If the drive to make the characters nicer and more likable inflicted a slow death on Mona Lisa Smile, Bounce is a movie that almost, but not quite, suffered the same fate.
Writer-director Don Roos, fresh from selling his screenplay The Opposite of Sex, set out to tell the story of a narcissistic, arrogant, dishonest, barely recovering alcoholic who changes as he woos a young widow. No problem—except that once the script got into development, there were a lot of people who didn’t like the hero, because he was, well, a narcissistic, arrogant, dishonest, barely recovering alcoholic. They wanted to like him, of course; more to the point, they wanted to know the audience would like him. Even if that meant turning the script into the story of a nice guy who, um…gets a little nicer?
Roos doesn’t think much of Hollywood’s obsession with likability, which emerges as an issue in all three of the Julia Roberts movies surveyed here. “I don’t think it’s important, necessarily, for a character to be liked by the audience,” the screenwriter said. “I think it’s important for a character to be understood by the audience, and for the audience to empathize with that character’s point of view. But likability, which generally means the character only does nice things—I find that to be a very useless concept.
“But it’s very, very prevalent. It was even prevalent at Propaganda [the company that bought Bounce], and it’s prevalent among actors and directors. We’re all infected with that. It’s kind of a disease we have here in Hollywood, [this fixation on] likability. It makes for much duller movies if the character always has to behave nicely.”
Roos was able to back his movie away from the precipice, though, where the writers of Pay It Forward and Mona Lisa Smile were not. That may be because Roos has an advantage they lacked: He directs his own scripts. Directing not only gives him a chance to protect his script but lets him enlist the stars as allies—and stars, by virtue of both their influence and their craft, can be the best allies a writer can have. Then again, they can be his worst enemies.
Bounce is the story of Buddy Amaral (Ben Affleck), an arrogant Los Angeles advertising executive who thinks of himself as supremely lucky until he is stranded in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport during a Christmas Eve snowstorm. There he meets a failing playwright and TV writer, Greg Janello (Tony Goldwyn), who is trying to get home to spend Christmas with his family. The patronizing Buddy gives up his first-class seat to get Greg on the plane so that he can spend the night with a beautiful woman he’s met in the airport bar.
Later that night, Buddy learns that the plane has crashed, killing Greg and every other passenger. It’s another stroke of luck, but instead of celebrating, Buddy spirals downward. A year later, he is fresh out of the Betty Ford Clinic and barely holding on to his sobriety. Haunted by the memory of Greg, he looks up his widow, Abby (Gwyneth Paltrow), and tries to set things right in her life. Expecting simply to throw her some financial relief, he instead finds himself falling in love with her and her sons, all while hiding his role in Greg’s death.
Roos wrote Bounce between the time he sold The Opposite of Sex and the the start of shooting on that film. That may make Roos sound terribly prolific, but if so, it’s not because he loves sitting down to work. “I hate writing,” he admits. “But I have a terrible day if I don’t write, so I make myself.”
Yet Roos found writing Bounce the easiest experience he’d ever had as a screenwriter. “I thought, You know what? I should write something that’s more commercial,” Roos said. “The idea for [Bounce] came into my head literally on a Monday night, and by Friday I had thirty pages of the script, a complete outline and thirty pages of the script. Within four weeks, the entire script had been written.
“It was a very exciting process, because I usually write with a lot of reluctance and dread and procrastination, and [this time] I was actually eager to get up in the morning and write, because I seemed to know where I was going. It was the only time in my life where I couldn’t wait to get back to it. It hasn’t happened since and it hadn’t happened before.”
Reading two drafts of Roos’s script—his sale draft from January 1997 and a revised draft from May 1999—reveals the results of that process. The plot is basically the same in each case, but the focus of the story shifts quite a bit from one draft to the next. Roos was discovering that Bounce wasn’t about exactly what he thought it was.
“The sale draft is essentially the story of a man who is competing, always, with the ghost of a man who died in his place,” said Roos. “The entire story is an evaluation of himself, compared to this real man who had real family and connections and affection and ambition and hopes and dreams and failures. [Buddy is comparing] his own empty, shallow, conceited life to that man’s. And in some way, over the course of a hundred and twenty pages, [he’s trying] to become that man who died.”
Of course, Bounce is also a love story between that “empty, shallow” man and the widow of the more virtuous man he admires. As Roos notes, “there is an element of Buddy becoming a man worthy of this widow.” In the process of refining the script, however, the deceased husband, whom Roos calls “the invisible third character in the movie,” receded from center stage. Among the casualties of this process was one of the sale draft’s more unique scenes, a moment roughly halfway through the film where Greg’s ghost appears to Buddy and taunts him.
“A ghost appearing can be very powerful, but it didn’t seem to be the story I was telling. He only appeared one time, and it seemed out of place somehow. I let it go quite easily. I just said, ‘Oh, you don’t like the ghost? Okay, I can do without that.’”
Instead—and probably inevitably—the emphasis shifted to Abby and her romance with Buddy. Of course, an on-screen relationship between two movie stars is bound to be more compelling than any relationship between an on-screen character and an offscreen one. But Roos also points to his leading lady, Gwyneth Paltrow, as the key to the change.
“If there were a lesser actress in the part, you wouldn’t be as invested in the love story. But she’s a very riveting presence, and her story is very clean. You can’t help but admire her. She’s an enormously powerful character. And, [when you’re] watching it, that is what you decide it’s about. Even myself.”
Roos also noted that downplaying Greg’s character made the storytelling subtler. “It’s an interesting thing for Ben [Affleck] to play—that he’s constantly judging himself against this man. But [this way] it becomes a subtextual thing, rather than what the story is about.”
For the writer, the transformation took some adjustment. “Sometimes I regret it. I think, Wow, I intended to make a different movie. But that’s moviemaking. Once you have flesh and blood and eyes and faces, your movie changes. It has to change—otherwise you’re not being responsive to your materials. The script is one element, and the players are another.”
Perhaps it’s no surprise to hear Roos talk so admiringly about his leading lady. Her father was one of the men who introduced him to screenwriting. Roos grew up in upstate New York and Washington, D.C., before attending the University of Notre Dame. Notre Dame had no film department, but alum Tony Bill, producer of The Sting, returned in the mid-1970s to teach, bringing along a then-unknown writer pal named Bruce Paltrow. Twenty-five years later, a scene of Bounce was shot in a restaurant co-owned by Tony Bill and Bruce Paltrow.
Bill encouraged Roos to come to Los Angeles, but when he arrived on the West Coast in 1978 he had no idea what he was getting into. “I literally showed up at Tony Bill’s office and asked for a job as the writer of his film. I suppose I thought they had writers during the film, to write extra stuff. That’s now naive I was.”
“There really aren’t jobs like that,” Bill told him. “All I can tell you is, keep writing.”
After a few years of writing typical beginner’s screenplays, “where the adults are crazy, and the young twenty-two-or twenty-three-year-old guy is really wiser than everybody,” he decided to go after a ready-made market: episodic television. “In those days, 1980, 1981, there were a lot of freelance episodes produced. It’s not that way anymore. So I wrote a couple of Hart to Hart scripts and got in the door that way.”
His first produced screenplay was Love Field, but when Orion went bankrupt, the film’s release was held up for two years. In the meantime, he wrote Single White Female. Both arrived in theaters in 1992.
Like many screenwriters, he soon became interested in directing as well. “When you see what directors do to your material, you decide to direct out of self-defense. Not that I have anything against the directors who directed my material, but very often their interpretation was not mine, or not what I intended, or what they thought was important, I didn’t. What I did think was important, they neglected. I’d rather be angry at myself. I’d rather mess it up myself than watch somebody else mess it up.”
After roughly a decade, Roos finally got his chance by writing his least commercial screenplay, The Opposite of Sex. “It wasn’t about stars, it was an ensemble story, and that’s always more difficult,” he said. “It was about the love life of a gay man, and that’s always more difficult. I never really thought that it would get made. I knew that if it was to be made, I would direct it, but I never really thought that anyone would buy it. It was more of an exercise for me to write a non-studio picture.”
The Opposite of Sex did sell, even with Roos attached to direct. That might have encouraged him to try to do the same kind of thing again, but Roos was savvy enough to guess that his next script should not only be more commercial, but have a straight male protagonist. He had written stories focused on straight women and gay men, but never a straight man. “I thought that would be a good task to tackle,” he said.
As it turned out, writing for a straight man proved no problem. Instead, Roos found it much more difficult to surrender the ironic writing style he had used to such great effect in The Opposite of Sex.
“The Opposite of Sex was a great, easy script to write, because the main character in her voice-over could always take a different position to the actual script, to what was actually happening on-screen. So, if there was a boring part of the story, I would just have my lead character say, ‘Oh, God, this is a really boring part, but what I have to do is get from here to there.’ That constant commentary on what I was writing about [gave the film] a built-in sense of irony, and I could hide behind that.”
Bounce, on the other hand, was “very nonironic, very sincere,” and consequently more challenging. “The discipline of actually having to tell a story and letting it live and die by its own merits was difficult,” Roos says.
After getting through his first draft, Roos put the script down for a month before giving it a polish. In January 1997, a week after it was sent out, the script was bought by Propaganda Films.
Then things slowed down. While Propaganda searched for a director for Bounce, Roos went on to direct The Opposite of Sex. That led Propaganda to call off their director search and ask Roos to take the reins himself. It took months to negotiate that deal; when Propaganda’s parent company, PolyGram, was acquired by Universal, it held up the film still further. The logjam finally broke in January 1999, when Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein read the screenplay and decided to buy it from Propaganda.
Many of the changes in Bounce, though, came from a revision Roos did in January 1998, after receiving notes from Propaganda’s Steve Golin. As Roos recalls, the changes made the story cleaner and simpler. For example, in the sale draft, Buddy had a girlfriend and an ex-wife; both were cut. Abby’s character was strengthened and became more active. A new scene showed that Abby was actually very good at her job, even though she wasn’t very successful. She also became more active in pursuing the romance with Buddy, so that the responsibility for the relationship would be split between them.
The most important shift, however, came in Buddy’s character. “I don’t like Buddy for not telling the truth,” Roos remembers hearing. “Can you make him nicer? Can you have more opportunities where he’s about to tell her and then something she says makes that impossible?” As Roos says, “It was a pervasive note from everybody who read the script: ‘Oh, my God, I hate this guy because he’s lying.’
“It’s difficult, because that’s the story I wanted to tell—the story of a guy who lies and becomes more and more invested in the lie and more and more afraid of the lie coming out. It’s hard to softpedal that. I did the best I could to make him more sympathetic, but ultimately he begins the movie as a very narcissistic, self-involved character, and it’s hard to turn him into a sweetheart from page one. That’s not the story.”
As Roos notes, rewriting often involves this kind of “cleaning up” for a film’s main characters—sanding down their rough edges to make them more palatable for a wider audience. He inserted a scene where Buddy moves toward telling Abby the truth but is interrupted. He also removed scenes where Buddy proposes to Abby and the pair go house-hunting, out of concern that audiences wouldn’t want Buddy taking the relationship too far while he was still deceiving Abby. “Fortunately, in the actual [execution], we were able to get a lot more edge and darkness back into it.”
After more than twenty years in Hollywood, Roos knows how to play the game. He knows who will be reading his scripts and what kind of notes to expect. “Very often in a script session they’ll say, ‘We have to have a scene that shows why the lead character is in love with the other lead character.’ And you can write many, many of those scenes, and none of them will probably survive into the movie theater. I mean, a main character, a star, loves another star because they’re the stars of the movie, and they bring so much history with the audience to that.”
More than their association with previous starring roles, of course, actors also bring their talents for character portraiture and emotional nuance. “Most of all they bring eyes,” Roos says, “and if they’re good actors they [can] really bring out the subtext of the scene.”
Roos’s writing stresses subtext quite a bit. His dialogue is especially rich and compelling, in part because his characters almost never say what’s actually on their minds. He writes his scripts knowing that actors will bring these characters to life—but he also knows that not every development executive will account for that before giving notes.
“It’s hard for people to read subtext,” he admits. “It’s hard for people to understand that while a guy might be lying with his mouth, his eyes may be clearly saying ‘I love you, and I care about you, and I’m worried about you.’” Many industry readers prefer to see their emotional nuances spelled out on the page. “A love scene in Hollywood development circles is where one character says ‘I love you. And here’s why I love you. And here’s how I’m going to love you.’ That’s very often not what a love scene will look like on-screen.”
To Roos, this overliteral approach often dampens creativity within the industry. “It’s why so many movies are by-the-numbers. When characters come in and start talking their subtext, I check out. [In real life,] usually people talk to conceal how they feel, not to express it. And when we do express how we feel, it’s often extremely ineloquent in real life.
“So I can tell a movie that’s been overdeveloped. I can tell a scene whose only purpose is to state where the character is at [emotionally]. We had such a scene in Bounce, but it’s not in the movie. We had a scene where the Ben Affleck character says, ‘I want to tell her. I should have been on the plane, and I really love her, and she’s really really special to me.’ It’s not in the movie. I never expected it to be.” Roos admits he only wrote the scene to placate the development people who were giving him notes. “You try to do it cleverly. You never write anything that you know won’t be in the movie. You try to make it work. You [think], This is sort of against how I would do it, but if I have to do this scene, this is a good version of it. And you spend a lot of time and money putting it on film, working with the actors and hoping for the best. [And then,] finally, when you see the movie, the scene falls right out, because it’s unnecessary.”
For Roos, such overexplicit writing is “really why movies are so dull. Because we get it. We understand. Everything we need to know about the character is displayed in front of us. When you [in the audience] work to understand a character and to try to figure out what they really mean and what they want, then you identify with the character, and it’s a stronger movie.”
On the other hand, Roos said that such on-the-nose exposition scenes are perfect for trailers, because they summarize the plot in a few lines. “They’re usually ‘so far’ scenes.”
“So far” scenes?
“‘So far,’” he said by way of illustration, “‘I’ve fallen in love with this woman, and yet I am the man responsible for her husband dying. That’s what’s happened so far, Seth.’ And then Seth says what the audience is feeling, ‘You need to tell her.’ So it’s a silly scene, really. It’s never going to be in the movie. But I tried.”
Roos’s dialogue is interesting precisely because his characters are so inarticulate. “Real drama is in seeing people hide or struggle to express how they feel. You really have to look at the underpinnings of where the characters are and what each action that they do means. There’s a code that each character has developed over the course of the movie.”
Unfortunately, screenplays have to sell off a read, and the readers and buyers are often the people who want everything spelled out in the dialogue. As Roos explained, few of them really grasp the power of film. “There are very few film enthusiasts in Hollywood, really, at those levels. Very few people who have favorite films, who are moved by films or understand remotely what film does. It’s difficult talking to idiots, it really is.”
How, then, to get the subtext across to those “idiots,” when they’re responsible for deciding whether or not to buy your script?
“You put it in the action lines,” Roos responds. “Here’s a scene: two characters, Linda and Steve. Linda comes in, she says hi.
“Steve says hi.
“Linda says, ‘I’m going upstairs to bed.’
“Steve says, ‘I’ll follow you.’
“That’s the actual [dialogue] that will be in the scene. [But let’s say] I mean it to be a love scene. I have to put all of that subtext in the action lines:
Linda enters the room. She sees Steve. It’s the moment she’s been waiting for, but she can’t trust herself to speak.
LINDA
Hi.
“You do it that way, so that people understand what you’re trying to do, but you don’t commit the sin of putting it into your actor’s mouth. Because I guarantee you, by the time we get to that Linda/Steve scene, we know how Linda feels about Steve. We know how she feels when she comes home and he’s sitting there. It’s everything she hoped for. So we don’t want her to say, ‘Hi, Steve, it’s everything I’ve hoped for to see you here.’ We don’t need her to say that. We want her to cover that. It will be much, much more powerful.”
Writing this way, Roos said, can be “very liberating. And it’s very simple. It’s a novelistic approach. In the action lines, you can actually be the director, conveying the subtext of the characters. That’s what they’re for—subtext.”
Roos learned this approach long ago, even before he became a director. “I would get notes very early on: ‘Your main character is unlikable.’ And literally, I would put in the action line, ‘Sam enters. Although abrasive, there’s something strangely likable about him.’ And then Sam’s dialogue would be, ‘You fat bastard, go fuck yourself.’ But it doesn’t matter. Because I’ve put that ‘strangely likable,’ they know that even though he says something awful, he’s a likable character. It’s obvious, but it works.”
But isn’t that cheating? No, Roos said. “Because what those action lines are supplying is the actor’s face, the direction, the way that somebody says something. It is cheating to put it into dialogue, because then you’re pretending it’s a radio play, instead of a movie.”
Roos is also expert at establishing character quickly. “It comes very naturally to me. That’s just one of your jobs as a writer, to quickly tell the audience who these people are. And leave room for surprises. How do you want them to see this person instantly? What is it important for them to get about him?” Usually, he notes, the writer finds an activity that helps suggest something about the character. “Because there’s a wonderful voyeur quality to watching a movie. The audience is titillated by finding something out, by watching somebody do something. That’s much better than listening to them talk about themselves. To see a character do something is much more powerful than to have a character tell you he did something.”
This audience-as-voyeur philosophy is a core part of Roos’s worldview. “We grow up feeling, in our lives, that we’re not exactly where the most interesting things are happening, that in another room there are other voices talking, and there’s something fascinating going on. Movies are a way to look into those other rooms, and it’s really very powerful.”
Through all the changes, Roos always took care to ensure that Bounce let the audience spy on Buddy’s personal spiritual journey. Those sensitive to recovery issues—and Roos himself is a recovering alcoholic—will recognize that Buddy arrives at a very “twelve-step” kind of spiritual awakening. He begins his rocky romance by jumping to Step 9 of the Alcoholics Anonymous twelve-step program (“We made direct amends to [people we had harmed] wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others”) without bothering to do the first seven preparatory steps.
“When he first starts to help Abby, it can’t be just that [he wants] to be a good guy,” explained Roos. “It’s a selfish reason: ‘I have to help her if I’m going to stay sober.’ I mean, I couldn’t take the selfish guy and then just have him approach Abby because he’s a great guy and wants to see if she’s okay. He’s protecting his sobriety. He’s an idiot, because he hasn’t sincerely worked an AA program. He’s jumping. [Buddy thinks], I can do this. I’ll check up on her, I’ll throw her a few bucks. I’ll be sober, and I won’t feel guilty.”
At the start of the story, Roos says, “Buddy thinks he’s God. He has incredible hubris…. He thinks he’s powerful enough to make planes fall out of the sky—that that’s his fault. And that he can fix it. That’s the true hubris: that [he thinks] he can show up and make it better. And what he fails to realize is that he can’t make that better. It’s a huge loss, and he’s too small to make that better. He has to let go of his control and let go of his idea that he can be God.
“So even in his trying to help her, he’s being egotistical. And he really has to be humiliated at depth. And then he becomes the man that Greg was at the beginning of the movie. At the beginning of the movie, Greg couldn’t be less powerful. He’s a mediocre writer eking out a living writing bad television. He is a humble man. He has been humbled by life and he is humble, and he is a worthy object of love. And that’s basically where Buddy has to be by the end of the movie. He has to be humbled by life and to learn his true station….
“That’s the whole process. The whole thing is humiliation and depth.”
Roos finds his own true station when he forces himself to sit down and write every day. “It was very important to me to feel successful as a writer, and the only way to do that is to fulfill your appointment to write. Because who knows if what you’re writing is any good or not? And I can’t do a page budget—like, ‘If I write three pages a day, then I’m a success.’ I really have to say, ‘If I keep my appointment to write, and I spend the time at the typewriter or the computer for that hour or two, then I’m a success.’ I can sit there from nine to eleven and not write a word, and at eleven turn the computer off and say, ‘I was a success as a writer today.’ It’s important for me to have something concrete like that.”
Often, Roos admits, he starts out typing gibberish: “‘I hate writing. Last night was terrible. I ate too much. I’m too fat.’ Then eventually you get bored with that. And after twenty minutes of a diatribe on your internal feelings, or how much you hate your life and other people in it, it’s actually preferable to [start] writing rather than continue that kind of internal monologue. So in an hour, you’ll get half an hour of actual work on a project.”
He spends an hour a day while he’s working out an idea, two when he’s writing a first draft, then up to four hours a day while rewriting. “But I find writing exhausting,” he said. “An hour of asking yourself what is in your brain, and what you want to create, is tough work.”
He’s also careful not to read over his work too quickly. “I never reread. Ever. Because there’s a little disgust involved with every artistic enterprise. You know, when you first go to a play, and you sit down, and everybody sounds phony, and you can see their spit in the footlights, and it’s just awful and fake and phony and stagy—and then, ten minutes in, it carries you away.
“No One Helps a Writer Do Anything”
DON ROOS ON WHY WRITING’S UNDERRATED
Don Roos may hate writing, but it’s still his favorite job in the business.
Writing is a great job. It’s the only job in this business where you can perform your craft without anybody hiring you. I could write a movie today. So could you. I can start a job today without being hired. You’re completely self-contained, or can be. So that’s an enormously powerful thing.
But the [lack of] respect for the writer, it’s really painful. And I honestly feel it’s up to us as writers to insist on it. To not let actors improvise and to work hard on our dialogue so it can stand scrutiny, to understand our work so that we can explain it to other people, and to direct if we have to. To not make the big sale and wait for no money but a chance to direct it too.
You know, directing is very easy compared to writing. No one helps a writer do anything. A writer is alone. A director has a hundred people working for him whose only job it is to make the director look good. They succeed or fail, and get rewarded with pay or promotion, if they make the director look good. It’s an ideal situation for somebody like me who doesn’t know what he’s doing. “Let me help you. No, you can do it this way. This will be better.” You have all the help in the world. So I think directors have got the populace hoodwinked. It’s so easy to be an okay director—where[as] it’s so hard to be even an okay writer.
The one job a director can do, that no one else can do, is to talk to the actors. And I say, if that’s the essential and unique job of a director, that’s what I’m going to do. My DP will take care of the shots, and my script supervisor will take care of the continuity, and the production designer will take care of the sets. I will worry about performance. That’s how I direct, and you can get by that way. I don’t think I’m a great director, but I think I’m good. It’s pretty easy to be a B director. I think I’m an A writer and a B director, and that’s how it has to be. Because I’m not interested in putting the time and the work in to be that kind of visionary. I’m not Scorsese, I’m not Woody Allen. There are five, maybe, American directors that are truly extraordinary. That’s not me. That’s not my job….
You just have to come to [an understanding] of what you can do, and do it. And that’s what I can do: I can help the actors with a performance, because I love actors and always have. One of the great things about direct[ing] is that you finally get to talk to the people who are bringing your characters to life. That’s a great privilege.
“The thing you need to avoid when writing is that initial glance at a work. If I reread the previous day’s output, I may never get over my feeling of disgust. I just have to soldier on and not be diverted by my own disgust at what I’ve managed to achieve. I’m a very self-critical person. My job is to spend that two hours a day, and eventually to type ‘The End.’ Then I let it sit, and then I reread it, and that’s always a very painful day.” For Roos, that day rarely comes less than two weeks after writing a new passage. “I very often don’t even get through it the first time. I get to page thirty, and I think, Oh, man, I’m in such fuckin’ trouble here. Maybe I have to re-outline, I don’t know. That first encounter with your own work of art—I find [it] very tough.”
Though Bounce was Roos’s easiest experience as a writer, he points to the evolution of the story as the the most exciting part of the process. “Watching something change, something that you think you know everything about. It’s just the magic of humanity, really.” He’s especially interested in how the process enhances his work—even when the dialogue remains the same. On Bounce, he noted, “None of the actors changed any of my lines. I’m not the kind of director who says ‘or say something like that.’ I’ve spent time on this dialogue, and I expect them to say it as written. And they do. But [even if] you think you know everything [about a scene], even [when an actor is] saying the exact things you wrote, a scene is different” when it goes before the camera.
“Directing something that you’ve written, you’ve got to pay attention and listen to what actually is there. That was very exciting, because things you thought were important aren’t, or things you maybe didn’t pay enough attention to are suddenly much more important to an audience—and to you—than you thought. That’s what happened with this story. It started out as the story of a man’s redemption, a man’s descent and climb out of it and eventual salvation. And it became a love story and it happened very naturally, right before my eyes.”
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
CREDITS
DIRECTED BY Michel Gondry
SCREENPLAY BY Charlie Kaufman
STORY BY Charlie Kaufman & Michel Gondry & Pierre Bismuth
PRODUCERS: Anthony Bregman and Steve Golin
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: Georges Bermann, David Bushell, Charlie Kaufman, and Glenn Williamson
PRODUCTION COMPANIES: Anonymous Content, Focus Features, and This Is That Productions
ORIGINAL MUSIC BY Jon Brion
CINEMATOGRAPHY BY Ellen Kuras
FILM EDITING BY Vladis Oskardottir
CASTING BY Jeanne McCarthy
PRODUCTION DESIGN BY Dan Leigh
ART DIRECTION BY David Stein
SET DECORATION BY Ron von Blomberg
COSTUME DESIGN BY Melissa Toth
MAJOR AWARDS
ACADEMY AWARDS: Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry, Pierre Bismuth—Original Screenplay
BAFTA AWARDS: Charlie Kaufman—Original Screenplay; Vladis Oskarsdottir—Editing
WGA AWARDS: Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry, Pierre Bismuth—Original Screenplay
CAST
Jim Carrey…JOEL BARISH
Kate Winslet…CLEMENTINE KRUCZYNSKI
Elijah Wood…PATRICK
Thomas Jay Ryan…FRANK
Mark Ruffalo…STAN
Jane Adams…CARRIE
David Cross…ROB
Kirsten Dunst…MARY
Tom Wilkinson…DR. HOWARD MIERZWIAK
BUSINESS DATA
ESTIMATED BUDGET: $20 million
RELEASE DATE: March 19, 2004
U.S. GROSS: $34.1 million
FOREIGN GROSS: $38.9 million
REVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
“Going to the movies would be an eternally wondrous experience if more movies were as smart, ambitious, offbeat and emotionally rich as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”
—CLAUDIA PUIG, USA TODAY
“[Gondry] can define contradictory emotions with extraordinary clarity and alacrity. It’s why he’s so suited to handling much of this particular Kaufman script.”
—ELVIS MITCHELL, NEW YORK TIMES
“Gondry and the pitch-perfect actors have crafted a remarkable film that can coax a smile about making the same mistakes in love and then sneak up and quietly break your heart.”
—PETER TRAVERS, ROLLING STONE