Meet Australian Screenwriter Michael Ouzas

Michael Ouzas, an Australian screenwriter whose career has flourished since moving to Los Angeles, hopes his feature screenplay will be picked up by a production company and go into development.

Entitled Third Man, it’s an LGBTQ World War I story about a young English soldier who falls in love with the German prisoner he has been tasked with interrogating. Will he follow his heart, or save the lives of thousands of his countrymen?

According to Ouzas, he has been fascinated and horrified by the idea of war for a long time.

“I think it’s just absurd,” he says. “We have this thing to settle arguments where governments send people to go and kill each other in tens of thousands of people, sometimes hundreds of thousands. World War II was six years straight; World War I was four years, and the fact that it wasn’t televised back then, there was this perception that it was this great adventure. It’s insane that they would send 17-, 18-year-old boys to essentially kill 17-, 18-year-old boys from a different country and culture.”

Both of Ouzas’ grandfathers were involved in World War II, and he remembers them telling stories of how they actually liked people from the other side, for the most part.

“They said they were surprisingly similar to us,” he recalls. “I thought, there’s this real disconnect between nations, governments, and systems versus the humanity of individuals and how we relate to each other as people. I really wanted to show that in a story. I wanted to show the horrors of war, along with the shared humanity that we all have, and I thought a love story between two different cultures in the middle of this war that they’ve been told to wage against each other was the perfect kind of metaphor for that.”

Third Man is Ouzas’ second feature screenplay, and it was a finalist in the prestigious Nicholl’s competition. It also ranked number one on Coverfly, which put his script against 60,000 others.

Ouzas says it feels amazing to receive such positive feedback.

“I worked very hard on this, but it was a script I was writing for myself because it was something that I wanted to see,” he says. “I’ve never seen a film like this, especially a war film with this kind of diversity in the characters. There tends to be one type of character in war films, so I had no idea how people would respond to it. It’s humbling that they like something that I feel so strongly about.”

Originally from Sydney, Ouzas worked as a counterterrorism lawyer, but says he always wanted to write or be involved with filmmaking in some way.

“I was always writing on the side,” he explains. “Law, believe it or not, just felt like the easy pathway, especially in Australia where the film industry, at least for above the line creatives, is not as thriving as it is here in LA. I wanted to see how it work out as a lawyer, and it was stressful and disillusioning. Sitting at a desk, reading top secret documents, and potentially having people’s well being in your hands while you’re making decisions based on documents is a very stressful thing to do. On top of that, you’re working long hours and getting an insight into a system I didn’t believe I aligned with. It came to a point where I was like, this isn’t what I want to do. I know what I want to do, and I have to take the plunge.”

Ouzas was accepted to the University of Southern California, where he pursued writing for screen and television. In addition to screenplays, he has also written a couple TV pilots.

Currently, Ouzas is on the writing team for Beacon 23, Spectrum Originals and AMC Networks’ psychological thriller series based on the book of the same name by bestselling author Hugh Howey, which he says is a dream come true. No matter what he’s involved with, Ouzas hopes his work will move people in the direction of love and shared humanity.

Long-term, Ouzas hopes to continue writing for both TV and film and eventually be the showrunner of his own hour-long drama series.

“Some people say to focus on one or the other, but I want to do both,” he says. “I’ve realized through working in the Writers’ Room that the show runner has the final say in what happens and it’s their vision everyone else is trying to create. I would love that kind of control over a TV show and put my original idea out there. In the feature world, this is an old-fashioned goal now, but I would love to have a film in a theatre. Yes, it’s getting rarer and rarer, and streaming services like Netflix are creating great films, but I would love for that to happen.”

Stay up-to-date and connect with Ouzas by following him on Twitter @michael_ouzas and Instagram @michaelouzas.

Photos courtesy of Akil Rashad Anderson and social media