“I love to build things from scratch,” says screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski. That fondness for originality makes Guzikowski something of a rarity in Hollywood, where “based on” credits come attached at the hip for most studio-financed projects.

Aaron Guzikowski Mark Davis, Getty Images

Instead of relying on comic books, Young Adult novels, Danish television shows, or memoirs for inspiration, Guzikowski prefers to invent stories out of whole cloth. His Prisoners script, filled with twists, turns, gore and moral quandaries, convinced Hugh Jackman to played an alcoholic survivalist who freaks out when his daughter gets abducted. Directed by Oscar-nominated Denis Villeneuve, Prisoners earned the kind of Metacritic scores usually reserved for award season art films.

Now Guzikowski turns his attention to a group of New Jersey Indians as the hook for his first TV series titled The Red Road.

Airing Thursdays on the Sundance TV, The Red Road takes place in an east coast enclave occupied by the Ramapough Indians. Until producer Sarah Condon sent him a newspaper article about the region, Guzikowski says, “I’d been living in New York city for years and had no idea that just 26 miles away you have this tribe of American Indians with no federal recognition living in the mountains of New Jersey.”

Speaking from the suburban Los Angeles home he shares with his wife and two young sons, Guzikowski explains his jump from movies to television, talks about his fondness for Hieronymus Bosch and describes the power of screenplay visualization.





Guzikowski joins a recent migration of platform-agnostic storytellers who see cable television as the narrative land of opportunity. “As a writer in feature films,” he explains, “You’re generally just responsible for the screenplay. Once it goes into production the director is king. What’s great about television is that the writer runs the show. Since I’m interested in casting, the visual aspects of the the production, the whole thing, doing The Red Road for television was very appealing.”

Additonally, episodic TV accommodates the kind of narrative sprawl that would overwhelm the confines of a tight, two-hour feature film time framework. Guzikowski says, “Television gives you time to flesh things out and develop characters, almost like you would in a novel.” By contrast, he says, “A feature film is very designed, more like a symphony. You can’t veer off the path too much because there just isn’t time.”