Scott Derrickson, Whose Home Was Destroyed by 2018 Woolsey Fire, Shares Lessons Learned From Devastation
When Wim Wenders was readying to present a 4K restoration of his classic 1987 fantasy film Wings of Desire in November 2018 in New York City, Scott Derrickson had to be there.
The German auteur is not only “a filmmaking mentor and one of my closest friends,” but he’s also godfather to both of Derrickson’s sons, Atticus and Dashiel. When the former was born, Wenders was the first guest to visit the family in the hospital. It made sense that Atticus, 14 at the time, would join his director dad in leaving their home in Los Angeles’ Thousand Oaks neighborhood to board a plane bound for the East Coast to attend the presentation at New York’s Quad Cinema.
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“Wim always had trouble with the color of the black-and-white balance — both on the VHS, certainly the DVD but also with the prints — and getting the proper tone for the footage, which was running a little sepia. He was always very frustrated that he could not get control of that movie so it would look exactly the way he intended,” recalled Derrickson, a veteran filmmaker who knows the struggle well after having built an impressive résumé on Marvel’s superhero blockbuster Doctor Strange and a series of high-profile horror films like The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Sinister, Deliver Us From Evil and more recently, The Black Phone. “They had redigitized the film through a complex process, and there was this really wonderful technical presentation. We watched the movie and it was really wonderful.”
A beautiful weekend spent ruminating on the art of cinema and the work of a beloved mentor crashed into tragedy, however, as the 2018 Woolsey Fire ripped through the Westside of Los Angeles, destroying Derrickson’s family home and taking with it all of their possessions. The tragic blaze ended up claiming more than 96,000 acres, 1,643 structures and killing three people in the process. Miley Cyrus, Shannen Doherty, Neil Young, Gerard Butler, Robin Thicke and writer-producer Chris Kelly were among those who also lost their homes during that catastrophic blaze.
“The only things I had after that fire were what I carried in my carry-on bag for that weekend trip. That was it,” Derrickson said by phone last weekend from Toronto, where he’s nearing the end of production on Black Phone 2. “The hardest I’ve ever seen my son cry was in New York when he found out that everything had burned. His room back home was an incredibly important space to him, and all of those things he had curated were not just symbols of memory that he wouldn’t get back, but also memories specific to that space. Everybody responded to it differently; people grieve differently.”
It’s a lesson Derrickson learned by living through a catastrophic fire and picking up the pieces in the months and years since. It’s also something scores of Angelenos will be faced with in the aftermath of the unprecedented wildfires that tore through Pacific Palisades, Malibu, Altadena and surrounding areas last week in a historic disaster that is still unfolding. The largest and most destructive, known as the Palisades and Eaton fires, have killed 24 people as of press time, and swept through 40,000 acres in the Los Angeles area. More than 12,300 structures have been reduced to ash.
“If an individual, a couple or a family loses their home, it’s certainly shocking when it happens. The real watershed difference between the two groups of people who lose homes are those who have good insurance and those who have either very poor insurance or no insurance,” Derrickson explained. “I was fortunate to have really good fire insurance, so it didn’t create a financial strain like it will for people who have bad insurance or have no insurance. That’s a nightmare I can’t really speak to, but it can obviously be life altering, ruinous and just horrible. My heart primarily goes out to people in that situation.”
For everyone, the immediate challenge becomes where to sleep. Friction often follows.
“What a long process it is to get resettled. It just seems like it took so long, and you’re living in a hotel or with family members, neither of which are fun, especially if you’re a family because it’s very cramped,” he said, adding that they were lucky to find comfort at the Four Seasons for a period before securing a rental property. “Our kids were in school, so we had to rent a home. But there’s a kind of morbidity that can set in for the displaced because one day you have a home and the next day, you’re homeless or you don’t have a place to call home. It’s a long slog of dealing with insurance companies and finding a temporary place, and maybe another to live in long term. The entire time, you’re feeling the shock that everything you owned is gone.”
Derrickson and his family signed a lease for a long-term rental in a home previously owned by the actor Kevin Sorbo. “I don’t mind saying publicly that I didn’t like his presence on Twitter, and I didn’t like him as a landlord. We lived in that house for, I think, nine months and we hated it. Hated it. It wasn’t our home. It wasn’t a place we liked aesthetically, and it wasn’t a place that anybody wanted to be in.”
It was not widely known at the time but Derrickson and his wife, Joyce, had split before the fire, further complicating a tough time. (He has since married Maggie Levin.) “The timing was really unfortunate on that level, and it became a dark, difficult and somewhat depressing time,” he said, adding that everyone in his family processed in their own ways. “Something I didn’t know about then that I know now is that the loss of a home puts incredible strain on a partnership if you’re a couple, and on a family [if you have children]. Everybody grieves the loss of their home space differently. My two sons and my ex-wife, all four of us, had very different experiences with the loss of that house.”
He, however, did not grieve the loss of his possessions. “That’s just because of my nature. It’s not a character thing. By nature, I’m not a very materialistic person. I actually kind of felt relieved, like, ‘Oh, great, I got rid of all this clutter.’ I was the person who suffered the least. It’s not something special about me, it’s just how I am. I didn’t miss all the clothes. I had a lot of movie posters I loved, and sometimes I would think about them.”
As a professional writer and director whose work stretches back to the late ’90s, Derrickson also lost all the printed drafts of every screenplay he had ever written, which were placed in a single stack in his office. “The vast majority of those are just gone forever. I don’t have them on any hard drives because of updated computer systems and all that sort of thing. I lost a shit ton of movie memorabilia. I collected a lot of great stuff, had a huge DVD collection, had an enormous classic movie poster collection, some of which were one of a kind. But again, that’s just stuff. My family was fine, my family was safe. So I just never really mourned that stuff.”
But there is one thing that still hangs heavy on his heart. During the Doctor Strange press junket and media tour, Derrickson wore something homemade: a charm bracelet created by his then-12-year-old son composed of items inspired by memories they shared as father and son. “It was beautiful and really artful,” Derrickson said. “It was really sentimental because Dashiel made it for me and he worked on it for an incredibly long time. That’s the only thing I lost that I still think about. I’ll never get it back.”
In the days since the L.A. fires erupted, Derrickson has been in touch with fellow industry insiders and close friends who have lost homes by offering an ear or advice should they need it. One of those is Miles Teller, who stars opposite Anya Taylor-Joy in Derrickson’s new film The Gorge, out Feb. 14 on Apple TV+. “I sent him a message telling him I’ve been there and I know what it’s like.”
Words of comfort can help. Derrickson still thinks of something Wenders told his son during that weekend in New York City. Following the screening of Wings of Desire, they joined a group for a gathering at a hotel to celebrate the restoration. “Atticus was very upset and visibly in a kind of despondent state that day. Wim is not a person of a lot of words, but when he speaks, he says very meaningful things,” Derrickson said. “I’ll never forget this. We got up from our chairs to leave and Wim called out to Atticus, who turned to him. Wim said, ‘Hold onto your memories. No one can burn them.'”
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