The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Savage Road: A Thriller by Chris Hauty

Episode Date: April 1, 2021

Savage Road: A Thriller by Chris Hauty NATIONAL BESTSELLER Hayley Chill descends even deeper into the dangerous political web of Washington, DC, in this thrilling sequel to the “propulsive, page-turning, compelling” (C.J. Box, #1 New York Times bestselling author) national bestseller Deep State. When a series of devastating cyber attacks rock the United States, Hayley Chill is tasked by the “deeper state” to track down their source. NSA analysts insist that Moscow is the culprit, but that accusation brings plenty of complications with Hayley directing the president as a double agent against the Russians. With increasing pressure on the president to steer him towards a devastating war, it’s up to Hayley to stop the mysterious computer hacker and prevent World War III—while also uncovering some shocking truths about her own life. Magnificently crafted and superbly unpredictable, Savage Road is an edge-of-your-seat political thriller ideal for our times. Biography Chris Hauty was born in San Antonio, Texas, and is a graduate of Reed College. He began his professional writing career with “Don Coyote”, a contemporary interpretation of Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” with Jonathon Lynn attached to direct. Projects in the family film genre followed, including Disney’s “Homeward Bound: Lost In San Francisco”. To broaden and further define himself as a screenwriter, Hauty wrote the original screenplay, “Arena”, a dark, gladiator epic. Subsequent credits include “Moby Dick” at Dreamworks Animation, “Beautiful Killer” at Universal Pictures with Jessica Alba attached, “Land of Legend”, a Viking saga at Walden Media with Renny Harlin set to direct, “Vigilante” at Studio Canal with Ed Burns to star and direct, and “Colosseum” at Icon Pictures, with Mel Gibson to direct. He sold the pitch for “The Eternals”, a supernatural thriller set on a college campus, to CBS Films. Recent produced credits include “Never Back Down”, directed by Jeff Wadlow and starring Djimon Hounsou and “Sniper: Ghost Shooter” staring Billy Zane for Sony Pictures Entertainment. Hauty lives in Venice, California, with his feral cat and a Triumph motorcycle. Deep State is his first novel. Visit him at chrishauty.com and follow along on Instagram, Twitter at @ChrisHauty and on Facebook at @hautywriter.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast.

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Guys, go to youtube.com, of course, that's Chris Voss. Take and hit that bell notification button to subscribe to all the wonderful things we're doing. Go goodreads.com fortunate chris voss and facebook linkedin all those different places we have a multi-book author and a screenwriter for different hollywood projects on the chris voss show today this is going to be pretty amazing we're talking with chris hottie he's written the book savage road and deep state his newest one of course is savage road he's going to be here talking with us about. He's an interesting gentleman who's done a lot of cool things in his life. He's been a screenwriter based in Los Angeles and the author of Deep State. He's worked at all the major movie studios in nearly every genre of film,

with credits including Never, Back, Down, Sniper, Homeland Security, and he currently lives in Venice, California. Welcome to the show, Chris. How are thou? Hey, Chris. It's great to be here and I'm doing great. And your more observant viewers might see that the backdrop behind me looks nothing like Venice, California. I've moved to the more bucolic Glendale, California, about 20 miles inland from the beach. Oh, there you go. You're close to La Crescenta then where I spent my younger years. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'm really enjoying this. I was on the west side of Los Angeles for, oh, probably over 30 years. And so just a few months ago, I moved here and really enjoying the change of pace.

And probably very different than Venice. Venice is quite cool. I used to love to go shoot in Venice with my cameras and stuff. Uh-huh. Yeah. Venice is definitely an interesting place and becoming more interesting every day. But I just had to get a little more peace and quiet in my life than Venice could offer. So here I am. And I've

started doing these podcasts and interviews outside just because it is such a beautiful and quiet scene here in Glendale. That's one of the things I always loved about Utah or not Utah, California. I moved to Utah after California, but just that always having that beautiful sun and all that good stuff, get that nice warm tan. And I may have misspoke here on your intro. I said you were a screenwriter. It says you is a screenwriter. I is. Yeah, I still is. Sorry, I ended your career with reading the bio. My bad. Yeah, I worked in Hollywood and have worked in Hollywood for, again, over 30 years and have only started writing novels in the last two and a half years. And so I still

have one, maybe it's bigger than a pinky toe in the film and TV business, but what I've pretty much resolved to do at this point is only work when in film or TV, only do adaptations of my own work or any old screenplays that never got purchased or never got made and work on my own stuff. At this point, I'm plenty busy enough to do that. And I really am enjoying and have enjoyed the transition from film to writing books. I just love writing books. Let's lay down some basis on this new book, and then we're going to get back to some of those details and then talk about some of the history of what you've done.

You've just published uh savage road uh give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs and where the best places are to order up the book one of the one of the uh perks of having an unusual last name is that i don't have to gussy it up too much in terms of finding me on facebook or instagram or twitter it's always my first and last name c-h-H-R-I-S-H-A-U-T-Y. And congratulations, Chris, on pronouncing that correctly. Most people say Howdy, but it is Hottie. So I don't know if my publicist did his groundwork or not, but that was well done. And my website is also very easily found. If you find my name anywhere, you can find my website. That's chrishotty.com. There you go, guys. Yeah, I actually watched a few videos of yous that

you've interviewed before shows, so I cheat a little bit and give people names. I try and get people's names. So you've written what is, I believe, a second book in a series with the character. And what motivates you you to write this book? It's probably easier to speak of the series as opposed to the book because one of the happy accidents of when I sat down to write my first book, Deep State, which centered around a protagonist named Haley Chill, a 25-year-old ex-Army veteran who secures an internship in the White House. One of the happy accidents of setting out and writing that story was coinciding with selling it to Atria Books and Emily Bessler Books

was learning that, in fact, when you work in that genre, they expect a book a year. I was, you know, happily surprised by that. In the film business, you're always, as soon as you finish one project, you're starting from ground zero again. It's just the hustle starts all over again. Whereas with this series of books in the thriller genre, they expect the books to come. And the motivation for writing Savage Road was to, I think with any series, to dig deeper into my character, Hayley Chill. So while I'm telling a whole new overall thriller story where she's taking on whether, in this case,

we're picking up a thread from the first book in Deep State and her role in the White House, which I can't go too far into detail what her covert role might be in the White House without giving away too many spoilers for Deep State in case any of your viewers haven't read that first book. But we pick up that storyline, but then expand it with a series of cyber attacks on the country. And her task and that of a colleague of hers is to find out where these attacks are originating from and try to stop them. And so all those storylines begin to converge in ways, again, that I can't really describe without giving away too much of the story.

But her job in the White House and her responsibilities that go beyond that of being a relatively low-level aide in the White House converge with this attempt to stop the cyber attacks, which are being blamed on the Russians. And we don't know if the Russians are really doing it or not until a certain point in the book. And the pressures that bring the bear on the president. And Haley has a unique relationship with the president that I can't storyline that I initiate in Deep State of Haley's revolving around the death of her father as a Marine in Iraq. And so she, at the conclusion of the first book, she assumes that the facts that she was provided by the military were correct. And as she digs a little bit deeper into those facts in Savage Road, it becomes very clear that things are not as they seem at all in regards to her father's death in Iraq. And that's kind of what I do with my writing.

I love twists. I love big reveals. And Deep State, for those in your audience who haven't read it, closes with one of the mother of all twists in these books, in the thriller genre. And thousands of people have bought the book. And I might every once in a while peruse the reader reviews and Goodreads or Amazon or talking to readers at events or festivals, book festivals. And I don't think a single person has guessed that ending, that twist ending of Deep State. And similarly, in Savage Road, there is another whopper of a twist that I haven't heard of any person having seen that one coming.

Just a little inducement for your audience to maybe buy the book and challenge themselves to either ones. But I suggest starting with Deep State and see if you can guess ahead of time where I'm going to go with this one. Now, I think we talked about this before the show. Are the books meant to be standalone? They are a series, but... Yeah, every book in any series, your publisher and your editor is going to pound you over the head with your book if it's not standalone, because you can't count on people being able to find that first book, or even if they just see the second book or third book or 19th book on a rack in a bookstore or in the airport, they have to be able to pick that book up and not feel like,

I'm not going to want to read this because it's not a standalone. Like I said, each book has a very, you know, what I call the big bad in the TV business. You call it the big bad. And so in any TV season, TV series season, there will be the conspiracy, the mystery, the medical case that needs to be resolved by the end of that series or by the end of the episode. And so each one, each book of mine has that going on in, and in the case of Savage Road, it's the cyber attacks and what's going to happen. And the attacks become increasingly more damaging and deadly as we go on. And that storyline is the one that probably the readers will be most invested in terms

of a classic thriller arc. But then again, I think that there's always connective tissue between these books. I hope to achieve that so that they can work both ways. There you go. There you go. Can you disclose why you chose the title Savage Road without giving away too much or is that? Oh yeah, I can do that. Yeah. I have a good story about that. Titles working three decades in Hollywood, writing many screenplays and pilots, titles are either really easy or either the title just... Sometimes you start with a title. Because with Deep State, I started literally with that title and wanted to create a story around it. sat down to start the book and start thinking about the outlining the story, the concept of Deep State was still in that realm of, it hadn't become completely omnipotent like it did towards

the end of last year, the last few years, but more in 2017 when I was first thinking about it, it was still, it sounded like a really sexy, cool, mysterious thing. And so I started with that title. Always knew it was going to be called Deep State. With Savage Road, I knew I wanted to do a story about cyber warfare, simply because I wanted to write a story about one of the scariest things, one of the biggest threats facing America. That's bread and butter for thriller authors. And just a simple Google search of biggest threats against America turned up cyber warfare,

cyber terrorism. And I learned a lot about cyber warfare and cyber terrorism that after I finished my research, reading about five or six books on the topic, I went out and bought a generator and a 30 day supply of freeze dried food because I didn't realize just how vulnerable we are. I'm still trying to figure out how to put a whole home generator in my house. But anyway, so out of that research, I pulled out a term that I thought sounded similarly sexy and cool and mysterious as deep state. And that was logic bomb. And so I call it logic bomb for a number of months while

I was writing the manuscript. And then I got an email from my editor who said, among other things, about that title. I think we need to come up with something different. She was perplexed by it. And you don't want people to be perplexed. Mysterious is fine, but inscrutable is not. So I had to come up with a new title. And again, like I said, they're either really hard or really easy. And I didn't have any idea. And we're getting closer and closer to the time that I really had to have a title. And it just, I knew that a good source of titles are geographical locations or addresses. And so just on a whim, one of the first things I did in trying to come

up with a title, literally within minutes of receiving that email was that thought struck me. And since so much of the action takes place at the NSA, the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, which is also the location of Cyber Command, I thought, what is the real mailing address? If you wanted to send a postcard from Hawaii to the NSA, which might get you a bit of trouble, but if you want to do that, what address would it be? And I Googled it and it was, I can't remember the exact number. It was something like 3,800, I think, but 3,800 Savage Road. And my face, I was just like, you've got to be kidding me. Savage Road was just like jumped out at me. And I immediately jumped on the, did more furious typing on the computer

to find out if anyone else had ever used Savage Road as a title on anything. And there was one book that was actually written by a former NSA employee, and it was the full address. It was 3800 Savage Road, and it was a fairly small print run a number of years ago. So I felt happy. I felt pretty safe with that, but I still had to run it by my editor. I hope I'm not telling too long a story about the title. No, this is awesome. So I was terrified by one aspect of that title, which was that my editor also is the editor of Jack Carr, the amazing that title, but it's just too close to Savage

Sun, which is on our list. But lo and behold, I emailed her the title. She absolutely loved it. And that's how I ended up with Savage Road. That's awesome. I love the title. It's brilliant. And now that I know the background, I think it's even cooler. Yeah. One of the cheats that I do in the book is I start to refer from my research about the NSA and Cyber Command and Fort Meade. If there's anything that insiders in Washington refer to collectively to those three entities, Fort Meade, NSA and Cyber Command, they'll say the fort or just NSA. And so just to make a little bit more hay with the title, I have some of the principals, including the president, refer to Fort Meade and those agencies there as Savage Road. But yeah, that's how that worked out. It's pretty cool. In fact, we just interviewed Jack Carr two days ago. Oh, awesome. He's a fantastic guy. Jack Carr is not only a fantastic writer, he's been in the business a couple years longer than me,

but such a good, welcoming, collaborative, collegial dude. Really like Jack. He's helped me out in a couple different ways, and I can't just say nicer things about Jack. Yeah, he was really wonderful to have on the show. You use a character in this book that's female. What was it that, and of course in the first book, Deep State, what made you choose a female character? And then people seem to enjoy the writing from a female character from an aspect of yours into the interpretation of a female character.

How does that work for you, and how did you do the research, and how did you make that something that was a choice that you made? Yeah, you're probably, I think you can see that I'm not a 25 year old female. You clearly are not, sir. This is a valid question. It really, the origin story of my inclination and motivation to do that goes back about 10 years when I was still principally writing films, screenplays. And I wrote action. I wrote a lot of action among other genres, but I wrote a lot. And I don't think I was the first, but I was definitely in the first among a few screenwriters who saw a real glaring opportunity for writing vehicles, action vehicles for actresses. And it's a competitive business. That's no secret in any form of creative writing, whether it's for film or for books.

And so I always just try to go where the people ain't. If everyone is writing screenplays and thrillers that are platforming male protagonists, then I'm going to try and do something different. It's familiar enough, but different enough that you set yourself apart and make yourself more, I think, more marketable that way. So I just started 10 years ago, I started writing and succeeding with writing action vehicles with female protagonists. I think one of my first ones was writing a vehicle for Jessica Alba. And I just kept on going with that. And so when I got to thinking about what to do with this title, Deep State, and what kind of story it would be, the first thing you need to decide is, well, what's your protagonist? And since what the deep state represented is a vast conspiratorial network of powerful

Washington insiders, what could be the biggest contrast to that in terms of creating a David and Goliath story? And that was a 25-year- old female intern from West Virginia. And so that's what I went with. And the more I thought about the character, I was inspired in some parts just by pure imagination. But certainly one of the kernels of inspiration was a real favorite movie of mine, which is based on a wonderful book called Winter's Bone. And Jennifer Lawrence's breakout role in that film was just a wonderful depiction of just a fantastic character. And so with that little idea burning in my brain, that's what I went with. In terms of, I don't, I get very little pushback about it. And I expected more, especially in this day and age of being a gray haired white guy writing

a female, a young female protagonist. And I don't know, all I can say is I must be doing something right. I just, I consume a lot of stories, whether it's reading or watching movies or watching TV. And I've been doing this for being a consumer for 40 years or more. The characters just take shape. Now that's the creative process of describing it almost sounds totally goofy, but these characters take shape inside your head and develop a voice and in developing her character. I'm just, I'm not thinking gender. I'm thinking who she is, her experiences, her upbringing, her attitudes or ideas. And then when I put her in

situations, that's when I'm really start thinking about her gender, because I think in any given situation, things happen differently, whether you're a male or female and that for me is in that case that's like a that's a added value because we haven't seen protagonists in those situations confronting that extra layer of complications and conflict because of her gender does that all make sense it certainly does it certainly does and women read a lot more books, I think, than men. Yeah. Again, that's the more mercenary aspect of it. Again, it seemed like a glaring opportunity because women do read, I think, read a lot more books.

Typically, I think the genre, the thriller genre is the place where men who are readers will gather and buy books. One of my motivations and goals in doing this is to increase my audience as much as possible, satisfy the hardcore thriller audience with my books. And I think I do. But also by making the choices I did with my protagonist and her gender and some of those issues that she confronts, that, believe me, the issues that she confronts in my books, in particular in the third book, which is in the process of being edited, could not be experienced by a male protagonist, male characters. I hope that in that way, I expand out my audience. It's probably the old screenwriter in me

because in screenwriting, you're always encouraged by your producers and studios, your buyers to appeal to a broad audience. So what they refer to as the four quadrant audience. And I'm just bringing a lot of my experiences as a film writer and working in Hollywood to the book game. And I hope in an entertaining and satisfying way to readers. So there is a third book in the works up and coming, huh? with it. I'm just not exactly sure when, so I'm just going to hold that back. But yeah, every, like I said, it's one of the happy accidents of having written as my first book, a thriller.

In the series, they're really expected to come out once a year. And as long as people are buying the books and you're expanding your audience, it just goes on and on. I think Brad Thor, I believe he's about to publish his 20th book in his series following the same protagonist. Those are squad goals. I'd love to be there with the, I'd love to be on your show. And what would that be like about 16, 17 years talking about Haley chill number 20. I hope so. I hope we're both around for the, like I said, I'm an optimist. Let's be an optimist. That sounds good. That sounds good. I don't know if, I don't know, I'll probably have to have some special glasses. I can't see you, Chris. Where are you?

I'm right in front of you. We'll do the show from our rocking chairs, man. Yeah, yeah. We'll be in the home together. And I'll just... There you go. Can you pass the milkshakes and the... Hopefully it'll be in a beautiful place like Carmel Valley or something like that.

That would be good. That would be good. That would be good. So this has really been a great discussion. I've loved it. Is there any other teasers maybe you want to give out on the book to salacious things that they might find in the book you want to tease out maybe? Salacious? I'm not sure. But like I said, a few people on Twitter have referred to me as the twistmeister. And I'll just say that I love messing with your

head a little bit and leading you on with expectations about where things are going, and then really smacking you upside the head to wake you up with a real big whopper of a twist. So I think the rug will be sufficiently pulled from underneath your feet in a delightful way, not only at the conclusion of Savage Road, but throughout. You will be surprised by the good guys, the bad guys, and everything in between. There you go. Pick it up, guys. You got to get surprised.

So transitioning from being a screenwriter to being a book author, how have you liked that transition so far? It's really been tremendous. I love it. I've enjoyed my long and occasionally illustrious career as a screenwriter. Screenwriting is a journey of compromise. And collaboration is probably the nice way of saying it, but compromise is really what it's all about. And it's a very limiting format.

Anyone who says they enjoy reading screenplays, it's probably someone who wants to be a screenwriter. And people in Hollywood, one of the dirty little secrets of Hollywood is that people really do not like to read. And that's why they employ my first job in Hollywood as a reader, because no one wants to read. So they hire someone and pay them 25 bucks to read the screenplay for them and to write a short one or two, three-page report, and they call it coverage. So as a writer working in that industry where you're essentially a necessary evil and you absolutely need a fantastic screenplay to make even a good movie, but nevertheless, it's not the end result. Your work is certainly not the end result. Whereas with writing books, no, I had no idea. I really started writing Deep State

on a whim. It was either that or writing Sniper 8 or writing another pilot and Bible for a pilot. And I was sitting down having lunch with another screenwriter who was similarly becoming weary of the hustle here. And he mentioned that he was writing a book and the thought had never occurred to me. And so I thought, why not? And I'll give it a week and see how I like writing it. And by the end of the first day, I had about five or six pages of prose that looked nothing like a screenplay, but I really enjoyed the experience. I enjoyed the freedom of it because I just wasn't as limited as you are in the constraints of writing for film or TV. So when I finished the book and sold it and got it published relatively quickly and relatively easily, I was hooked. To be honest, Chris, I had started writing the book

with a very clear plan of, I'm only writing this book so I can get it published and then sell it to the movies so I can set up the project as a film project. And by the end of that process of actually finishing it and selling it, I had decided I wanted to keep just writing books. We have, we did option the book for TV, but I was hooked on the idea of considering myself primarily a novelist and a film or TV writer a distant second. That's awesome, man. That's quite the road. And you've done the

savage road. See what I did there? There you go. Before we go out, anything more you want to touch on in the book? Like I said, it has, I think that the book has a lot of surprises and twists and some scintillating action and some real, I'm a character and dialogue guy. Readers respond to the character, not only of Haley Chill, who's motivated by a very simple and elegant devotion to the U.S. Constitution and the preservation of its ideals. And that's her driving force. And she's a very unique but sympathetic character. And oftentimes, because of her background from West Virginia and being ex-military in the civilian world and the professional world, oftentimes those types of people might continually underestimated and she's fantastically capable. But surrounding her are other characters that I think are well drawnwriter into my book writing. And in looking at some of those reviews that I only very occasionally check out on Goodreads or Amazon,

oftentimes readers will say, will remark on the fact that, oh, the author is a former screenwriter, can really tell that from reading his book because it reads very quickly. It's a really fast read. I know page turner is a well-used phrase in applying to these books in this genre, but I think mine truly is

a page turner because remember what I said about in Hollywood, no one likes to read. The only way to get people to read is by writing in a very compelling way where the language really pops off the page. And so I don't waste a lot of time. I just give you what I think is just enough detail and specific facts to keep that story going. It's a ride for sure. There you go. There you go, guys. Be sure to check it out. Give us your dot coms, places where people can find you on the interwebs in order of the book. Sure. Again, it's my first and last name, Chris Hottie, H-A-U-T-Y. No space or underline or no numbers after that. ChrisHottie.com is the website. There's a sign up sheet for a sign up form for my mail list and you can find the upcoming news about any new books or ebooks or our book events and they'll if you check it not too distant future there'll probably be a link to this podcast

that sort of thing yeah there you go please link it and you can also watch for the third book but now pick up the book savage road hayley chill. You can take and get that at Books here. You can also order up the prior book in the series, Deep State, as well. Thanks, Moniz, for tuning in. Be sure to go to YouTube.com to see the video version of this interview. You can also go to Goodreads.com for just Chris Fossey. We're reading and reviewing over there. You can also go to numerous groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.

We certainly appreciate you being with us today. Thank you very much, Chris, for being on the show. Hey, Chris, it was really great talking with you today. Thanks for having me. Thank you very much, sir. And keep enjoying that wonderful, beautiful California sunshine. There you go. Thanks a lot for tuning in.

Be sure to give us a like, subscribe to us on YouTube, all that good stuff. Be sure to wear your mask, stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.