: They were just fun. At the time, animation was the only medium in the world in which you could solve a plot problem by calling in an air strike. That was very expensive in live action. Truth is, I grew to love the characters. 22 minute shows are very achievable. You can write one in a day if you know the show well enough.That means it's a single focused effort. A single thought-stream. It's not like a movie. It's more of a sprint.
The Movie ["Transformers: The Movie"]that was not a sprint. It was a marathon. I probably did 20 drafts of the movie from the now lost "Secret of Cybertron" that Jay Bacal and I wrote (and influenced the movie and the "Five Faces of Darkness.") all the way to being holed up in the Grand Hyatt for six weeks seemingly doing a draft a day (I didn't really, but it was a process). Great, fun days.
HNGN: Speaking of "Transformers: The Movie," did you get work/interact with Orson Welles (who voiced the planet-sized Transformer, Unicron) at all?
FD: He came in one day for recording. He was great. We talked about the Mercury Theater while the techs were adjusting things. Easy to work with (contrary to rumors). He was very heavy (looked like a planet) and had a little bit of a wheeze. He died, I think, a week later. But I'd met him before that with Gary Gygax. I'd forgotten about that meeting until I read about it on Gary's Blog. We wanted him to play the dungeon master in a D&D type movie. He was in...as in he definitely wanted to do it.
HNGN: I was always interested in the animation (and overall process) on those old shows because, at the time, they were so much better (in terms of color, design, and animation quality), so they really stood out from the standard, Saturday morning fare we were used to. Can you tell me a little about that, or what you know about that? Was it just you turned in your script then you saw the finished product a year later? Or did you have some say in the process at all? I know the animation was handled overseas for the most part, so maybe you had some say in the dialogue recording?
FD: I was a producer as well, so I saw it from story concept through recording session to final sweetening session, though I'm not sure I saw most of them in total, final form, until I watched them on DVD 20 years later. We had a great team. Sunbow [the production company behind many classic, 80s cartoons] paid everybody well and you get what you pay for. I went over the storyboards before they went overseas, saw the rough assemblies (which sometimes took a lot of editing... All of the post, came back to the U.S.
HNGN: What your favorite video game project that you've worked on? Why?
FD: I have a lot of them, for different reasons. I'm loving "Ingress" right now, because it is so wildly different than anything I've done before or, frankly, anybody has done before and it's got a great team. But that's not a console game. There are so many that I enjoyed for different reasons, sometimes it's the team, and sometimes it's the content, sometimes it's some other intangible. Impossible to answer.
HNGN: For you, how does writing for a video game differ from writing for a film or TV show?
FD: There are a lot of similarities, to be honest. I love the challenges of crafting a story inside of a game. It's always interesting.
HNGN: What was it like working with Blizzard on "Diablo III?"
FD: Blizzard is probably, over the long term, the most successful video game company in history.That's not an accident.They're great. Expectations are very high. Obviously, Chris Metzen and I had fun on the script given that we went on to do three Transformer graphic novel series' afterwards. Micky and James and the C-Team were fun to work with on the "Book of Cain" sourcebook. It was a challenging project given that it had been in production for seven years under different teams, so there was a lot of focusing and editing involved.
HNGN: What do you think of long-term fans of the series criticisms of "Diablo III?" Fair or unfair? Deserved on undeserved?
FD: Well, with high expectations come high criticism levels. You play in that league, you have to expect it. Making a game that huge and complex is a very tall order. Very few companies could pull it off at all. I'm proud of what we did there. With all criticism you sort through it. What's valid? What's not? How do you do better next time? You're only as good as your next one.
HNGN: What are your thoughts on the current state of pop culture now that the nerds have inherited the Earth? What I mean by that is things that were considered nerdy or geeky in the 70s and 80s are now huge, billion dollar entertainment franchises. Do you think Marvel, DC, etc., can maintain the pace that they are on, or will the bubble burst at some point in the near future?
FD: Frankly, I think we're in a renaissance. What used to be only do-able on the big screen shows up on television every week. There's more variety in content than we've ever seen before across the media universe. YouTube gives everybody access at one end, and we are constantly seeing wonders of the world on the big screen. Artists have an amazing palette or set of pallets to paint on now. And another thing...you don't hear word "nerd" much anymore. The modern term is geek and most of the time it isn't pejorative. I think everybody in the world has suddenly discovered that they were secretly a geek for something.
Obviously, there are a lot of changes happening.There is a lot of disruption.Old models are being broken and we're discovering some exciting new ones. The audience is having a lot more say. This is not making the old order happy, but so it goes. They will adapt and survive.
