'Snow's' Mark Fergus on his craft and his collaborator

Writer/director Mark Fergus was in town a few weeks ago, shortly after he and his screenwriting partner Hawk Ostby had been nominated for an Oscar for "Children of Men."

It had been 12 years since the pair had begun writing together and after the typical rocky start, they seem to have hit their stride, with big-budget screenplays for "Iron Man" and "John Carter of Mars" in the Hollywood pipeline.

Fergus, however, was in town to talk about "First Snow," an indie feature about fate based on a script he and Ostby wrote in 1999 and which has turned into Fergus' directorial debut.

The Daily News spoke with Fergus at the Four Seasons Hotel, where he talked about his career, his craft and his writing partner.

"We'd worked about six years trying to sell scripts for lots of money," Fergus said, "which is what everyone is interested in - 'OK, I can quit my real job once we sell a script.'

"But what does that mean? You keep trying to write a script that someone will buy and you keep failing because they don't even know what they want and how can you hit a target that doesn't exist?

"So we just wrote ['First Snow'] and I definitely wanted to direct it, and this was the writing sample that allowed us to get an agent and start getting adaptation work. It had a big impact even though we couldn't get it made for another six years. Finally we were working writers.

"I didn't know that writing samples was the game. I thought you write a script, you sell a script, but I didn't realize that most of the work was done on assignment and you've got to have samples to show. So none of the work ends up being a wasted effort even if you can't sell it.

"It was 'In the Company of Men,' the Neil Labute film that inspired us to write it because we were just so knocked out by how powerful a film that was with limited resources. It was stunning how much he was able to pack into that movie just through the writing. That was a real wake-up call. Instead of just complaining we can't get anything together, we thought, why not write something that people would want to make - kind of up your game a little.

" . . . We write solitary as a team basically. He lives in Burlington, Vt., I live in L.A. We met in New York, we were editing for each other, before we just decided to jump in and what we found is that we love to work separately. I'm an outlining freak, I love to figure a story out and where it's going, and he can't stand that.

"So I'll do that and brainstorm and I'll fling that to him. He will slam through a first draft in a couple of weeks, which I can't stand doing, but he kind of loves the challenge of building up the first version.

"He'll spit it to me and I'll rip it to shreds and put it back together in my version of what it should be and we'll just keep doing that until the story kind of emerges from under the murk. There's something great about not hovering over each other's shoulders.

"We have a passive-aggressive way of doing it. I'll take something out and he'll put it back in and in the next pass I'll take it out again. And eventually, if we can't find a balance, one of us will say, 'What is it with you and that stupid thing?' and we'll get to those discussions kind of when the story has been figured out.

"I love how you just never know how things are going to play. He kept writing this one line into 'Children of Men' and I thought it was just so cutesy and I didn't like it and I kept taking it out and he kept putting it back in and it not only ended up making it into the movie but being the poster in London. 'Last person to die, please turn out the lights.'

"He's usually really right about things and I resist him and we push each other out of our comfort zones.

"We've been doing it this way for 12 years and the only time it's ever been violated is now while we're working on 'Iron Man.' They need us there in the office in L.A. all the time so we're sitting there together and it's such a weird, new dynamic. I don't want to spend this much time with him." *

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