Tales from the Script

6 Power Players

The hierarchy of the Hollywood system is never more evident than when “above the line” talents attach themselves to film projects. Producers have the money to get movies started, directors have the creative know-how to get movies made, and stars have the box-office appeal to get movies seen. These power players have varying levels of autonomy over the film projects with which they become involved, but all have authority over screenwriters.

When everyone works together in a respectful fashion, talents are pooled into a project that becomes greater than the sum of its parts. More commonly, turf wars ensue, during which some of the parts are discarded, especially writers. The insights offered by screenwriters in this chapter explain how to manage, or at least comprehend, the delicate personal interactions that drive every movie production.

Producers are the first heavyweights to become involved. In many cases a producer purchases the rights to an underlying story idea, then hires a writer to expand the idea into a script. Likely the individual whose role in the filmmaking process is least understood by those outside of the entertainment industry, a producer is an entrepreneur who tries to gather all the elements necessary for the creation of an actual film. Directors generally request and supervise rewrites of the scripts they hope to shoot. In rare cases, such as Paul Schrader’s collaborations with Martin Scorsese, the perfect pairing of writer and director becomes the stuff of cinematic legend. The dream of emulating these sorts of partnerships underlies many of the efforts that other writers describe about trying to achieve unity of vision with the directors who bring their screenplays to life.

And then there are stars. As Joe Forte and others note, stars matter because their participation motivates studios to finance and distribute particular projects. Fulfilling the unique needs of movie stars is one of the most crucial skills that screenwriters must develop if they hope to sustain careers at the industry’s top levels.

Meet the Moguls

PAUL SCHRADER: I remember years ago, I needed some money, and I was good friends with Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. In fact, I introduced them. They were both involved in American Gigolo. They were on a roll, and they were paying writers a lot of money. We all had the same agent, Jeff Berg, and I went to Jeff and I said, “I’m old friends with them, why can’t I get some of this money?” He said, “Why don’t you have lunch? I’ll set it up.” So I had lunch with them on the Paramount lot, and we all talked about doing something. And then a month went by and nothing came up. I asked Jeff, “Did you ever talk to Simpson about those writing jobs?” And Jeff said, “Well, there’s kind of a problem.” I said, “What’s that?” And he said, “Well, Don likes to beat up on writers, and he’s not really comfortable beating up on you.”

NORA EPHRON: I have had a number of unbelievably painful moments with Hollywood executives, and the truth is that their reasons for rejecting projects were beyond ludicrous—they were willful and capricious, and in several cases meant that the scripts involved, which I had worked hard on and which, I swear to God, were wonderful, were never made. Not only were they unwilling to make them, but they were unwilling to put them into turnaround so that someone else could make them. The very worst moment of this occurred with a man who used to run Fox. He told me he would neither make a movie I’d written, with Alice Arlen, nor put it into turnaround because he was sure it would win an Oscar, and he would be embarrassed the way he’d been when he put The English Patient into turnaround.

FRANK DARABONT: I had one producer with his own source of funding—a guy with a lotta dough to spend on movies—offer me a $30 million budget for The Mist. He said, “I will write you a check for $30 million, you go make your movie.” He literally had his pen poised. And he said, “But there’s one string attached. You can’t have this ending. You’ve gotta have another ending.” And I said, “What ending would you like me to have?” He said, “I don’t know.” I said, “I don’t know either. This is the ending I’ve been thinkin’ about for twenty years now. And it’s not like I haven’t tried to think of alternatives, but this is the ending that makes intuitive, creative sense to me. This is the one that I’m most interested in. If you have an alternative to suggest, by all means suggest away. I may love it, I may hate it, I may laugh in your face, but I’ll certainly listen to it.” He didn’t have that. So I said, “Thank you very much,” I shook his hand, I walked out of his office without the $30 million check, and I made the movie with Bob Weinstein for almost half of that money—which meant my not taking any salary, et cetera—because I wanted to make my movie.

MICHAEL JANUARY: A producer is someone that lies well enough and long enough until the lie becomes the truth.

BRUCE JOEL RUBIN: I was working on Deep Impact, and I had lunch with a president of Disney—someone who had produced another movie I had worked on. We’re having lunch in the Disney commissary, and he starts asking me about Deep Impact. I just started talking freely and openly. I had no idea he was planning Armageddon. He was taking notes on everything I was saying. I wasn’t really literally giving him my script, but I was talking to him enough about it that he could pick up the genre, the tone, the character-driven aspect of it. That was really clever, I thought. He was figuring out how to do a movie in juxtaposition to the movie that I was in the process of writing. He was getting all of my ideas. It was really fascinating that there was a kind of subterfuge that was happening with this head of a major studio. When I found out that Disney was doing Armageddon, I went, “Wow, that’s interesting.”

PETER HYAMS: If I want to write, I sit down at the keyboard and write. If I want to draw, I take a No. 2 soft pencil and a blank piece of paper, and I draw. If I want to make a film, I’m asking somebody for money. The only reason why they’re gonna give me money is they think they’re gonna make more money back than they gave me. If they didn’t think they were gonna make more money back than they gave me, they’d be idiots to give me the money. They don’t owe it to anyone to make their movie. They have to see something in it.

KRISS TURNER: Producers are only gonna get behind something that can sell, because they only make money when it’s green-lit.

GUINEVERE TURNER: The executive who wants the truly innovative, risky idea is a rare breed. There’s the lovely and talented Christine Vachon, who produced Go Fish and produced my Bettie Page movie, but they are few and far between.

PAUL MAZURSKY: Alan Ladd Jr. was great. I did four pictures for him. You’re not gonna find many like him. If you encounter an executive like Laddy, you’re in luck. I also had Mike Frankovich on Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. He read it, and I said, “I have to direct it.” He said, “What have you done?” I said, “Nothing, but I made a short, I was an actor, and I directed theater. I’m not gonna sell it if I don’t direct it.” He said, “I’ll let you know tomorrow,” and the next day he called me. He said, “Okay.” I don’t think that’ll happen now.

RONALD SHUSETT: Dino De Laurentiis said to me, “I want to make a sequel to King Kong, but everybody says no, because King Kong is dead. Can you give me a way to bring back King Kong?” So I went home and thought, and then an inspiration hit me. Unfortunately, it was not a correct inspiration, but when you swing for the fences you’re going to miss sometimes. I said, “Dino, I know how you can bring back King Kong, and the audience will accept it even though he’s fallen a hundred stories. You give him an artificial heart. It’s huge—as big as a Volkswagen. It’ll be a funny scene, and everybody will believe he can come back to life.” He said, “Okay, I like the concept.”

So in about three weeks I came back with the story structure. I was trying to do a spoof of King Kong and at the same time make it exciting. I said, “After he’s resuscitated, he meets the love of his life. It’s a giant female version of Kong. He’s sixty feet tall, she’s forty feet tall.” He thinks for a minute and says, “Sounds good, but one thing bothers me, Ron. One thing stops me. People accept one sixty-foot ape. But I don’t think they’ll accept a female ape this tall. Maybe another male, but a female is too hard to accept.”

I thought for a minute and said, “Dino, Kong had to have a mother.”

“My God, you’re right! We go with this!”

And within months the script was ready and we were shooting the movie. It turns out I did not craft it well enough. It couldn’t make up its mind—it didn’t work as a comedy and it didn’t work as a serious movie—but that’s probably the best mistake you can make. There’s a saying by Mike Todd, the great old producer. He did Around the World in Eighty Days, and everybody thought he was nuts. He said, “He who never sticks his neck out never gets taller than his collar.”

RICHARD WENK: I made a short that got bought by HBO, which was not a big thing in the eighties, because HBO had no programming at that time, so they bought anything. It was seen by a producer named Don Borchers, who was working for Roger Corman at New World Pictures. They contacted me, and I came out for an interview. The interview consisted of Roger and Don bringing a poster out of the closet. It was a big poster, and it said Vamp. I said, “That’s really great.” They said, “Now we need a movie to go with it. If you can write a movie that has strippers, college kids, and vampires in it, you can direct it too.” So I did. That was my first experience writing a script for a studio, under the guidance of Don Borchers, and it was a great learning experience.

Richard Wenk

LARRY COHEN: The last development deal I had was a half-a-million-dollar deal at Warner Bros., for Joel Silver. After I wrote the script, I called Joel up on the phone and said, “What did you think of the script?” He hemmed and hawed, so I said, “Joel, did you read the script?” And he said, “Well, I was exposed to it.” I said, “You were exposed to it? Does that mean they held it up and showed you the script, and said ‘Look, here’s the script that Larry Cohen wrote for $500,000’?”

SHANE BLACK: Joel Silver has been an angel to me because, through thick and thin, for whatever reason, his vision of what he wants to see in movies coincided enough with mine that he trusted me to get what he was saying. At the very earliest stages, we worked so well together that he would literally be in his office and I’d come in five, six times a day and say, “What do you think?” He’d say no. I’d take it back and say, “Okay, now what do you think?” And I’d just keep coming in until he said, “Yeah, that’s what I want.” That kind of collaboration made me feel very comfortable in the business.

To this day, Joel remains my favorite producer, even though he’s so exponentially grown since then—you know, you have to walk beside him on the way to another meeting, and sort of get in as many words as you can.

On Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Joel ran interference for me. It’s not that I wasn’t trusted at that point by the studio, but I was—well, I wasn’t trusted. I hadn’t directed anything. Joel was able to drum up a fairly minimal sum of $15 million. He had made the Matrix films—you know, the good first one and then the not-so-good next ones—and they all made a billion dollars. So the studio said, “$15 million? Give it to Joel? What are you gonna do? Sit on him, yell at him? No, we’re gonna let him do what he wants with $15 million. He’s earned that privilege.”

I had a unique situation where I had to answer to only one man, because the money was so small. The studio rode off and it was just Joel. If Joel liked it, we filmed it. If he didn’t like it, I’d try to convince him. If I couldn’t, we didn’t film it.

ANTWONE FISHER: I know this producer who never says, “Leave my office,” but he sends signals when the meeting is over. Some people in the room don’t get the signal. They don’t pick up on that, and they wanna be friends. I’m friends with him because I picked up on his signals. You have to know how to read the people you’re with. It’s like a dance. You have to know who your partner is, and you have so many partners. It’s just like a night on the town—you’re going to this ballroom, you’re gonna dance with all these people, and you wanna dance with them. But when it’s time to switch partners, you can’t get nostalgic.

Auteur Guide

JUSTIN ZACKHAM: As a screenwriter, you understand that you’re providing a document that is gonna be turned into a film, and that is an entirely new evolution of the same story. If you want to write a script and direct it, then you get your way. But if you’re just a writer on a project, you are just a writer. As parasitic as it may feel to have a director come in and change your words, that’s what you signed up for.

DANIEL PYNE: Directors need to figure out a way to internalize your movie. They’re trying to find a movie to base on your screenplay, so their process is kind of outside-in, as opposed to when you’re writing it, which is an organic thing.

NAOMI FONER: You have to be able to watch a director do the horrible thing that happens to a script, which is take it apart into pieces and then try to put it back together again. And sometimes they put it back with one sleeve missing. But it has to be their turn. There has to be a single leader.

JOSH FRIEDMAN: Even when directors don’t have final cut, they have final cut from you. So you can try to convince somebody of some great idea you have for a scene that they’re not sure about, and at the end of the day you may win the battle, but you aren’t winning the war.

RICHARD RUSH: The writer’s lot in Hollywood has some unfortunate consequences, and I can say that with authority as a director who has run roughshod on writers that I have dealt with. When I say roughshod, I don’t mean literally. I respect the writer immensely. But when it gets down to the making of the picture, and I want to change dialogue at the moment, I don’t consult with the studio or with the writer or with God. I consult with the actor to find out what works well on his tongue, and I change it as needed.

PAUL SCHRADER: It’s interesting about directing other people’s scripts. I do something that is sort of quasi-unethical, which is I retype the scripts. I change the punctuation, sometimes a little dialogue, sometimes the descriptions. And then I feel like I wrote it. You have to make it yours. When you direct a script, you look at it as a huge problem: “We have this literary event, so how can we rethink it into a visual event?” That shift in thinking, from one side of the brain to the other, is the same whether you wrote it or not.

PETER HYAMS: There’s paper, and then there’s the logistical phenomena that you have to deal with called “filming.” Sometimes things just don’t translate, and you have to make changes: “Well, we have to shoot here because we can’t make a big move during the middle of the day, and the other place that you want so much would require an extra day.” Steven Spielberg can get the extra day. I can’t. So you have to make those accommodations.

NAOMI FONER: My best movie is still Running on Empty, because Sidney Lumet had a clause in his contract that said he could make one movie a year, as long as it was under a certain budget, that was untouched by the studio. If you have some eight-hundred-pound gorilla who can protect you, then your voice onscreen is probably gonna be close to your voice on paper. Sidney treated me the way a playwright is treated in the theater. The actors were given two weeks’ rehearsal—the whole movie, in order, every day—and they were able to voice their opinions about things. Any change that got made, I was involved in making. Such a different process from how most movies are made.

WILLIAM GOLDMAN: George Roy Hill came from the theater, and he loved having that rehearsal time on Butch Cassidy. I mean, we would just sit in his office for hour after hour and talk about this line and music and all kinds of stuff. And we had the actors—we had Newman and Redford and Katharine Ross. It was just the five of us in a huge room. The actors loved being able to talk about scenes they didn’t like, scenes they didn’t feel worked, and get it out of the way in rehearsal. They don’t do that today, and it’s too bad because you can get rid of a lot of shit early.

BRUCE JOEL RUBIN: When we were doing Jacob’s Ladder, Adrian Lyne and I fought continually over the script. He had visions for it that were different from my visions, but he was the director, and he’s also really talented. I had to learn to accept his visions, and we started to have these very strong, very respectful dialogues about how the film should go. He would listen to me, and I would listen to him. In the end, it’s kind of an amalgamation of two different approaches, and in some sense I think the movie benefited from these extraordinary involvements that we had in making the script into the script he wanted to direct.

His rejections of certain parts of the script were very painful for me, particularly the last ten minutes of the movie, which were very much effects-driven. It was essential to me in terms of the theme of the story, but Adrian said to me early on, “I don’t do effects.” I said, “Well, how are we gonna do that sequence?” He said, “We’re not.” I said, “But that’s the core of my movie.” He said, “Find another core.” I never did. We shot the movie without ever getting the ending quite right. But what he created had integrity, which is a very extraordinary thing to have a film contain.

JOSH FRIEDMAN: Working for Steven Spielberg on War of the Worlds was the strangest experience that I’ve had, because you have a hard time reconciling the man who made movies that made you go into the film business with the man on the other side of the phone saying, “Put more cars on the bridge!” There’s a point where he’s just another guy that you’re talking to about what you’re working on, and I think that’s one of the great things about him. He’s such an enthusiastic presence—almost boyish—and it feels like he’s just as happy to be working with you as you are to be working with him. So it’s easy to forget, at least for a while, who he is.

Steven’s kind of like your funny Jewish uncle who you’re happy to have lunch with, and then he gives you a couple little suggestions for your script, and you’re thinking, “Ha, ha, silly Jewish uncle—that can’t work.” And then you start working on the screenplay, and you’re like, “Oh, that’s kinda genius, isn’t it?” That happened a number of times, where he would say, “Why don’t you try this,” and I wouldn’t think, “That was the most revelatory, genius, Zen koan screenwriter moment I’ve had.” And then you start implementing it, and all of a sudden the scene or the sequence opens up in such a way that you’re like, “Wow, I guess he does know what he’s doing. I guess he really is Steven Spielberg. He’s not just my Uncle Steve.”

Josh Friedman

JOHN AUGUST: I’ve been lucky to make three movies now with Tim Burton, and everyone assumes that I must have this amazing relationship with Tim, and that we talk all the time, and we’re close buds. I’ve probably spent a total of twenty-four hours in Tim’s presence over the course of three movies. The way Tim works is he’ll send me something and say, “I wanna do this,” and I’ll say, “Okay,” and I’ll figure out what I think it is he wants. Then I’ll have iced tea with him, usually at his hotel out in Santa Monica. I’ll talk through what I want to do, and he’s like, “Yeah, go do that.” I’ll go and do that, and that sort of becomes the movie. Sometimes there’s some tweaking along the way, but it’s not this talk-through-every-little-plot-point process. It’s been terrific to work on these three movies, and I’m really, really happy about it, but it creates this weird expectation that I must know a lot about what makes Tim work, and what his real goals are as a filmmaker, and what drives him. I don’t. I just hope it drives him to keep making movies that I write.

ROBERT MARK KAMEN: Luc Besson and I have had a great relationship now for sixteen years, through thick and thin. Some of the movies have worked sort of well, some have worked really well—Taken comes out, it’s through the roof, and it’s wonderful. This kind of relationship is completely unusual in the world of cinema.

What happens with a writer and a director is that you’re working for a single purpose, and the purpose is to make the best film you possibly can. If the director trusts the writer, the director will constantly lean on the writer for ideas. He’s sucking everything out of you. He’s a vampire. And then at the end of the film, usually what happens is he doesn’t take your calls, you don’t see each other at dinner, and the free parking space is no longer there. All of a sudden it’s a different relationship, because he’s onto a different film with a different writer.

Luc calls me every day. We don’t even call each other by our names anymore. I call him “Shrek” and he calls me “Donkey,” because that’s basically us—he’s the big green guy who owns the forest, and I chatter. It’s quite wonderful for me, because I look at myself as a smart craftsman, and I look at him as a gifted artist and a great businessman. I’m honored to work with him, and I’m honored that he calls me all the time, even if it’s just to correct the English in dialogue.

Robert Mark Kamen

PAUL SCHRADER: I’ve been very lucky with the collaboration with Scorsese. The reason Marty and I clicked, for those years in the past—and I don’t know if that applies anymore—was that, in essence, we were sort of the same guy. We were short, asthmatic film buffs with a lot of guilt and anger, only he was Italian and urban and Catholic, and I was Dutch and rural and Calvinist. So even though we were the same guy, we each had different elements. When we connected, he took my elements and exploded with them.

That’s just serendipity. You run into somebody who’s in the right creative space, and you inhabit the space together, sometimes for a period of years—or, in rare cases in film history, a period of decades. But, you know, we speak of those collaborations with great fondness because in fact they are so rare. When you think of Wilder and Diamond, or Ozu and his screenwriter, you’re really talking about exceptions to the rule.

If you had asked me two weeks ago if I would work with Marty again, I would have said no, but something has come up where we might work together, although in a different relationship, as producer and director. We’ll see. The truth of the matter is you only make movies with friends when you’re starting out, because after you have some success, everyone moves into their own worlds. When you’re all out there hustling, you run into each other. But after you’re up and running, you’re around the people you’re working with. I try to have dinner once a year with Scorsese, but that’s about it. I’m off making films and writing scripts, he’s off making films and writing scripts, and our paths don’t cross very much.

FRANK DARABONT: I’ve noticed that the best directors often are the ones who recognize everybody’s contribution as valuable, and that’s not just true of the screenwriter. The best directors recognize that the people who have dressed the set or costumed the actors, or the guy slinging the camera from take to take, are just as valuable as anybody on a production. You get that sense of inclusiveness from a really good director. They’re the captain of the ship, but everybody else is in the same boat.

JOHN CARPENTER: I always tell people, “Look, it’s gonna be great. We’ll make this film, but you gotta understand something. There’s gonna be one guy at the very end, standing there with film cans in his hand, and you’re gonna put all your blame on him: It didn’t work because of the director.” They’re gonna blame you. They always do.

MARK D. ROSENTHAL: I was reading scripts for Mark Rydell, who I learned a lot from, and he was very good friends with Sydney Pollack. They had come through the Actors Studio together. They were sitting in Mark’s office at Fox one day. Sydney Pollack had just done Tootsie and Out of Africa, he had won Academy Awards, and he was one of our most important directors. I said to him, “It must get easier for you.” He gave me a look like I was a fool. It’s never easier. Every single movie is just as hard.

Performance Anxiety

PETER HYAMS: If you want obedience, get a puppy. If you want actors to listen to everything you say, get unknown actors. If you are lucky enough to work with film stars, you find there’s a reason why they’re film stars. They tend to be incredibly smart people. Brad Pitt doesn’t strike me as the kind of actor who shows up at seven o’clock in the morning and says, “Where do you want me to stand, boss?” If you’re lucky enough to make a picture with these people, you’re gonna listen to what they have to say, and you’re gonna accommodate a lot of what they have to say—otherwise they don’t want to do the movie.

WILLIAM GOLDMAN: So much of a movie depends on the casting. I remember on Misery, Rob Reiner said he didn’t want a star for the Kathy Bates part. He wanted an unknown. And the reason he wanted an unknown was because there are scenes where she does terrible things to the Jimmy Caan character, and Rob’s feeling was that if you had had a star—if you had had fabulous Meryl Streep—the audience would know she wouldn’t do those terrible things. And so we wanted an unknown person, and we went with Kathy, and she was fabulous. But we could make that decision because Castle Rock was an independent. That’s not a decision the major studios could have afforded to make. Obviously, since Kathy Bates won the Oscar, the part had quality on the printed page. We could have gotten a star. Had it been a studio, they would have insisted, and we would have done it. Maybe the movie would have been wonderful with a star. I don’t know.

JOE FORTE: The star triggers the financing, and therefore you have to create great star roles that will attract that kind of fish. If I were to define technically what a starring role is, it’s that the hero of the movie is impacting every scene. He’s making the plot, from scene one to the end. There’s characterization and all those other things, but what makes it a starring role is that they are the center.

RON SHELTON: Movie stars like to shine. They like to have their movie-star moments. I will sometimes write a speech that I think I’m gonna cut out later, but it’ll attract the movie star. Bull Durham has the famous speech. I wrote it just to get a movie star, and it worked. It’s not my favorite moment in the movie. It’s been quoted, it’s been published: “I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy…. Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone…” Well, it got the right actor. I thought, “I’ll cut that scene.” Everybody loved it, so I kept it—and I was probably wrong, and everybody else was probably right. But I think you have to realize, in trying to write a movie-star part, that it still has to be a good part. It has to be honest, the character motivations all have to be appropriate. But movie stars are bigger than life, and so maybe there’s something bigger than life about that character you write.

JUSTIN ZACKHAM: David Chase wrote a foreword to a compilation of Sopranos scripts, and he was talking about the character of Tony Soprano. He said, “It doesn’t matter if your lead character is good or bad. He just has to be interesting, and he has to be good at what he does.” The first one is obvious, but the second one is not so obvious. If you think about it, all leading characters have something that makes them interesting, and it’s because they’re good at whatever it is they do. They’re great talkers, they’re great firefighters, they’re great whatevers.

Stars aren’t stupid. They wanna play someone who the audience is gonna be attracted to in some way, or repulsed by in some way, as long as that attraction or repulsion is interesting. And then they have to go on a very clear arc of change. It doesn’t have to wrap up neatly, but as actors they wanna be able to show off what they can do.

Change is what drives drama, and change is what causes conflict, so I think if you’re writing a part for a star, come up with something that they’re good at, that we haven’t seen before. “This guy’s the world’s greatest chimney sweep.” Why is that interesting? Why is that real? And let them go through some sort of a transformation that, for better or for worse, is gonna inform their life and give the audience something to think about. For me, that’s the trick.

JAMES L. WHITE: The first job that I got was from Sidney Poitier, who hired me to do a rewrite. Mr. Poitier comes out, all sixteen feet of him—’cause he looked very huge to me—and he says, “James, I understand you have a story to tell me.” So I said, “Yes, sir.” I was so nervous. My mouth was trying to tell the story, but my mind was screaming, “That’s Sidney Poitier over there!” So I started at the rear of the story, went sideways and went that way, went down…. I couldn’t tell a linear pitch. I just couldn’t get it out. Finally, just before I was about to pass out—’cause I had hyperventilated—I said to Mr. Poitier, “I have to stop.” And he said, “Okay, what’s wrong?” I said, “Well, it’s you.” He goes, “What?” I said, “You’ve been a hero of mine all my life, and so here I am sittin’ in the room with you, and I can’t get my story out.” He said, “Take your time. You want some water or something? Don’t worry, you have the job.” Well, I almost passed out then, you know?

ARI B. RUBIN: Sitting down with Robert Redford is an amazing experience. Everybody in a meeting has a different way of expressing himself creatively, and Robert Redford, no surprise, expresses himself by acting. If he has a scene idea, he will act out that idea, and you will literally sit there and watch him do an Oscar-worthy performance of the scene that you have not yet written. So that is a pretty compelling experience.

There’s a lot of intimidation walking into the room. Once everybody’s sitting, and the water’s poured, and the pleasantries are aside, you assume your role. I wear my writer’s hat and he wears his—at that point it was his director’s hat—and that’s what it is. The tension of huge actor sitting in front of you has to fade away, or else you’re not going to survive very long in that room.

Ari B. Rubin

GERALD DiPEGO: Message in a Bottle was one of the few movies that we had actual rehearsal time built in, and a few of the principals were there for the rehearsals. Paul Newman came all the way from New England to be part of this week of rehearsals at Universal Studios. There were some ensemble scenes that they didn’t have enough actors for, because a lot of the actors weren’t cast yet or weren’t available, so I got to play some of those scenes sitting next to Paul. To hear him talking, speaking my lines, and at the same time being in the scene with him and working—it was one of the real thrills.

SHANE BLACK: Movie stars are gonna give you your best ideas, because they’re the opposite of development people. Development people are always saying, “How can the character be more likable?” Meanwhile, the actor’s saying, “I don’t want to be likable.” You know, they give you crazy things like, “I wanna eat spaghetti with my hands.” Crazy’s great. Anything but this sort of likable guy that everyone at the studio insists they should play.

RICHARD WENK: They are thinking purely from one character’s point of view, so there’s a lot of insight that can be gained. You like to have those conversations, and it’s very rare a writer gets to have them. Mos Def came up with a lot of great stuff on 16 Blocks. His life, and where he grew up, and his attitudes toward police, and his reactions to things that might happen to him, brought more depth to that role than what was in the script. Because it’s from him, you know?

MARK FERGUS: First, a great actor will go through the script and black out all the stage direction. You’re like, “But I want you to say that haltingly, so don’t cry.” They don’t want you telling them how to move. Then they will start cutting lines that are emotionally redundant. Great line, great monologue—all gone, because they’ve said it already over here. They’re giving you a gift. They’re showing where you’ve overwritten, where you’ve hit false notes, where you’ve tried to be clever but you’re full of crap. They’re giving you a truth test on your own material.

ANDREW W. MARLOWE: There was this experience on Air Force One, where I’d written this little speech. Harrison came up to me and he said, “It’s a great speech.” I said, “Oh, thank you.” He said, “I’m not gonna do it. All this, I can do with a look.” And he could.

MIKE BINDER: The reason they’re so good is they know what works for them. You gotta listen to them, and you gotta be able to take their knowledge and put it on the paper. You gotta work in their voice.

I’m a big Kevin Costner fan. Loved him in Field of Dreams, loved him in Bull Durham, loved him in Dances with Wolves. When we worked on The Upside of Anger, he would call me up and he’d throw ideas by me. “Couldn’t I be stoned?” That was his idea, and it was a great idea. It just set the whole thing up. He understood how to do this part.

There were scenes that he would want me to rewrite ten, fifteen times—and many times, I would think, “He’s wrong here, but I wanna go way down the street with him and see where we get to.” I wanted to see if maybe he got to territory where he’s right, or else he gives up and says, “Okay, I liked your idea better.” And a lot of times, that would happen. I’d do all these drafts of a monologue, and at the end of the day it was basically the same thing that I was saying, but it was in different words. It was in words that were more comfortable to him.

I never say no. It’s not in my vocabulary to say no to an actor.

JOHN D. BRANCATO: In early discussions about Terminator 3 with Arnold, listening to his feelings about the character, the moments he thought worked the best, what he thought the character was about—that was important, and did help us write. He had a very clear sense of what a Terminator would and wouldn’t do, and that really was useful. That was a unique situation, because when my partner Mike Ferris and I were writing, every line that Arnold’s character was gonna say, we were able to spit out in his voice. There was one that I really liked. I liked giving him the line “nanotechnological transjectors,” which is actually in the final film. Christ, I don’t know how many times he tried to say that, but that was just, in a way, a little bit of asserting screenwriters’ power—to try to have that line in that Austrian accent. “Nanotechnological transjectors.”

MARK D. ROSENTHAL: After the success of the first two Superman movies, Superman III was really a fiasco, and the cast said, “We don’t want to do this anymore.” Christopher Reeve came up with the idea for Superman IV, so we were asked not just to work with Chris’s idea, but to bring the cast back. They all said, “It depends on the script.”

Chris was such a down-to-earth star. I remember when we would walk down Columbus Avenue in New York, people would stop him, and he was warm and friendly to everyone. He had no pretensions. He really loved acting. We wanted to get back that feeling of the first two Superman movies, and we really worked hard with Chris on that. Luckily, our script got the whole cast back, and he was very happy about that. The great test is we got Gene Hackman back as Lex Luthor, which we thought was a triumph.

Unfortunately, Warner Bros. had made a deal with Cannon Films several weeks before preproduction, and they cut the budget in half, which meant all the scenes had to be downscaled. The movie was supposed to open with this giant action sequence, and it got so pared down that when the movie opened, you knew right away it didn’t look right. I think the one sequence in the film that still kind of works is a double date, sort of a farce scene, where both Clark Kent and Superman have a double date with Lois Lane and another character we created, played by Mariel Hemingway. At least you can sort of see what the movie was trying to be.

To watch Chris put himself out there for this movie and have such a terrible product come out at the end was heartbreaking.

Mark D. Rosenthal

ALLISON ANDERS: I had a friend who was one of the most brilliant actresses, Katrin Cartlidge. She was in a lot of Mike Leigh movies, she was in Breaking the Waves. She rejected me for Things Behind the Sun. I wanted her to play my lead character, and she turned me down. She was notorious for turning people down, because she was not careerist. She completely went with, “What character needs me to bring it to life?” And she told me, “Allison, this character doesn’t need me, but I’m gonna tell you exactly who you need to look for, what qualities this person needs to have.” And I found Kim Dickens, based on the stuff that Katrin told me. Sadly, Katrin passed away a couple of years ago, but she was amazing. Whatever character called to her—feature, big money, little money—it didn’t matter. And so I really take that same attitude. She really taught me that. I feel like there are stories that need me to tell them.

The Director’s Perspective: David Dobkin

David Dobkin

NYU-trained filmmaker David Dobkin made commercials and music videos before launching his feature career with the indie thriller Clay Pigeons (1998) and the hit sequel Shanghai Knights (2003). Then came Wedding Crashers (2005), which earned over $200 million at the domestic box office. Subsequently, Dobkin has directed Fred Claus and produced Mr. Woodcock (both 2007).

A Material World

I believe that great writing makes great stories, and great stories make great films. I start from that, so I really don’t move until I trust the material that I have in my hands. I can credit the long, slow boat of my career to being able to build better development skills, because I couldn’t get my hands on the material I thought was really great. There’s a totem pole in Hollywood, for sure, about who they want to entrust certain material to. The more successful you are with your films financially, the more access you have to better material. It’s like anything—if you were going to hire someone to build your house, you’d probably hire the guy who built the house that you really like, or that came in on budget.

I usually get screenplays that need work. It’s something that they want to get going, and it needs a director’s vision to focus it into what it’s gonna be. Then you go out and get talent from there. A lot of times, there’s already a start date. The danger with doing that before the material is ready is that you’re fighting with everyone for the talent pool in Hollywood, which is not enormous. There are a lot of great actors, but there aren’t a lot of movie stars. Once in a while, I have talent that’s attached, and they send me the screenplay. That’s been a new kind of treat—to be able to get a piece of material with an actor attached—so when you’re reading it you’re visualizing them in a role. You’re able to look at it and go, “I see their voice in it,” or “I don’t see their voice in it.”

A director can read something and be like, “God, this is gonna be a great movie—but it’s not what I want to direct.” Something happens when you read something you want to make. I immediately start storyboarding in the margins as I’m reading. I’ll start making notes for adjustments to a character, or ideas for new scenes. It happens very organically—either the material starts to pull you into it or it doesn’t.

Powerful male bonds always played a really big part in my life. I’m someone who didn’t kiss a girl until I was seventeen years old, didn’t have a girlfriend till my senior year in high school. I was a late bloomer, so my friendships with guys filled in for that kind of energy. My first girlfriend kind of broke my heart, and it was really my friends who helped me pull it together. With Wedding Crashers, I had the opportunity to explore the difficulty that I experienced when my friends got into relationships and all of a sudden part of their emotionality became absent from our friendship.

Nuptial Bliss

For the first time as a director, I found out what the power of telling your own story through a film is—you find a piece of material that lines up with you, and everything starts to resonate at a whole different level. Wedding Crashers was the first time I decided I was going to tell my own story in a movie.

I kind of found the coming-of-age story for thirty-five-year-old men, which was my age at the time, and Owen Wilson’s and Vince Vaughn’s as well. There were scenes and adjustments inside scenes that I brought to the writers, and we created together. The characters sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, with Vince saying, “We’ll look back on this and say we were young and stupid,” and Owen saying, “We’re not really young anymore”—that was something I actually used to do with my best friend in Washington, D.C., at the end of a long night. I felt that would let the audience understand that Owen was outgrowing this lifestyle.

I added the love-at-first-sight moment with Rachel McAdams so we understood that Owen had an emotional connection. That colors everything in the second act—we understand what his goal is. I added a thing in the beginning where Vince says to his secretary, about Owen, that he’s always looked over him, like a little brother in a way; he believes he’s holding up his friend, and Owen believes he’s holding up his friend. Those were kind of the first contributions to an emotional arc.

Then there was a process with the actors, especially with Vince and Owen, who are both writers. Through a writing/rehearsal/improvisation process, we would work through character intentions and dialogue and stuff like that, and oftentimes come back to about 80 percent of what the screenplay was—with 20 percent of new amazing stuff. You know, Owen said to me very early on, “I think it’d be funny if we go crash funerals.” That was his idea. We didn’t know where that was gonna go in the movie. Then I realized I needed a bottoming-out moment—an all-is-lost moment for him emotionally. I said, “Hey, I think the funeral could be here.”

That sequence was created in a room with Owen writing and riffing, and me kind of being editor to his writing.

Respecting the Writer

I’m a Shakespeare guy. I learned to direct actors through Shakespeare, and Shakespeare’s writing is perfect. All the characters are psychologically sound, they’re making the right decisions for the right reasons, and they’re saying lines that you wouldn’t change. So the job for me and the actors, when we’re doing Shakespeare, is to discover the writer’s intentions—and if we’re not understanding it, we keep workshop-ping stuff until we understand it. But you don’t go changing the lines.

In Hollywood, people come in and they wanna change everything. It’s almost like they want it to become their own voice—which for some people is very important. It’s important for Vince to be in his own voice. You want to see that happen in the process. But not everybody has that. A lot of the time, you want to see the actor become the character.

I do long rehearsal processes, and I want people to find the writing before we go changing things. I like to get the screenplay solid enough that people can come in and participate without it being turned upside down. We’ll make small changes on set as we’re shooting, but we improvise on the page, you know what I mean? It’s like, “Find your way into it, then change a few words here and there.” But I really like to stick to the writing, because I know what’s there. A lot of people just change and change and change, thinking there’s always something better. If it’s coming from the writer, I trust it. If it’s coming from everybody else, I tend to get a little bit concerned.

I believe in the original writer. I really don’t like replacing writers, and I don’t think I’ve ever consciously been the person to pull the trigger on that. I’ll roll up my sleeves and get in the mud and go to hell and back with them. I’d rather get in that journey and see what it is. Sometimes the original writer gets burnt out. And by the way, I have many times seen the original writer step off, and someone else comes in, and the original writer comes back and finishes it. What I usually tell somebody, if they’re being replaced for a stage of the project, is that this is your baby. Your name’s always gonna be on it. These are your characters.

It’s part of the process in Hollywood. You shouldn’t take it personally, because there isn’t a major writer in Hollywood that this hasn’t happened to. Hollywood tends to need things on a timetable, and if somebody isn’t juicing those ideas, there’s not always a lot of time for them to gestate. That’s a lot of the reason why different people with different ideas come in.

I don’t think it’s always necessarily a disbelief in a writer, or a disbelief in their ability to get it all the way there, but sometimes it is. By the way, people can have great ideas but not be able to execute them. You see it with directors all the time, and you see it with writers all the time.

The Collaborative Process

Writing is a very isolated, lonely experience, and then your writing goes out to people, and either it worked, or it didn’t work, or it kinda worked. It’s the same thing as a director, when you put your movie out in front of people. It’s a nerve-racking experience to go through. But, you know, get over it. It’s like shooting free throws—you’re gonna miss and miss and miss, and then you’re gonna start hitting, and you’ll hit more often the more you do it.

I like people who are really open, and who understand what their strengths and their weaknesses are. I like people who are good listeners. Listening is a huge thing. I listen very carefully to the writer, and I hope the writer listens carefully to me. I listen to my actors. The actors listen to the writer and the director, and the producers are there to help coach everybody.

The more collaborative people are, the better it is to work with them. You want to have a good experience. Some people can get very defensive and insecure, and that’s okay. A lot of people are defensive and insecure and talented. But it’s harder for me, personally, to work with people like that.

When you’re looking for movies to do, you meet with the people whose writing you love, and you hopefully build relationships with some of them. You try to hire the people you think have the right voices, or people that you know would be excited to have an opportunity to do something different. We meet, and hopefully the writer has the same vision of the movie that I have. It’s a little bit of a two-way street. I say, “This is what I’m trying to do,” and they have an idea of how to help me get there. Or else they have their own vision of it, and I have to see if that’s somewhere I want to go.