Max Borenstein is an American screenwriter He is known for his work on the MonsterVerse film series featuring classic Kaiju

Max Borenstein is an American screenwriter He is known for his work on the MonsterVerse film series featuring classic Kaiju, including writing Godzilla (2014) and Kong: Skull Island (2017), contributing to the story of Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), and Godzilla vs. Kong (2021).

Borenstein wrote, edited, and directed the 2003 film Swordswallowers and Thin Men while a senior at Yale University. The film starred Peter Cellini, Zoe Kazan, Fran Kranz and Graham Norris, and featured Army Wives star Sally Pressman and Midnight's Children lead Satya Bhabha. The film won Best Feature and Best Screenplay at the New York Independent Film Festival and was named Best First Feature 2003 by Los Angeles Times critic Kevin Thomas.

Borenstein's 2008 screenplay What Is Life Worth?, based on Kenneth Feinberg's memoir of the same name, was included on The Black List, an annual list compiled by Hollywood executives of their favorite unproduced screenplays. On February 14, 2018, it was reported that he would produce his screenplay into film alongside Michael Sugar, Marc Butan, Sean Sorensen, and Bard Dorros, with director David Frankel helming the project.His 2009 screenplay Jimi, commissioned by Legendary Pictures and based on the life of guitarist Jimi Hendrix, was also included on The Black List.Borenstein has written and/or co-written additional projects for Legendary's MonsterVerse, including Godzilla, Kong: Skull Island,and Godzilla: King of the Monsters. He was hired to write Paladin for Walt Disney Pictures,and Mona for New Regency.

On May 4, 2017, HBO announced that Borenstein is one of four writers working on a potential pilot for a Game of Thrones spin-off. In addition to Borenstein, Carly Wray, Jane Goldman, and Brian Helgeland are also working on potential pilots.Borenstein has been working and communicating with George R. R. Martin, the author of A Song of Ice and Fire, the series of novels upon which the original series is based.Current Game of Thrones showrunners D. B. Weiss and David Benioff would also be executive producers for whichever project is picked up by HBO.

Max Borenstein Max Borenstein is an American screenwriter and director.
Early life
Max David Borenstein was born in Los Angeles.[1] Of his youth, he said: "I come from a family of storytellers. Eccentric, convivial, rambunctious intellectuals and show-folks without the concept of an inside voice. Writers, comics, old vaudevillians. In gatherings like that, stories were the currency – jokes, chestnuts, punny turns of phrase – that was how you won the room. So maybe this career path was not so much inspired as required to survive."[2]

Borenstein described himself as interested in film from an early age. An amateur film buff, his favorites were the works of Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Woody Allen, and Orsen Wells - "above all others, Welles."[3] He only got interested in Godzilla films when he was in high school, but long before that he was interested in world cinema: "Toho movies were my favorite, but it was the Kurosawa movies that I loved. I was not the kid who was obsessed with big monster movies. I was a real movie snob. My favorite filmmakers were Kurosawa, Fellini, and Welles, and I expanded my tastes from there."[4]

As a high school freshman, Borenstein cold-called Oliver Stone's production company and asked if they needed a summer intern - neglecting to inform them that he was only 13 years old at the time, they told him to come in for an interview:

"It must have seemed delightfully absurd for them to discover in the waiting room not your normal film school grad, but some pimply 13-year-old with both proud parents flanked in tow...The hardball interview questions ran along the lines of 'What's your favorite movie?', but I suppose I handled myself capably enough because by the time it was over, I had a job. It would not be pretty, they warned me – mostly pouring coffee and making copies – but at least I could read some scripts on the side and learn the ropes. I was thrilled."
However, by the time Borenstein got home, the answering machine had a message left by Stone's office - who had just looked closer at his paperwork - saying they legally could not hire him as an intern due to child labor laws. A few days later, however, a package of screenplays arrived at his house, along with a note from the executive who interviewed him, which invited him to analyze them (write "coverage") along with an example. Borenstein came back in for a meeting the following week, which led to several subsequent meetings, and ultimately he was being mentored on writing his own screenplay, which went through about a dozen drafts that summer.[5]

After high school, Borenstein attended Yale University, majoring in English, and graduated in 2003. He remained greatly interested in film, however: in his senior year at Yale, he wrote, directed, and edited the indie film Swordswallowers and Thin Men, about a group of college seniors confronted with the awful realization that they will be graduating soon and have to face the real world. While not in the Yale film studies program, Borenstein commenced the film as an independent project on an $1,800 grant. The film was well-received, winning both Best Feature and Best Screenplay at New York Independent Film Festival 2003. It was also named Best First Feature of 203 by Los Angeles Times critic Kevin Thomas.[6]

Career
Early Career
Following the success of his indie film and graduation, Borenstein spent the next nine years actively working on screenplays for various studios, gradually working his way up the ranks. None of his scripts from this period ultimately went into production - however, his unproduced scripts frequently met with quite positive reception from the screenwriting community. His 2008 screenplay What is Life Worth?, based on the Kenneth Feinberg memoir of the same name, was honored on the "Black List" - an annual list compiled by surveying major movie studio executives, of unproduced screenplays they nonetheless considered to be the best (but which weren't made into films for various other reasons, such as budget, scheduling conflicts, etc.). Borenstein's unproduced 2009 screenplay Jimi, about musician Jimi Hendrix (on which he spent considerable time and energy) was also later honored on the Black List.

Borenstein continued to work on several screenplay projects which were ultimately not produced, but gaining experience in screenwriting and familiarity among the production circles of several major movie studios, particularly Legendary Pictures. In 2012, it was announced that Borenstein was hired by Disney to develop the space scifi/adventure film Paladin, which was later shelved. At the time, he was also in development on Legendary Pictures' The Seventh Son, adapted from Joseph Delaney's The Spook's Apprentice. Kit Harington was also being considered for it at the time, but eventually both dropped out of the project, and the final film failed at the box office. In 2013, New Regency came to Borenstein to write Mona, an adaptation of an upcoming novel by Dan Sehlberg - an international thriller involving cyber-warfare. Mona was also later shelved.[7]

Godzilla
Max Borenstein's big break into prominence came with Godzilla, the 2014 reboot of the Godzilla franchise by Legendary Pictures. Borenstein had been pitching scripts to Legendary, and during one meeting they mentioned that they had the rights to Godzilla and asked if he would be interested in writing the screenplay, and he "jumped at the chance". He was also encouraged that the studio had hired director Gareth Edwards for it: Borenstein was a big fan of Edwards due to his prior film Monsters, about giant aliens landing in the Mexican desert, and how it showed you can "Take the giant monster film genre and use it as a way to tell a very intimate, human story [and] not just exploitation."[8] Borenstein was actually not well-known for making large-scale action movie scripts at the time, but small-scale, critically respected character-driven dramas. Asked why he thought Legendary Pictures asked him to write Godzilla, Borenstein said he felt it was because they wanted the film to be serious and grounded, not just a special effects spectacle:

"Godzilla was a big concept with a lot of action and excitement, but what’s always difficult is finding a tone and a journey that feels original and grounded in some way. Sometimes it makes sense for a studio to plug screenwriters who do smaller, dramatic pieces into movies that are of giant scale. What they’d like to do is bring those giant-scale movies down to earth a little.[9]
At the time, Borenstein hadn't seen a Godzilla film in about ten years, though he had been quite interested in them as a teenager. As he explained, around 1995 when he was in high school, Power Rangers exploded in popularity, which got him interested in other "suitimation" genre works, so he rented a lot of old Godzilla movies, for the kistch and camp value. In his high school days, he saw most of the first series (Showa era) and the second series (Heisei era), but never saw the later rebooted Millenium series of the 1990s.[10] During that time, his favorites were the more campy Godzilla movies of the 1970s. However, going back to rewatch the whole film series as an adult, Borenstein was struck by how many of the earlier films actually had very dark and mature subtext and social commentary. Particularly, he had never seen the original Japanese cut of the first 1954 Godzilla film (Gojira) before - the American release drastically reworked and re-edited it, cutting out much of the specific social commentary about Japanese society still terrified about atomic warfare only nine years after the end of World War II:

"Watching [the Japanese version Gojira] was a revelation, because it's really more a harrowing allegory for the predominant fear of the moment - nuclear...Over the years, Godzilla has become a different vessel for different fears. In the ’60s the films were a little campier because they were dealing with alien invasion fears. There were the environmental fears in the ’70s, with films like 'Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster', and later films dealt with fears of bio-engineering and advanced technology...looking at the world we live in now: what strikes right at the heart at what we’re afraid of? And what makes us feel powerless in the face of it?” That’s what all Godzilla films have in common – it’s the common denominator – that Godzilla represents a force of nature that is beyond mankind’s control."[11]
Therefore, when writing Legendary Pictures' Godzilla (2014), Borenstein strove for a dark tone focusing on "fears that resonate" more than a fun, campy actin-adventure romp. In this case, fears of mankind's arrogance in thinking it has power over nature, when natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes are beyond human control, as well as mankind recklessly trying to harness the power of nature, i.e. atomic power (the Fukushima nuclear disaster, resulting from earthquake damage, was still in painful recent world memory, and the film has a giant monster attack a nuclear power plant). Borenstein didn't want to stray too far from the original Godzilla formula, citing his "inherent respect" for the source material - though at the same time, he pointed out that Godzilla has had so many different iterations over the decades that "it's hard to be a Godzilla purist when there have been so many versi