British writers Chris and Michael Mul, known as the Mul Brothers in the screenwriting world, have some fantastic news: their Big Break-winning screenplay, Faster Than Horses, is in pre-production with director James Erskine (Shooting for Socrates), producer Bear Grylls (Running Wild with Bear Grylls) and starring Ansel Elgort (Baby Driver). 

Faster Than Horses is a survival-thriller about a former Olympic runner, Mauro Prosperi (Elgort), who attempts a comeback in the grueling Marathon des Sables across the treacherous Sahara Desert. Based on a true story, the athlete disappeared for nine days in a sandstorm that left him fighting for his life. 

We sat down with the Mul Brothers to find out about their writing journey and hear how winning the Big Break competition helped progress their career to the next level.

The Mul Brothers have always been fans of survival stories and are obsessed with movies like 127 Hours. But when they read an article about Prosperi’s harrowing journey in 2017, they knew the shocking endurance story had particular cinematic appeal.  

“The amount of things that went wrong for Mauro while he was in the desert – you couldn’t believe it!” says Michael, adding, “A missed plane that went past and then he just so happened to not be in the right place when they sent out a rescue team, it was one thing after another. And then right at the end of the story, he tried to take his own life but somehow survived because the blood just congealed. He saw that as a sign of divine intervention to keep going.” 

After that, Prosperi faced down the guns of Algerian soldiers when he accidentally wandered from Morocco into Algeria. No wonder survival expert Bear Grylls signed on to produce the movie!

But a great true-life story doesn’t always translate easily into a great movie script. Beyond just the true events, the story must also include a highly emotional and cathartic journey for its protagonist. The Mul Brothers were able to craft that journey by focusing on Prosperi’s deep need to reclaim his former athletic glory – something the judges of the Final Draft Big Break competition recognized. Faster Than Horses was awarded the prize for Best Feature Drama in 2021. 

“Every screenplay competition has a different caliber and it took us a little while to figure out who the big players were. So with the Final Draft submission, we were just like fingers crossed!” says Chris, who admits he was thrilled to find out they’d won considering they had entered the year before. 

The prize package that came with the Big Break win made all the difference. 

“Mike and I say, 100 percent, one of the best prize packages we ever received was the fellowship that we got as a result of Final Draft. It wasn’t so much about the money. It was more about the opportunity that led to us writing more material. I think it was 10 weeks and over that time, we wrote an entirely new TV pilot in one of the classes [as part of the New York Film Academy, included in their prize package] which was a really cool experience. The guy who was running it, George McGrath, who we’ve stayed in contact with and was super lovely, shared it with a friend of his at HBO just off the bat and he’d never shared anything with anybody before, but he just felt like the color of the writing was great. So just off that, it was like, ‘Okay, this is why Final Draft is that much higher in caliber.’ For us, it was one of the best experiences we’ve had when it came to placing or winning in contests,” says Chris.

The Mul Brothers want to share this advice for emerging writers: “Keep writing. I think that that is the best way to find your voice as a writer. The more Chris and I wrote, we started to find that we would continually revisit the same themes in our work. And ultimately that’s what really grounds you as a writer in terms of the things that you like to explore,” says Michael. 

Chris’s advice is to read produced screenplays for this reason: “A lot of writers starting out don’t realize how important the first 10 pages of the screenplay are because sometimes that’s all a producer is going to read. You see in those opening 10 pages of a lot of produced screenplays, they’re almost perfect in how they’re delivering character and introductions to the world and themes, and the economy of those pages.” 

For more information on Big Break visit https://www.finaldraft.com/big-break-screenwriting-contest/.