Christopher Shank
Screenwriter / writer-director · Atlanta
I have spent most of my adult life writing things nobody asked me to write. That sounds romantic until you do it for twenty years. Most of the time there is no applause, no check, and no reason to believe the thing will ever leave the room. You make it anyway. Then you make it better.
The movies I keep writing begin when somebody can no longer live inside the explanation they built their life around. The marriage is fine. The grief is handled. The rules are real. Tomorrow will be different. Then something happens and the lie stops holding.
Sometimes I get there with two people in a room. Sometimes I need a ghost, a war, a pit bull, an AI wife, a black hole, or a man committing felonies because admitting his movie is dead would mean admitting something worse.
I want the movie to follow you home.
Featured screenplay · Current priority
After his mother's death, a Philadelphia musician returns to the Missouri town he escaped, where his estranged father, old friends and soldier brother's absence force him to confront how little he knows about the people he left behind.
Birdtown started as my MFA thesis and has spent the years since being made less convenient.
It has been through festivals, outside readers, notes I agreed with, notes I ignored, notes I fought, and notes that turned out to be right. Every serious pass has found another place where I protected a scene, simplified somebody or let Craig understand himself better than an actual person would.
I keep coming back because the movie keeps getting closer to what I meant before I knew how to write it.
If you want one script to know what I do, read this one.
Birdtown is the cleanest place to start. It is not the only place I go.
There are soldiers, ghosts, bad marriages, dead friends, a pit bull who wants no part of what people bred him for, technology that gives a grieving man exactly what he asked for, and a filmmaker who commits felonies because admitting the movie is dead would require admitting something worse.
Pick the problem that interests you.
See all the work
A punk Army Reservist facing deployment to Iraq turns to his active-duty younger brother, but after his brother is killed in action he considers vanishing rather than reporting—and must decide whom his refusal would leave behind.
Feature · Military family drama / war-era character drama
A lonely repairman discovers a door that returns the dead at the cost of twenty-five years of his life per hour, then devotes decades to undoing the one loss no bargain can repair.
Feature · Southern gothic fantasy / family drama
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A grieving husband reconstructs his dead wife with an AI service, but when the replica reveals a marriage he never knew, he must choose between preserving a version that agrees with him and accepting the real woman he lost.
Feature · Near-future science-fiction / psychological relationship drama
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An Atlanta couple turn a murdered shopkeeper's hardware storefront into a vintage business, then discover that the deal tying their future to the neighborhood also connects their benefactor to the man's death.
Feature · Social thriller / Atlanta urban drama
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A psychologist struggles to keep her grieving husband and their marriage afloat after a death in his family, financial obligations, a faith-based inheritance ultimatum and an elderly dog's emergency compound into a crisis neither spouse can absorb alone.
Feature · Intimate marriage / family grief drama
Discarded for refusing violence, a gentle pit bull forms a bond with a withdrawn man; when the dogfighting network comes to reclaim the animal, their fragile refuge becomes something they must defend.
Feature · Animal-rescue drama / survival thriller
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After a former infantryman dies by suicide, the men who served with him gather to sort his belongings and discover that their celebrated brotherhood may be failing a friend who is still alive.
Feature · Veterans ensemble / grief drama / dark comedy
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During a pandemic-era sweep of Los Angeles's Skid Row, a disgraced doctor stages a reckoning for the brother who betrayed him, but his daughter's bond with an EMT and the encampment community force him to choose between control and letting others live.
Feature · Shakespeare adaptation / politically charged urban drama
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When a financing review freezes his first film on the eve of production, an ambitious director begins forging, stealing and betraying the people who trust him to save the movie—only to discover the money arrived on schedule.
Feature · Dark comedy / filmmaking thriller
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Gravely ill at Christmas, an atheist who spends his life selling the possessions of the dead experiences fever visions that force him to face the family he abandoned—and the urgency of a life with no second chance.
Feature · Christmas family dramedy / existential fantasy
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With their marriage close to collapse, a husband runs the Honolulu Marathon with the wife who may be leaving him, hoping that finishing together will prove their life can still be repaired.
Feature · Marriage drama / sports-road story
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A depressed rideshare driver realizes that his late-night fare intends to die at the destination, and finds that helping the stranger means finally admitting his own need for help.
Short · Suspenseful two-hander / human drama
A grieving man planning to die is unexpectedly left with a tiny dog whose relentless demands keep ruining his final schedule.
Short · Black comedy / grief drama
Making now
I spent enough years waiting for somebody else to decide whether I was allowed to make a movie.
This one is small enough that I can stop pretending permission is the problem.
One car. One night. Two people who need the other person to stay alive for reasons neither one wants to admit.
I intend to make it.
Follow Keep Driving
Selected Journal
This is where I try not to.
Family. Death. Movies. Books. Religion. Politics. Work. Failure. Taste. Ambition. Getting older. Trying to become somebody I can live with.
Occasionally I get several hundred words in and discover the asshole I was arguing with was me.
My dad had a pillow. It’s mine now.
Growing up, I thought acceptance was one of the highest things you could earn.
The first movie that made me want to make movies was not the kind of movie filmmakers usually cite when they are trying to sound impressive.
Other people have read the work.
That matters, but it is not why the work exists.
Every result below is listed at the exact level the awarding organization published. A quarterfinalist is a quarterfinalist. A finalist is a finalist. Nobody gets promoted because the better word looks nicer in a bio.
Represent it. Finance it. Develop it. Produce it. Publish it. Hire me to write something else.
Or tell me I got something wrong and bring evidence.
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