Talking Story
During the summer, a film called Confidential Informant was released. It features Mel Gibson, Kate Bosworth and Dominic Purcell, and tells the true story of a terminally ill detective who makes an illicit deal with an informant in hopes his family will be taken care of after he’s gone.
It’s star-studded, action packed and, best of all, written by Honolulu’s own Brooke Nasser.
Back in her Punahou School days, it would’ve been hard to convince a young Nasser that her name would one day roll in the credits of a Hollywood blockbuster. Not because she didn’t think she was good enough, but because it wouldn’t have crossed her mind. She was about to become a pre-med student at Dartmouth College.
“Even though I wanted to be a writer, I thought of it as a hobby,” says Nasser. “I didn’t think of it as a viable profession; you do your passions on the side. But when I took a film class and a screenwriting class, I was like, ‘This is what I want to do.’”
“I looked around at the people that were in the science classes with me, and I was like, ‘I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with these people; I want to spend the rest of my life with creative people,’” she says, laughing.
Once graduating, she, like most aimless 20-somethings, floated around various jobs and cities, hoping the proverbial glass slipper would fit. Eventually, she followed her heart and enrolled in film school, which turned out to be only a good choice in theory, but at least she got to “get the crappy films out of the way,” she jokes.
Nasser floated around some more — as production assistants on ABC’s Off the Map and Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean — until there was a wind of change when she was hired as Academy Award-winning director Kathryn Bigelow’s assistant for a Chanel commercial.
“I pretty much bullshitted my way into that position by claiming that I knew every surf spot in Hawai‘i — which is a total lie,” says Nasser with a smile. “My dad, who was raised here, got out a giant map of O‘ahu and marked up the surf spots for me to memorize.”
From this happenstance break, Nasser was asked to come back as Bigelow’s assistant for Zero Dark Thirty. Bigelow introduced her to filmmaker Michael Oblowitz, who was looking for a screenwriter to turn a documentary about drug-smuggling surfers into a film. Thanks in-part to her local roots and her dad’s aforementioned crash course, Nasser was perfect for the job.
For more than a decade, Oblowitz threw projects Nasser’s way. The screenplays would get buzz only for them to be shelved or, worse, 30 meetings later, dropped like nothing happened.
Feeling depleted and struck by news that her father was sick, Nasser decided it was time to come home. With Hollywood’s temperamental tug-of-war in the rearview mirror and a steady career path as a high school teacher on the road ahead, Confidential Informant landed on her desk.
“It was a 240-page script from a former New York City narco detective from the ’90s. (Oblowitz) said, ‘The script is way too long, can you look at it and make it better?’”
Nasser essentially had to start from scratch and rewrote the script every time an actor, including Nicolas Cage, John Travolta and Wesley Snipes, attached to the project before the role ultimately went to Gibson.
“I started crying when I found out it was going to production because it’s been so many years of trying to see this dream fulfilled,” she says. “After 20 years, you just think it’s not going to happen.”
With no signs of another hiatus anytime soon, Nasser hopes to publish a coming-of-age mystery novel based in Hawai‘i, which, if all things go according to plan, will come to life as a motion picture, too.
“I want to write a young adult novel ... that students in Hawai‘i, my students that I’m teaching, can read and get all of the same analysis richness that we get from other young adult books, but it’s a story that’s more familiar to them,” she says. “It’s a story with people they recognize.”