Chris Terrio

• 1. Introduction

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  Chris Terrio spent months trying to figure out whether Gatorade existed in December 1979. He needed to know if Tony Mendez could plausibly have made a joke about the drink in a CIA conference room, and the answer mattered because the whole tension of Scene 58 of Argo depended on it. He eventually found a magazine from a year earlier featuring a dehydrated athlete with a Village People moustache and the slogan "Gatorade: When You're Thirsty to Win." That detail made it into the script. Argo won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2012, and Terrio collected that award on the strength of research habits like this one. Born on the 31st of December, 1976, Terrio grew up in Staten Island, studied English literature and German phenomenology at Harvard, and later earned a master's degree from the USC School of Cinematic Arts. His career would take him from a debut feature at Sundance to the furthest reaches of franchise filmmaking, touching everything from DC Comics superheroes to the final chapter of the Star Wars saga.

• 2. Roots and Formation

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  Staten Island and the Catholic faith shaped Terrio's early world. He attended St. Joseph by the Sea High School before enrolling at Harvard University, where he graduated in 1997. At Harvard he lived in Adams House and threw himself into performance as well as study, joining both the Harvard Radcliffe Dramatic Club and the Hasty Pudding Theatricals. His academic interests were eclectic, reaching across English literature and German phenomenology, a combination that hinted at a sensibility drawn equally to narrative and to ideas. After Harvard he went to the University of Cambridge for an MLitt, but eventually turned toward film school, completing his master's at the USC School of Cinematic Arts in 2002. He is of Italian, Irish, and Acadian descent, a mixture that places him at the edges of several cultural traditions at once. That same year he directed, wrote, and produced a short film called Book of Kings, starring Aasif Mandvi, which premiered at the first annual Tribeca Film Festival.

• 3. The Directing Years

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  At age 26, Terrio directed his first feature, Heights, released through Sony Pictures Classics in 2005. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and follows five New Yorkers through a single pivotal twenty-four hours. The cast included Glenn Close, Elizabeth Banks, James Marsden, and Jesse Bradford, with Isabella Rossellini, George Segal, and Rufus Wainwright in smaller roles. Heights was one of the final films produced by Ismail Merchant and Richard Hawley, and it earned a Best Independent Feature Film Casting award from the Casting Society of America in 2005. Five years later Terrio returned to directing, helming the episode titled "I Look Like Frankenstein," the eighth episode of Season 3 of Damages on FX in 2010. Alongside his directorial credits he also edited the documentary short First Out and worked as an assistant director on the short film Equation, directed by Anuj Majumdar. He also served as a grip on the short film Awake, directed by Lori Lovoy-Goran, whose own documentary short In Between Days won a DGA Student Film Award and a SXSW Competition Award.

• 4. Writing Argo

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  Terrio adapted the Argo screenplay from two sources: a Wired article by Joshuah Bearman titled "The Great Escape" and the memoir of former CIA officer Tony Mendez, The Master of Disguise. He supplemented both with his own extensive research. The challenge he faced in Scene 58 captures how he thought about screenwriting. Nine men sit in a conference room debating cover stories for getting Americans out of Iran, with nothing to cut to except the actors' faces. Terrio wanted Mendez's voice to emerge without seeming disrespectful, and he arrived at a joke about Gatorade to break the silence and shift the room's attention. The script earned him the Writers Guild Award for Best Adapted Screenplay of 2012, as well as nominations from the Golden Globes, the BAFTA Awards, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. The wins extended further, covering honors from the Online Film Critics Society, the Austin Film Critics Association, the Phoenix Film Critics Society, the San Diego Film Critics Society, the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the Kansas City Film Critics Circle, and the 2013 USC Scripter Award.

• 5. The DC Universe

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  Warner Bros. brought Terrio into its expanding DC Comics film series to rewrite David S. Goyer's earlier draft of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which was released in 2016. He also wrote the screenplay for Justice League in 2017, sharing the credit on the theatrical cut with Joss Whedon. When Zack Snyder's version of Justice League was announced for release on HBO Max in May 2020, Terrio received screenplay and story credit on that director's cut, which ultimately appeared in 2021, with Will Beall also credited. Separately, on the 30th of January, 2017, it was announced that Terrio had performed a rewrite on Ben Affleck's script for an untitled Batman film, which Affleck had co-written with DCEU producer and co-runner Geoff Johns. Terrio also completed an adaptation of Harlan Coben's novel Tell No One for Warner Bros., with Affleck attached to direct that project as well.

• 6. Beyond DC

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  Terrio's range as a writer extended well past superhero films. Paramount Pictures and Indian Paintbrush hired him to write A Murder Foretold, a drama based on a David Grann article in The New Yorker about a series of high-profile murders in Guatemala, with Terrio expressing a desire to direct the screenplay himself. He also completed a screenplay he titled A Foreigner, likewise adapted from a piece by journalist David Grann. He wrote a script for a film adaptation of Richard II, which director James Ivory planned to shoot in 3D. Earlier in his career Terrio had worked directly with Ivory as an assistant on the Ivory-Merchant productions Le Divorce and The Golden Bowl. On the 12th of September, 2017, it was announced that Terrio would co-write Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker with director J. J. Abrams. The film was released on the 20th of December, 2019, and the filmography notes an unusual extra credit: Terrio appears as a voice cameo playing a character identified as "Aftab Ackbar."