When it comes to drugs, there’s been a complete one-eighty from the harsh mandatory minimum sentencing rules enacted in the 1980s to the booming medical marijuana industry of today. A dealer convicted 20 years ago could be released from prison now to find entire communities selling pot and raking in buckets of cash … legally.

This striking dichotomy is part of what inspired Matt Tente to write Green Rush, the heist action screenplay recently picked up by producers Brian Oliver and Will Packer. Tente’s script also just made the 2017 Black List.

The story follows an ex-con who tries to bond with his estranged daughter by helping her raid the city’s tax coffers—overflowing with cash from the thriving medical marijuana trade—in order to go straight and fund her entrance into the now-legal industry.

“Here, we have this person that has been locked away for something that a lot of people have done,” Tente explains. “And he gets out, and now it’s legal, and there are people making tons of money off of it. Just the hypocrisy of all that … I can’t imagine what somebody sitting in jail must feel like.”

Green Rush, whose two leads are African-American, strives to peel back some of the societal inequalities that so often underscore individual journeys. “When you look at films like Ava DuVernay’s 13^th, you get to see the institutionalized racism and different things like that you have within governmental systems and policing.”

Tente had one youthful dust-up involving pot. “If I had grown up in different circumstances,” he acknowledges, “the potential for me to actually be in jail or just have a criminal record for that would be much higher than in the kind of place that I grew up.”

He got in hot water with his parents and the local DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Program) officer, but it stopped there. “Had I been born a different skin color, or had I been born anything else, I might not have the same situation.

“The way I grew up, being a straight white male, in a suburban place, pretty middle class, I had a lot of privileges. You don’t even realize at the time.”

What drives Green Rush is the emotional, damaged relationship between a father and daughter: “what the whole system has done to certain people, and breaking families apart over kind of ridiculous laws that create generations of disenfranchised people.”

Having double-majored in communications and film because he liked to watch movies, Tente was hooked after a visual-effects internship put him in the center of production. He moved on to assistant work, eventually becoming an assistant to esteemed writer/director Scott Cooper (Hostiles, Crazy Heart).

“There are certain types of jobs within the film industry that people would give their firstborn for, almost,” he says. He loved working for Cooper on projects like Black Mass and Out of the Furnace and getting to see Cooper’s process firsthand. “It was great. You get to read a ton of great scripts that come in, do a ton of coverage on those, just read, read, read.

“Getting to read those scripts and see how other people work—I would say that was really my education as far as screenwriting goes,” he continues. “Assisting was really my way to get my hands on scripts and then really learn the craft.”

Directing has always been part and parcel of Tente’s filmmaking dreams. He wrote and directed Welcome to the Building, a short crafted to shoot inside his apartment. Despite having to slash the original 25-page script substantially during production and post due to time and budget constraints, it was still an incredible learning experience.

“I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Because you get out there, and that’s how you learn: by writing scripts, by making films, shooting shorts. Whatever you can. And that’s really the only way you can actually learn is by doing anything in film if you’re trying to make something.”

Other successes include Burn Run, which previously placed on the Black List, and Ride Share, an action script with two female leads that’s currently in development. A deliberate choice to not take another time-intensive job played a big role in his recent accomplishments. Tente decided, “If I’m going to do this, I’m going to paint myself into a corner where the only way out is really through writing.”

Getting optioned bought him a year and a half to focus on his own scripts. Still, up until a few weeks ago, he was walking dogs and cleaning litter boxes part-time to stretch that option money out.

Tente advises aspiring writers to listen to all the big podcasts, which weren’t available when he was first starting out. “The one through-line piece of advice that you’ll get from all those that’s actually consistent is just read as much as possible, whether it’s scripts or books, and write as much as possible.

“You realize that all those people who are working writers—and there are tons of them—are getting up and doing it every single day for eight, 10, 12 hours a day. And for you to compete with those people, you really have to find whatever separate job it is that can help you survive to write as much as possible.”