Originally published at the Georgia State University News Hub, April 6, 2016. Archived here.
By Jeremy Craig
When Lane and Ruckus Skye wrote the screenplay for “Rattle the Cage,” a psychological thriller about a man who wakes up in a jail cell in rural Georgia, imprisoned by a corrupt sheriff’s deputy, it had all the trappings of the Southern Gothic.
By the time it was released last December, the film had been adapted by Abu Dhabi-based director Majid Al Ansari into “Zinzana,” the first-ever major motion picture in Arabic to be acquired by Netflix. The Skyes, a husband-and-wife team who first took up screenwriting as a hobby while waiting tables, traveled to Austin, Texas, for its premiere. They’d never even seen a rough cut of it.
“We were surprised by how close it was to the original script,” said Lane, a 2001 Georgia State University alumna who majored in French. “We love foreign films, so we’re used to watching films in other languages, and we love foreign thrillers specifically. It was cool to have something from a type of film we already love, and then have it be something that we wrote.”
They hadn’t expected the film to be produced, Ruckus admitted. Instead of pitching it out, they just posted it to The Black List, a database of scripts.
That’s where Al Ansari found it.
Different places, same heart
The director had been searching for the right script for the first feature-length thriller to be made in the United Arab Emirates.
“Films in Arabic are often politically minded, or focus on social issues, and this is a just a fun thriller that people aren’t used to seeing coming out of the region,” Ruckus said.
There were differences, of course, in the adaptation. After all, the original script was full of Southern colloquialisms.
Instead of contemporary Georgia, the Arabic-language version was set in the Arabian peninsula during the 1980s.
Despite the language and cultural differences, the core element of the story was the same: the deep importance of family as the protagonist tries to escape his jail cell to get to his estranged wife and son.
Those family connections in Arabic culture and art, strong even in the midst of conflict, are inherent in the Skyes’ storytelling set in the American South.
“That’s kind of a through line that runs throughout our scripts and stories—family’s super important,” Ruckus said. “I think that’s such a big part of the South.”
And so is storytelling itself, Lane said.
“I grew up listening to my family tell stories on Sunday afternoons at my grandmother’s house,” she said. “That’s how I learned to tell stories, from listening to my Southern relatives stretch the truth.”
There’s stretching the truth around the living room, with laughter and togetherness—and then there’s Southern Gothic, a more sinister genre marked by the grotesque. It’s what shaped the original script.
“I really like looking at the more dangerous side of the region, and the strong characters it can lead to,” she said. “The South has such a complex history that it’s still trying to wrestle with.”
Close to home
While she and her husband are fascinated by the rural South, Lane preferred Georgia State’s urban environment, where cultural, artistic and media resources are more readily available.
“As much as I talked about loving small towns, I didn’t want to be stuck in the middle of nowhere going to college,” she said. “I like cities. I wanted to be in the middle of the action.”
Even so, they prefer to remain in Atlanta, a smaller city than the heart of the entertainment industry, Los Angeles. For Lane, hailing from Norcross, Ga., and Ruckus, from the Florida panhandle, Atlanta is much closer to home, geographically and culturally.
And technology allows them to write scripts and offer them to potential directors without having to go through the hard slog of capturing a director’s attention in person or mailing out scripts and praying someone will read them.
“In the case of this film, we would never have even thought of it being directed abroad as an option,” Lane said.
“Image Nation, the company that made the film, registered on the website and found the script, and that never would have happened any other way,” Ruckus said. “It’s been life changing for us.”
So life changing, in fact, that production companies are reaching out to them, rather than the other way around. The couple is working hard on their next big project, something they can’t reveal quite yet.
“It just started as stuff we were doing for fun,” Lane said. “And then we started getting more work, and started taking it more seriously. It’s been pretty amazing.”