As a kid, it’s easy to see Iowa as lacking in spectacle. But I’d wager we Iowa kids have the best imaginations because of it. With fewer shiny distractions, creatives are able to devote themselves to a craft.
Joshua Johnson, raised in West Des Moines, is one of those former kids. His childhood love for film has evolved into a career in screenwriting.
“The thing that stood out to me being from Iowa is that the movies acted as a portal to another world,” Johnson said. “In a way, that sort of allowed me to get outside of the quiet suburbs and see a diversity of people, a diversity of experiences. You can watch foreign films and see what life is like in Korea or France — even big cities were foreign to me. … It grabbed my imagination. I felt like I could learn about the world through those stories and through film.”
Johnson and his writing partner Jamie Napoli’s first feature film, Untitled Home Invasion Romance, is a blend of thriller and comedy. The film features Jason Biggs in his directorial debut and the lead role of Kevin. In a last-ditch attempt to save his marriage, Kevin stages a home invasion during a romantic getaway weekend that quickly goes south. Think Fargo as a snowless, 90-minute comedy.
I caught up with Johnson to chat about the new release, his time in Hollywood and his decision to move back to Des Moines while still working in the movie industry.
What was the road from Iowa to Hollywood for you?
I would say the big green light, the go-ahead, was getting accepted to the University of Southern California film school. I had already done undergrad [at the University of Iowa, studying economics]. I was going to go work for a bank or something.
I kept doing film in undergrad in Iowa City. It was minor, but it was always in the back of my mind. That’s how I was spending my free time.
When I was done with school, I would still try to make movies or write. Getting accepted to USC felt like maybe this really impractical career is a possibility. So I used that as a stepping stone, a justification for saying, “I’m going to take a risk.” Because it is a massive financial risk and a time commitment.
I know plenty of filmmakers that are from Iowa that just said, “I’m gonna go [to Hollywood] with nothing but $1 in my pocket and a prayer and hope to make something.” And for me, I was fortunate to have that stepping stone of going to a film school that had a network, that had a community, had people that I could make friends with and learn from and grow, and that really kind of set me up for the rest of my career.
Why are you back in Des Moines?
I was in L.A. for about 10 years, and I always knew I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in L.A. I spent basically a year of the pandemic in L.A., and in 2021, I knew that I wanted to put down roots somewhere closer to friends and family with a lower cost of living and seasons. I had all these boxes that I wanted to check, and there was something about the pandemic that accelerated those plans for me. And I came back to Des Moines.
I did not want to live in the suburbs, which is why I live downtown, because it would be a hard move from L.A. to, let’s say, Waukee. But coming downtown has been a surprisingly easy adjustment. It was great to come back. It was great to be back. I love the people here. I love the way of life here. And it allows me to continue to spend time writing, continue to spend time doing sound production [as a side gig], and not constantly having to deal with the grind of L.A., the nightmare of the traffic, the expenses, and the constant culture of oneupsmanship and stuff. My heart was always kind of in Des Moines. [It] was always in Iowa, even when I wasn’t here. I see myself being here for the foreseeable future.
How do you start your writing process? Where do you look for inspiration?
Everything that I do is with Jamie [Napoli], so as we’re each coming up with kernels of ideas — usually separately — we’ll pitch those ideas with each other, ideas that aren’t fleshed out, more like, “Wouldn’t it be funny if there was an invention that allowed you to live forever?” That’s the most generic bullshit ever, right? But, exploring different things in your mind, pieces that you feel are either funny or interesting or that feels like you have something to say.
Usually my mind is thinking about different movies, but what if I stole that movie and made it radically different? I’ll use a kind of funny example. The Godfather is entirely the story of a family business, and it being passed down from one generation to another. It’s like watching The Godfather and saying “What if I did that?” But instead, I did it with a small-town bakery and there’s an old man at the bakery who is very well known. And, his son, who wanted nothing to do with the business, moved to the big city, and he comes home one time to realize he may have to inherit this bakery.
[Napoli and I] could write that movie and no one will have any idea it has anything to do with The Godfather because it is so profoundly different. … It’s really like a chef putting [ideas] together in different ways, until you’re really excited about something. Then, I can get Jamie excited and we’re kind of off to the races.
What’s the kernel that started Untitled Home Invasion Romance?
This is the perfect example of what I just mentioned where Jamie had watched the movie Dial M for Murder. It’s an Alfred Hitchcock movie, and it’s been forever since I’ve seen it. But the general gist is the husband is trying to kill the wife. Jamie watched that movie — it’s a thriller — and said it was surprisingly funny. He came to me and was like, “What if we made Dial M for Murder, but we made it funny?”
So, we started talking about a husband trying to kill his wife — it was a little dark for me, this actual killing [of the wife]. And I thought of this idea: what if he wasn’t trying to kill his wife, it was just a big misunderstanding. He sent a guy to break in, but the whole thing was a scheme to make him look like a hero. So Jamie brought that 50 percent of what if we did something [with Dial M for Murder] and I took it and put a huge twist on it.
The title was originally Getaway. Why the change to Untitled Home Invasion Romance?
We wrote the script a very long time ago. I think we wrote it in 2016 originally, and we ended up winning a competition called the Script Pipeline Screenwriting Contest. A lot of people read it, and a lot of people loved it. It was called Getaway at the time, but Hollywood wasn’t looking for dark comedies. Producers in Hollywood are always looking for an easy path. They want a script that is in a genre that’s in demand, a package with some big actor, and they want things handed to them on a silver platter. I respect that, and understand just sending them a script that’s a dark comedy that’s kind of off-beat, they’ll read it and think this was funny, or this was weird, this is interesting, but also that they’re like there’s no way this will ever get made.
In 2023, during the summer, the script had been sitting in a drawer for years by that point. And randomly, I told Jamie that there’s some things we should fix. So we cracked it open and made a bunch of changes. And then completely out of the blue — the day that we got done with it — we got a call from a producer who read it, like, five years before, and he said, “I know Jason [Biggs] is looking to do something radically different than the studio comedies that he’s known for. I think he’d be interested in this. Can I send it to him?” We thought he was just pulling our leg. We barely even knew this guy. And we just said, “OK, whatever.”
And within 24 hours, we got a photo of Biggs giving a thumbs up, saying he wanted to do it. … By the time it was done, even all the way into post-production, it was called Getaway. Paramount, the studio behind it, has some movie in their library called Getaway and they have this rule that they can’t repeat titles, no negotiation.
We came up with a variety of ideas and Jason came to us with Untitled Home Invasion Romance because that’s the name of the script that Jason’s character Kevin writes in the movie. The whole premise is an actor staging this home invasion with his buddy, who is also an actor. So he writes this horribly written, two-page scene with the worst dialogue ever. And the title for his scene is “Untitled Home Invasion Romance” because that’s the weirdest title for his little two-page scene.
When you and Napoli were writing this script, is this what you had imagined it would become when you watched the film for the first time?
I feel pretty confident in saying I think so. Over the years, especially when you’re writing, it can become so many things because you just change a word on the page. You have so much more freedom than when you actually sit down with a camera and film it and try to actualize this thing.
When writing, we always have these images in our heads, but at the end of the day, Jason understood the story beats that needed to happen. He understood the tone. He very much knew when there should be a gasp, when there should be a laugh, when there should be a surprise, when there should be shock and horror and discomfort or joy — it’s like he really knew the emotional journey that we wanted the audience to go on. We’re very happy with the direction he took it.
I will just say, as a writer, once things start to materialize, little things are kind of surprisingly different, not in a bad way, but like we had we always pictured Arturo Castro’s character of Ernie to be like a giant, heavy-set goofball and that’s how he was written in the script. That’s one of the best things about this as a collaborative art form, is like, “OK, we just have some image in our head.” And if we would have just held on to that image, we would have never discovered what kind of unique and interesting flavor that Castro could bring to the table.
We’re able to see things we had never seen before because we only had one image of it on the page for so long. And so even though the end product is something that we like, and we know that Jason’s vision for it was perfect for it, you’re always going to have little things that are good surprises. And that’s one of the best things about filmmaking: the good surprises once other smart, creative, collaborative people come on board.
