Rewrites & drafts

Paul Davis

which he did write a first draft screenplay when Polygram was sold by Peter Guber and John Peters in the early 90s. I can't remember the name of the guy who took over, but he came to John and asked him to write a sequel. And John deliberated about it. He thought about it for a long time, didn't really have anything that was significant

50:28 · jump to transcript →

Now, he wasn't going to be a preacher, was he, in your first... No, in the first draft he was a psychiatrist. A psychiatrist and a film buff, if I remember. He had posters up. Did he not? Yeah, and we had lunch that day. Here she comes, dynamite. He had done Equus on Broadway and just played the psychiatrist, so he came up with the concept of the preacher. Well, I'd seen, since I was in America...

9:12 · jump to transcript →

for the rights of other nerds. I mean... As Steve and Jeff said, you know, substitute nerd for I'm gay. Yeah. I'm black. That was always the... I'm short, I'm tall, I'm anything. Yeah. I think we both wrote our own speeches. Yeah, I remember some rewriting going through here. That's not at all the way it's written in the script. And the script only has three pages in it, folks. I'm a nerd.

1:23:12 · jump to transcript →

technical jargon. And I would go with the script lady and rewrite the whole paragraphs and get her to type it up and then get the director to give it to him just before the take and say, oh, we have these changes. And watch Desmond. So the panic would come into his face. And then we'd have to say quickly, no, no, it's a joke.

14:47 · jump to transcript →

James Cameron

This is Jim Cameron. I wrote and directed this film back in '83, and directed it in '85 through '86. It was released in the summer of '86. July 17th, if I'm not mistaken. It started as a treatment. I was having a meeting with David Giler and Walter Hill, talking about another project, and that pitch was not going very well. I could tell by their sagging expressions that they didn't like any of my ideas. But they had read my 7erminator script and wanted to work with me on something. I was getting up and making my way toward the door and David Giler, one of the producers of the first film, said "We do have this other thing", and I said "What's that?" He said "Alien 2." And all the pinball machine lights and bells went off inside my head but I maintained a straight face and said "That could be interesting." And I suggested that I write a quick treatment, a quick outline, just to give them an idea of what I might do with it. So I raced home and stayed up for three days straight, drank about eight pots of coffee and wrote a 40- or 50-page treatment. Really what I did was I adapted a story I had already written, which was called Mother, which was an "alien on a space station" kind of story. It had the power loader machine in it. I had written this treatment a few months earlier. So I adapted it, dropped Sigourney's character and a bunch of marines into it, and in that one quick stroke created all the character names - Gorman and Hicks and Vasquez and all those folks - and dropped it on them a couple of days later. I think they felt like they'd hit the jackpot. That was the film they wanted to make. So they authorized me to go ahead and start writing the script. The problem was, that day I landed the job to write the script for the second Rambo film. So I called them up and asked David Giler what I should do. And he said "Don't be stupid. Take both jobs." So I took both jobs. I also had to do a rewrite of my 7erminator script to start production in February, so I had a three-month period where I had to write three scripts. So I decided that each script was gonna be two hours long, so it'd be 120 pages. So I figured out the total page count, whatever that is - I guess 360 pages. I divided the total number of waking hours I had during that three-month period by 360 and figured out how many pages per hour I had to write, and then I just wrote that many pages per hour.

0:04 · jump to transcript →

Well, yeah, I mean, it's not like Fast and the Furious, but, you know. Exactly. Those are things, I mean, what they've done with special effects is rewrite the laws of physics so they don't apply, so that things have, things happen in action sequences that could not possibly happen just in terms of the weight and speed of things. Yeah, it's just kind of funny. I remember, like, when this hit, blockbuster video, you know, you walk in, you run a movie called My Best Friend is a Vampire. You don't expect to see this big.

54:28 · jump to transcript →

Lea Thompson

And the idea of the scene, teaching him how to kiss the girl that she would like to see not living on the planet Earth, is pretty unique. And John wrote it, I remember... After the script was completed, we were doing rewrites and he said, "You know what? We need another scene. We need a scene." And he just started writing this, and it was done in... I don't know. You know, five minutes, and... It's a great idea. - I read it and went, "Oh, my God. This is so much fun, but also, underneath, so poignant."

57:30 · jump to transcript →

Macaulay Culkin

I love how the family never finds out all that stuff he did. It's true. - They never-- They have no idea what he did. Well, may-- We miss between the two movies. I'm sure he talked about Harry and Marv. - Maybe. Maybe they don't believe him. - I don't-- Exactly. But there was that sequence at the beginning of the second one... ...where it was me cleaning up the house. Oh, that's right. - At, like... Cleaning up the Micro Machines... - Right. And stuff like that. Yeah. Now, in the original script, this did not exist. Oh, the tooth. - No, none otf it. The movie ended with, "Just hung around." - Oh, really? Laughter, freeze-frame, boom. Home Alone. Marley, now I'm convinced, was an added character. And we added him throughout the course of rewriting the script. To me it solidifies the movie, you know? - It worked. Yeah. It really solidifies the point of the movie. - It'd be a different movie. And coming up is my favorite shot in the film. That was when he looks over? - No, your close-up as you're... And then Buzz yelling. But I do remember talking you through this scene... ...because I was off camera telling you to think about something that was happy. I can't even remember what I was telling you to think about... ...but I was trying to make you laugh or think something happy. But your performance is so good there. It's so genuine, and.... Oh. It just really works.

1:37:08 · jump to transcript →

Off his script. Yeah, or a combination. A combination, yeah. Yeah, the prison planet was an idea early on. Was it Eric Redd? I can't remember who came up with it. Or was it Giler who came up with it? I can't remember who came up with it. But yeah, so yeah, it's an amalgamation really, isn't it? They seem to have taken the worst aspects of all the possibilities and slammed them together and then decided, actually, no, let's rewrite the script on a daily basis anyway. Yeah. But if you look at the teaser trailer for Alien 3...

13:03 · jump to transcript →

but I love it, it was a total stranger pitching me. And this is, we had a great writer, Jonathan Lemkin, who came in for a production rewrite. He came up with that joke of him cussing and using the paper's toilet paper, which I thought was a great, I love when a rewriter actually improves my stuff instead of trying to change it, and that was a great example. Now, this is also very precedent. This is about the chips installing machines

39:33 · jump to transcript →

Well, except Chloe, right? I mean, Chloe was the only one that we had to... That's true. Because we had to test it. And that was the weirdest part about that process, right? It was the first time we had to kind of create this faux score, right? But I think that's a lot of the time why my scores for you are very original and fresh and very, very identified with the film. Because I'm not replacing something else that's there. But having to rewrite the field theme...

29:52 · jump to transcript →

when I read the screenplay, the very first draft of the screenplay, and this is the Eric Roth screenplay, because there were many screenplays prior to that that were done over many years. I just kept turning the page to see what was gonna happen next. I mean, I had no real desire or compulsion to make a movie about a guy with a low IQ. It seemed to be the right character, and I kept wanting to know what was gonna happen to this character.

0:28 · jump to transcript →

I mean, I was lucky, yes, but, and fortunate, but to have an editor as good as Steve Rosenblum was to really bring his own thing to it. I mean, he took what I gave him and he managed to sort of make it better, you know, which is, when it comes right down to it, the edit's just the final rewrite. And he's a master of it.

2:03:35 · jump to transcript →

This idea about the bullet on the roof - it's a little bit later - it was an idea from the first version of The City of Lost Children. We didn't use it. I don't remember. In fact, it was a very good pool player, and he used a gun to kill the people, shooting on the roof exactly like this. I used this idea on this film. Yeah, but you didn't shoot it. No. It was in the first draft. Suddenly I thought I was going crazy. The weapons were based on existing ones. I remember leafing through encyclopedias of guns, which were given to me by Steve Cooper, art director. I guess somebody thought "We'll get around to the weapons." Actually, I jumped off the storyboard on to the weapons because panic was setting in. People were saying we needed to get them going. So Steve Cooper brought in all these volumes of books on handguns, rifles, whatnot. I started doing little sketches one afternoon. I think I did one page with eight or nine guns, and out of that one page almost everything came out. We showed them to Nigel and he said "Why don't you expand that one?" Then we started detailing them, and then finding ways to stick them into the wheelchair wherever possible. This was great, cos Tom would always play the hero alien. We had Mark Viniello in one of the other suits, and David Prior was in another one, but Jean-Pierre wanted to keep Tom as the main performer. That was that torso we made with all the guts and the... That's self-explanatory, isn't it? This was a neat effect. This was a prerigged floor with an elevator that would lower all the guts and so on. It would appear as if the thing was melting, but it was a simple little rig. See? They never learn in these movies, do they?

38:37 · jump to transcript →

Taylor Hackford

We rehearsed this scene for about a week. It was the one, I must say... ...for Warner Bros., a great thing they did for me. And although we had our differences, I was able to get my vision on the screen. I have no excuses. So, I do thank them. There was a great thing here in that Warner Bros. allowed us... ...to come back from New York. We built this set in Los Angeles. I had a week to prepare the set, to light it and to rehearse with the actors. Al, Keanu and Connie and myself, worked there alone... ...and really kind of built this scene. Tony Gilroy was there also, pardon me. It is not an easy scene to do when you realize it's basically a monologue. How do you keep it moving? How do you keep it visual? And it's basically a confrontation. And again, as I said... ...I want the devil to be confronting us. We all take credit for the things that we do in life that are good. When it's a good decision, "I made that decision. I'll take credit for that." But when they're wrong, we look for people to blame. That's exactly what Keanu is doing here, and Al won't have any of it. Milton is basically saying to him, "Hey. You made every decision yourself. "In fact, I told you not to. I said take care of your wife." I mean, I love the argument. And this is what we were trying to do. I give a lot of credit to my collaborative partner, Tony Gilroy, on this project... ...because this piece was a script that existed with a lot of special effects... ...and not many ideas, and it wasn't worth making. And every Hollywood star turned it down. Al Pacino turned it down five times. What we did with this script, from a page one rewrite... ...is try to give it some ideas, try to make it about free will. Not make it a special effects piece, a ghoul piece, a monster piece... ...but make it about something. Not just about lawyers... ...because lawyers are convenient and they happen to be a major target... ...and I think are the most pragmatic of all professions. However, all professionals find themselves in a position to blame... ...or be able to use their corporate entity, their boss, their organization... ...their professional oath as a screen against having to confront... ...moral realities, personal choices. If you can say "My personal, professional oath," pardon me, not my... "My professional oath says that I'm absolved from responsibility... "...because I have to represent my client to the best of my ability." Or, "My corporation says I need to do this, pollute this lake, and I'm doing it." It absolves you of your personal, moral responsibility. What this whole scene is about is confronting your own hypocrisy... ...and saying your ambition, your own vanity, in a world that's fiber-optically... ...interconnected to satisfy our every eager impulse, "You," meaning, "You humans"... ...as Milton says, "are exactly... "I've succeeded beyond my wildest dreams just by letting you do what you want. "You're so selfish. You're so self-involved." So that's what this scene is about. Kevin realizes that it's true... ...he was responsible for Mary Ann's demise... ...and when he does, he falls apart. Now watch Milton. He starts picking him up. He starts trying to say: "Hey, you know, think of it in a positive way. You have to think of yourself. "She wasn't up to you. Here's a woman who is. She's fantastic. "She happens to be your sister, but so what? She's beautiful. "She's smart. She's intelligent. You know, there's something more for you." And I think at this point, when confronted with the fact that he knows it's the devil... ...and now what Milton is gonna do, is talk about... You know, remember, Keanu is half and half. He's half Judy Ivey. He's half Al Pacino. He's half Alice Lomax. He's half John Milton. He's half God and half the devil, and this is relating to a lot of us. We all have our good side, our bad side. In this particular instance, this next sequence is, I think, really interesting... ...because Al Pacino is basically talking about his father. He's talking about his former boss. He's his own boss now. But if you think of Lucifer, the fallen angel... ...the brightest, the most honored and the most... ...you know, he was God's favorite... ...being thrown out of heaven because of ego, because he didn't want to take orders. That's what Pacino's doing here. Look. He's angry. He's losing control.

2:00:18 · jump to transcript →

He just shifts in his... His shirt, as you can see, is kind of Cuban. I just noticed now. I just noticed right now. He's wearing sort of a... Yeah, that's it. That was a controversial... Well, again, there we go, yeah. That was very good. Yeah, very good. And I remember we had to rewrite it because we'd originally said New York and then we had this journey and then...

45:14 · jump to transcript →

One of the things that we began talking about, you know, early with... ...the screenwriter Seaman and Price... ...later with the guys who came in and did the rewrite, Berg, Schaefer and Mandel... ...with Jim, with Rick Baker, Brian Grazer and I talking about it... ...was just trying to get the tone. It really needed to be a live-action cartoon, and yet... ...you know, I also hoped that audiences would connect with these characters... ...as they would any human character.

37:23 · jump to transcript →

Jonathan Lynn

And the jokes with the tulip here I asked Mitchell to put in on the very first rewrite as part of several places where I wanted to boost Bruce's character and give him some more laughs. This scene was originally going to be shot in a little cobbled street in the old town. We couldn't afford to go there because all the shop owners got together and...

13:15 · jump to transcript →

Stealing from tombs has worked out very well for the O'Connells because they have a hell of a house. Brendan's going to laugh at this, but when he read, Brendan read the first draft, I think one of the things he said was, you know, I don't think we would spend our money on a, you know, big, beautiful house. Couldn't we just have some sort of, like, eccentric flat of some sort, you know, some apartment? And he was pretty...

23:46 · jump to transcript →

Michelle asked me if I would rewrite her monologue using, what, 25%? Is that what you said? Yeah. 25% of actual stuff that she says in the Velveteen Rabbit monologue so that we can cut away from her when she's not saying what we have on film. And he thought I would be excited by the challenge, and I was, and I did it. It was like 15 minutes, I think. Yeah, I know. And it became, people really love this scene.

52:34 · jump to transcript →

One other interesting note about this scene, that is a real keg with real beer, and Jacob Pitts, our delightful Cooper, really liked these scenes a lot. It's what we like to call method acting. That's one of the things we learned. Or simply drinking. - Aren't they the same? I guess we should introduce our cast, now that you've been watching for ten minutes. Scotty Mechlowicz as Scott Thomas. - Which is why we cast him. Make it very easy on ourselves. The beautiful and talented Michelle Trachtenberg as Jenny. And Travis Wester is her twin, Jamie. And that's Jacob Pitts going off to take a leak. And this was another one of our delightful cameos that we got because we were in Prague. Yep, that's Matt Damon, which... Everyone in the theater sort of goes, "It can't be. Is it? Is it really?" Why is his head shaved? He was actually in Prague shooting Brothers Grimm for Terry Gilliam at the time. And we actually went to college with Matt years ago. So we've been sort of friendly ever since. And he was in Prague and we asked him to do a day of work for us, and he agreed. The biggest favor ever. - Thank you, thank you, thank you, Matt. Yeah, Matt's just hilarious here. Matt's not watching this DVD. We're going to make him watch it. That'll be another commentary. That would be the biggest favor he's ever done. But the band was actually started by some other friends of ours from college. I guess this is as good a time as any... A couple of them were of Matt Damon's roommates in college. The band Lustra... - One of them. The band Lustra, good guys. And they wrote the song, which is really fun. We've known each other since college. I'm going to just talk now 'cause no one's listening to what I'm saying, because there's a naked girl on the screen. I wasn't listening. What were you talking about? Now this, in the unrated version that we're watching, she started off topless. In the theatrical release, if you saw it, we actually cut a different version where she started off with her top on and Cooper talks her out of her top. - He convinced her to take it off. And it was very strange, sort of, when you get into this whole nudity thing. Obviously, it's a hot tub scene, but somehow when her top was on and he talked her out of it, while it was a very exciting moment that he talked her out of it, it oddly made her dumber, even though she is sort of a stereotypical dumb blonde. - Right. And we always liked it this way, the way you're seeing it. We liked the scene to answer the question, "What is beyond gratuitous?" That's the answer. - There it is. And there they are. The answers. The other stuff we added back into the scene is just more of him screwing around with her. Because, to us, once you're at the nudity, it's how far he goes. This scene... - It's not about nudity. No, this scene was always about the crazy extent to which he got her to play with herself, as opposed to just getting her to take her top off. By the way, the banner in the background originally... This is what happens when you work in Prague. It's a big congratulations banner. The first day when we got there, it just said "congratulation," like one singular congratulation, which is a word we didn't know existed. Sort of a funny story about this scene, which, hopefully, we can tell. We were actually rewriting another movie, which I guess we'll leave nameless, that had a hot tub scene in it and we came up with this idea, which was the fact that a guy saying, "You have a smudge. You've got something on you." And we were really enjoying what we were doing so much that we didn't put it in that script. And we're like, "We'll use it one day." And here it is. Screw it. The movie was called Out Co/d, I think. Yeah, exactly.

7:55 · jump to transcript →

Noah Baumbach

And Bill's reading one of your actual notebooks. Yes, the notebooks in this-- Jane's notebooks are modeled on the notebooks that these movies are written in. So The Life Aquatic is-- Originally, while we would sit here talking, I would write everything down in longhand in these notebooks like this, then take it home and type it up, then bring in the pages next day, then we'd write more in the notebook, more on the pages. That's what the notebook-- I mean, I guess it's worth noting that the way we write these things or not, we don't both do separate scenes and then bring them in together and try and sort of edit them or anything. We actually come up with everything together in the room. I mean, stuff is done later in rewriting or when you're directing and stuff, but... You know, it is a... We make the story sitting here together. Yeah, in Jane's notebooks. - Yeah, in Jane's notebooks. Why don't we talk about some of the people who work on these films? Maybe we start with Robert Yeoman, the cinematographer. He shot all my films, Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and Royal Tenenbaums, as well as your most recent film. The Squid and the Whale, yeah. Yeah, from my perspective, I tried to hire Bob for the first movie I did, Kicking & Screaming, and... Only to hear later that he was shooting a movie called Bottle Rocket by some neophyte Texan writer, director, actors. Yeah, I think we both probably responded strongly to Drugstore Cowboy, which was a film Bob had shot. - Right. And, you know, Bob, he lights his movies, he's drawn to very natural lighting, and I feel like he's sort of a Nestor Almendros kind of... His style of director of photography. He's also a very good operator, camera operator. He's great at hand-holding and he knows how to get the image. And he's tireless too. This is probably a good-- Now we're underwater, in the underwater forest, a good time to talk about Mark Friedberg. And you did this in a tank in Cinecittà? Yes, this is in a tank, where we built this undersea forest, and it was very difficult to do. It's hard to keep the water clean, hard to get the temperature right. You've got to build the whole thing, and the set starts to disintegrate. It's very complicated, but a bizarrely exciting thing to film. You know, it's just a crazy experience. And, you know, it's very-- It's-- You know, it looks fake and... It's fake to X degree, and not fake to some other degree, although it's pretty fake. And the thing we liked the most here was we took a scene that could be staged in a broom closet somewhere or in somebody's living room, but we just put the scene at the bottom of the ocean, where they have to push buttons to say each sentence. It's just really a scene about, "Can I call you 'Dad'?" And, "No, you can't." Yeah, I think maybe we'd initially written this scene on deck-- - On land. Yeah. - And then... Then we decided to go underwater with it. It's also a scene where we sort of, you know, where Zissou manipulates-- We get to see Zissou sort of first-hand manipulate the reality of his film. Yes, we see how it works. We're restaging.

52:14 · jump to transcript →

James McTeigue

I wanted it to be like a fascist state but more about... ... how people live now. About more how... ... society is, and politic is... ...and people are controlled by capitalism. It's not about beating people into submission anymore. I think everyone's worked out that those manifestos don't work. Today, I think a dystopic vision... ...lncludes something more like, you know... ...material comfort, sort of, you know... ...quelling your desire to speak out against injustice, or something. It's more like an Iran totalitarian society... ... than a Soviet Union totalitarian society. You do have the creature comforts. Maybe your choice is limited. But it's not about being beaten into submission. It's about being complicit. He should conclude that the New Bailey will become the symbol of our time... ...and the future that our conviction has rewarded us. Mr. Heyer. Our surveillance cameras captured several images of the terrorist... ... though the mask obviously makes retinal identification impossible. We also managed to get a picture of the girl that Creedy's men were detaining. Who is she, Mr. Finch? - Not sure yet, sir. But we're working on several leads. - Anything else? We located the fireworks launch... ...and found traces of the explosives used at both sites. Unfortunately it appears that despite the heavy level of sophistication... ... these devices were homemade with over-the-counter chemicals... ...making them very difficult to trace. Whoever he is, chancellor, he's very good. Spare us your professional annotations, Mr. Finch. They are irrelevant. Apologies, chancellor. Gentlemen, this is a test. Moments such as these are matters of faith. To fail is to invite doubt into everything we believe... ...everything we have fought for. Doubt will plunge this country back into chaos, and I will not let that happen. Gentlemen, I want this terrorist found... ...and I want him to understand what terror really means. England prevails. England prevails. TV is so ubiquitous, you know. I mean, it's everywhere. You can't escape it. Part of it is a bastardization of what happened in the novel. There is, like, a TV station siege. Then, I think it's pretty obvious... ... that, you know, capitalism has won out, everywhere. Part of your social strata in some countries... ... 1S how big your TV is and how many TVs you've got. That's a way of disseminating information. And whether that information is right or wrong or it's bad or it's good... .or it's true or it's untrue. I think that's what I was trying to get at. It's also a part of the, obviously, part of the system of control. You have a government broadcasting station and it seems to be the only one. I mean, I can't remember. I might be wrong. But it seems like it's the only station that everyone.... And then you see everyone watching that very station... ...and Evey's working at it. And Deitrich is ready for his tea. I don't get it. Why does he wear a Guy Fawkes mask? Didn't Fawkes try to blow up Parliament? It's not too late. He's still got another 16 hours. Maybe he's just getting started. Yeah? Okay. A lead on the girl. Look, don't get me wrong, I love it. A cow getting crucified. It's hysterical. But you'll never get it approved. You've got to rewrite it, okay? Gotta go. I don't recall getting stood up by a more attractive woman. Mr. Deitrich... - Gordon, please. I don't need "mister" to make this body feel any older. Gordon... ...I was on my way last night, but there were Fingermen... ...and I got scared and went home. Sadly, after last night, I think our curfew will only get worse.

11:00 · jump to transcript →

John Cameron Mitchell

Photography, beautiful shots from the window. And this scene was done afterwards? We reshot the scene because we didn't have much time to do it on the day, and we wanted to do a little rewriting. Also, we had a lot of airplanes going overhead, which whenever Paul had an emotional scene, there was a plane. And we shot this in our friend's Heath...

1:16:30 · jump to transcript →