For your reading pleasure, please enjoy our Black List Tales interview with Arun Croll about writing The Light at the End from Backstory Magazine’s issue 52 – now available to read! If you want to read the accompanying script, we hope you’ll join us to read the rest of the issue by subscribing to Backstory Magazine!
Arun Croll’s acclaimed script follows a woman’s effort to survive a deadly bright light that has suddenly filled the sky.
By Danny Munso
When he first decided to try his hand at screenwriting, Arun Croll would read scripts from the Black List to get a gauge for the type of material that was getting seen in the industry at that time. Just a few years later, he can now count his own writing among that select company. Croll’s brilliant and moving The Light at the End was voted onto the 2023 Black List last December, and the script has launched a screenwriting career that is still in its early stages. “I was trying to immerse myself in the kind of writing that was going on at the time that wasn’t necessarily going into production,” he recalls. “Seeing Black List scripts was my first inkling that you could go in with a really cool script, and even if it didn’t get made or sold, you could still get on the map somehow. So it was really cool to see my name pop up on there.”
The thought of being a writer occurred to Croll near the end of high school, and he started out writing fiction—both novels and short stories—after studying English lit at UC Santa Cruz. But after a few years, the results proved unsatisfactory, and he decided to give screenwriting a try. It proved to be a better fit, and so five years ago, Croll moved to Los Angeles to pursue it full-time. “I wasn’t learning the things I needed to learn as a writer when I was trying to write novels,” he says. “Writing screenplays, I learned so much about story and structure that I was not getting practice at in the novel format. I hadn’t learned how to outline. I had more of a romantic idea what it meant to be a writer, because a lot of my heroes were writing by the seat of their pants, sentence by sentence. I was trying to emulate that instead of approaching it from this very procedural framework that exists in the world of screenwriting. That ended up helping me improve as a writer.”
In 2020, as the world was shutting down due to the COVID pandemic, Croll began penning The Light at the End, a story that follows Hana Nagata, a woman in her late 20s who must navigate a mysterious solar event filling the sky with a bright light that kills everything it touches. She ends up inadvertently holed up in a house with 30-something doomsday cultist Elion. “I wanted to write something that was very contained, very low budget and something that could be made independently,” he says. “It was the middle of lockdown, and life was claustrophobic in general. It wasn’t too hard to imagine what it was like to be stuck in a place with one other person. My girlfriend and I got together a few months before COVID hit, so we were seeing a lot of each other, and in L.A. there was really nothing going on for a while.” The inspiration for The Light at the End came from real life as well. As any Californian knows all too well, wildfires have been a constant issue in the state over the past few years, particularly devastating in Croll’s hometown of Santa Rosa. “That summer, the fires were really bad. I was at home seeing all these pictures of the sky on fire, and I think I got the idea from that—just looking out the window and saying, ‘What’s going on?’ The world looked like it was on fire. So The Light at the End takes that to the nth degree, with the premise being you just can’t go outside because the light will kill you. Usually when I describe it back, it seems very obvious because it was pulled straight from what I and a lot of people were experiencing.”
Though he outlines heavily for current projects, at the time of writing The Light at the End, Croll jumped right into penning the first few scenes of the script instead of penning an outline first. And those pages are crucial to the story, as he thrusts the reader into the middle of Hana’s journey to find shelter with no setup for the apocalyptic event that has taken over the globe. “I just started writing pages early on because I had an idea for a few images and a few scenes,” he says. “I was fleshing out the premise and how we would be exposed to that and really thinking like a director for some of the first pages—really thinking about the budget. Some of that stuff is easier to figure out when you’re writing pages instead of an outline. The opening had to be as compelling as I could make it in those limited parameters, again trying to keep it as clean and cheap as possible.” Once he had some scenes in place, he segued to outlining the script. “I went back and forth between the outline and the pages of the script. As I figured out stuff that worked in the outline, I would then go and write the pages. Then I’d discover that maybe those pages didn’t make too much sense after all, so I would hop back over the outline, update it and just keep those two documents in conversation with each other.”
Arun Croll
As good as the premise is, what sets The Light at the End apart are its two lead characters. Thrown together under the worst circumstances, Hana and Elion represent two opposite ends of the belief spectrum. She is a practical realist, while Elion is part of a religious movement that has been preparing for the apocalypse for a while. As the two get closer, each person’s perspective begin to blur and take hold in the other. “The characters are both representations of different ways of approaching meaning and life and perspectives that are inside me and inside all of us in one way or another,” Croll says. “There’s one character who’s longing for transcendence and the divine and this other character who’s very pragmatic, boots on the ground, what you see is what you get. I think we all have those impulses. I have them, and they’re constantly at war, so I had fun putting these two together and letting them hash it out and eventually cross paths and switch places. They both go on the arc they need to go. At the heart of any story, I think, is the character. You can nail everything else, but if the character isn’t something the reader responds to on a personal level and makes that connection with, then the rest of it just doesn’t matter to them. What drives the story is the characters and their beliefs and questions about what the purpose of life is and what’s it all for. These big, existential, angsty questions—that’s what most readers have responded to.”
And yet Croll’s first draft actually didn’t emphasize the characters and their relationship to each other as the final version does. Instead it leaned heavier into thriller elements and having more people trying to invade the home where Hana and Elion are staying. “In the first draft, there was a much bigger home invasion element. There were more characters that came in. There were wasteland scavenger-type characters, gangs, marauders who would go in Mad Max-ing other people—stealing their gas, stealing their food, stuff like that. There was more emphasis on that, and I hadn’t quite figured out the character element and I hadn’t gone into these existential areas. There was a little of that, but I was trying to balance it with traditional genre elements and having this thriller side, which is definitely toned down [in subsequent drafts] in favor of just letting the characters go through their relationship together.” The thriller element still exists in the script, though now it’s in the form of Sarah, Hana’s acquaintance who returns to the house twice to cause trouble. And tensions still swirl as Hana and Elion parse out what the light means, especially since, as the story progresses, it begins to change colors and give off differing results as they interact with it.
Croll began to shift the story after getting notes from friends who had read his first draft. In the final version of the script, Hana and Elion make important choices for their futures. We won’t spoil what those are or what prompts the decisions, as the reveals in The Light at the End are too good to ruin for readers. But the writer had gotten a note that the characters’ decisions didn’t add up. “It was a recurring note I got,” he says. “In the first draft, I hadn’t spent as much time changing the characters through the drama of the story and through the drama with each other. What was taking up page space instead were these thriller set-pieces. When I went back in, I knew where I wanted to end up and I knew what kind of characters these people are by the end of the script, but I hadn’t really done the work to get them there. So I went back and made sure they were changing in a way the reader understood. I don’t really miss the thriller elements because the characters were definitely more important to focus on.” The results of this rewrite mean The Light at the End became something more than a post-apocalyptic thriller. Instead it blossomed into an existential examination of life itself while rooting itself with enough genre elements to make it thrilling for the reader.
It’s not surprising that as of a year and a half ago, The Light at the End had begun to attract serious attention. Off the strength of the script, Croll was included in the inaugural recipients of the Netflix Created By Initiative, a program officially announced in January 2023 that offers underrepresented writers support in developing scripts. (He was nominated for the program through CAPE, the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment.) That led to him getting repped by Writ Large Management, which sent the script to companies a short time after. Croll landed a bunch of meetings both before and after the WGA strike that ended in September, though as of now the script is still seeking a buyer. “There was some interest here and there that didn’t work out,” Croll says. “A common response I got was, ‘I love this script, but we have another post-apocalyptic thing going on right now.’ It was a good learning experience for me as someone who just started taking a lot of meetings off of the back of this script in terms of what production company slates are like, what studio mandates are like. There are really only so many slots for a certain kind of movie, and everybody’s got a movie of every genre at some stage of development most of the time, so it’s really a happy coincidence when you have a script somebody loves and they have the power to actually move it forward because they aren’t working on something like that or whatever the case may be. But I’m still taking meetings from the script as a sample, so one day hopefully.”
Of course, as Hollywood well knows, a sale doesn’t necessitate whether or not a script is success. The response to Croll’s Black List screenplay has laid the groundwork for what is still to come in his career. He just wrapped the Netflix program and is already pitching on another assignment for the studio as well as projects for various production companies. “All of those are things that came from The Light at the End,” he says, looking back on his journey. “For most of my writing career, I didn’t have much of a writing career. In the past year and half, everything changed. There’s no doubt that this particular script is what got my foot in the door.”
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There’s plenty more to explore in Backstory Magazine issue 52 you can see our table of contents right here.
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