Max Landis is a Hollywood disrupter with an attitude

West Hollywood, California

LAST year, when prolific screenwriter Max Landis was spending long days in script development on Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, the BBC America TV series he created, he decided to blow off a little steam - by writing another screenplay.

In just seven hours, Landis bashed out a spec script (as unsolicited, over-the-transom screenplays are known) for a psychological horror-thriller called Deeper, about a disgraced astronaut. Almost as quickly, a bidding war broke out, and in April, Deeper sold to MGM for US$2 million - a breathtaking sum in an era when most speculative screenplays sell in the low six figures.

To hear Landis tell it, however, the payday pales in importance to a more existential imperative. "I write scripts the way a lot of people play Angry Birds," he said, sipping a mojito poolside here at the Chateau Marmont. "In my head, I see a movie. If I don't write the script, there's no chance that movie will exist. If it doesn't exist, I feel like I'm failing. I feel like this pit inside of me is rapidly growing and expanding. And I'll disappear and be nothing. So clea…