✦Biography
Screenwriter
Spare, literary neo-noir about ordinary people who make one compromised choice and cannot find their way back.
Martin Kriegler writes English-language neo-noir. His register owes an open debt to Cormac McCarthy and the Coen brothers: plain, exact sentences; violence kept mostly off the page; landscape that carries the weight of fate.
His scripts return, again and again, to one figure — the quiet, indispensable man nobody quite sees. A small-town undertaker. A territory’s hangman. A long-haul trucker. A desert fixer. Each makes a single compromised choice, tells himself it is only the once, and learns too late that there is no road back. The wound beneath is always the same and never quite the same: the cost of looking away, the price of handing your conscience to someone else, the slow trade of a soul for a way to keep going.
He is drawn to places where the law runs thin and the choices are stark — dying towns, hard borders, the far edges of a country or a century — where an ordinary person’s smallest surrender can become the whole of a life.
He writes original feature screenplays. Quiet Departures, his first, is complete; The Administrator, Yellow, and Samsar are in progress. He is seeking representation.
I’ve seen enough of it now to know how it goes — the good man who makes the small wrong choice, the moment everyone looks away, the thing nobody wants to say out loud. And the ideas don’t stop coming — ways it could go, the ones nobody’s told yet. So that’s my work now: I catch them before they go, and get them down.