From Mexican actress Salma Hayek, to Lebanese-Colombian singer-songwriter Shakira, to Anglo-Lebanese vocalist MIKA, a slew of artists have achieved international fame overseas. The latest is 28-year-old Lebanese-American screenwriter and actor James Jurdi.
Having written and acted in several short films, Jurdi broke through Hollywood’s celluloid ceiling this year with two feature-length movies packaged for global distribution.
He co-wrote “Reaper,” a supernatural horror flick, with newcomer Mark James. Jurdi also played a role in the film, alongside veteran actors Danny Trejo, Vinnie Jones and Jake Busey.
“Reaper” recently completed a run at Lebanese cinemas, where this week Conor Allyn’s “Pocket Listing” is set to open. Jurdi wrote the screenplay of this satirical thriller packed with sex, violence and intrigue, and co-stars with Burt Reynolds and Rob Lowe.
“It’s a very hard to categorize the film,” he says. “It mixes in socioeconomic commentary on a kind of a humorous level with elements of a noir-ish thriller. It’s basically set in Los Angeles’ competitive real estate world and it follows the rise and fall of this broker that I play.
“He works at this firm that Burt Reynolds’ character runs and eventually gets involved in this make-it-or-break-it, life-or-death deal where he’s commissioned by Jessica Clark’s character ... to sell this Malibu villa that [she] and her husband, who’s played by the great Rob Lowe, own.
“Then he begins to discover all kinds of complications and illegal activity. A pocket listing actually is a real estate term for a kind of under-the-table deal, a deal where it’s not really publicized and it’s not really advertised. It just kind of remains between the buyer and the seller. I thought it was a fascinating backdrop for potentially corrupt activity and for things that you don’t necessarily normally see.”
Sitting in an underground photographer’s studio in Sin al-Fil, Jurdi seems somehow larger than life. His teeth are pearly white, his skin tastefully bronzed and hair artfully disheveled. He looks ready to play the hero in some big-budget romcom, but “Pocket Listing” affords him a more complex role.
His character, Jack Woodman, is willing to cross ethical and legal lines to get what he wants. In “Reaper,” too, the actor played a criminal, one with fewer redeeming qualities.
“I am a crook,” he shrugs with a hearty laugh. “I like flawed but fascinating characters or characters that are crooked to some degree but still have some [redeeming] elements ...
“The one in ‘Pocket Listing’ is a little bit more nuanced ... He’s someone who’ll do anything to get the deal done, but he experiences a real reversal of fortune in the story ... [which] teaches him some hard lessons about who his real friends are and what the game’s all about.
“That’s really fascinating for me, a character who kind of starts off on one end of the spectrum and kind of ends up on another ... I once had a professor who said, ‘Give me someone really kind of hard-boiled and down on his luck and I want to see him climb back to the surface.’ That struggle is what’s interesting.”
Jurdi was born and raised in California, to a Lebanese father and a Lebanese-Venezuelan mother.
“I always loved movies. I thought movies were a portal into a whole other magical world,” Jurdi recalls. “I studied writing. I studied acting. Acting for me was really a fascinating outlet, because ... an actor is essentially the component that kind of breathes life into all of the facets of the story.”
Bringing his own characters to life, he says, allows for a richer creative process.
“Acting in a project that you’ve written gives you a much deeper understanding of the character,” he explains. “Obviously when you’re writing you’ve got the character biographies. You’re assessing the background of the character, how he got to where he is at the beginning of the script ... Sometimes you’re meeting a character halfway through the story but you know so much more about him if he’s come out of the canals of your imagination.”
Thanks to the well-known Hollywood names he’s worked with, Jurdi says, his scripts came to life in a whole new way.
“I remember in writing ‘Reaper,’” he says, “originally the Danny Trejo character was someone that we imagined as, I guess you could say, a little Southern, because it was kind of like a trucker and someone who was a little hard-boiled ...
“[Trejo] has this kind of Latin edge that’s very popular and that he uses very well, this kind of machismo, and what he did with the character was something completely beyond our imagining.”
In town to promote “Pocket Listing” before moving ahead with new projects, Jurdi says that the mundane challenges of getting a film made are harder than the creative processes of acting or writing.
“The most challenging thing is always getting the project produced,” he says. “It’s an extremely competitive industry, on a worldwide scale now, not only in Hollywood, so you’ve got so much content.
“I remember when I walked into the Cannes festival – and, you know, when your film’s showing at Cannes you feel like you’ve hit a milestone – and there are like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other films that are competing and vying for the same kind of attention that you are.
“It’s humbling, but it also allows you to understand the way that the system works ... That’s why I’m just real happy to be having these films trying to connect to a global audience,” he adds.
Jurdi says future projects may include a film set between the U.S. and the UAE Although he has no plans to film in Lebanon, he does dream of making a movie with an international cast.
“I’d want to keep it English-language and I’d want to keep it kind of commercially viable,” he says, “but at the same time I’d want to incorporate famous talent or famous elements of this part of the world with the world that we know so well, the West.”
In the meantime, he hopes local audiences will find themselves able to identify with “Pocket Listing.”
“It’s an American story,” he says, “but I think it’s got universal themes that people could connect to, hopefully. Fingers crossed.”
“Pocket Listing” opens in movie theaters across Lebanon on Dec. 4.
