This week’s episode is a special one. Eric Roth won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1994. He’s written the scripts for movies like Dune, Forrest Gump, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — and worked with directors like Spielberg and Scorsese.
Some highlights from our conversation:
God is in the details.
If the details aren’t vivid, the story won’t succeed.
If you get writer’s block, try changing the weather in your story.
Don't try to make your characters likable. Try to make them understandable. Great villain characters aren't great because we like them, but because we understand what makes them tick.
For major characters, you should have a clear answer to: What makes them tick?
A good movie is more than just a story. It has to be about something. When writing, ask yourself: What's this story really about? The writing gets easier once you have a clear theme.
The time of day in a scene should match the content.
Great writing lives in the subtext. The most sophisticated writers don’t explain things too directly. Communicating through subtlety lets you achieve more with your words. You can convey information, share a lesson for life, and give the audience something to make sense of for themselves.
Dialogue can't just fill space. It has to carry weight. Every interaction has to move the story along. Avoid Shoe Leather (which is when you have an unnecessary scene where people are walking around in a way that doesn’t develop the story or the characters).
The first time you write something, it won't be right. That's just how it is. The work of writing something great happens in the rewriting.
Every screenplay will follow a 3-Act Structure. You can't escape it. The first act will state the problem, the second act will complicate it, and the third act will or will not resolve it.
End each writing day with a scene you like so you don't have to worry about it over night.
"I start on page one every day." Reading the whole screenplay from scratch is how he stays close to the material and keeps the entire story consistent.
Transcript
David [00:00 - 00:06]: You said you were writing today, and you're still writing every day from page one.
Eric [00:06 - 00:13]: From page one? Well, yes. Sometimes I do not touch page one, but I always start from page one.
David [00:13 - 01:00]: Tell me about that. Tell me about erosion.
Eric [00:14 - 00:59]: It is a way of keeping myself involved with the material where I am living it. I call it a sense of erosion. If there are things that need to be fixed and backfills, like dirt piled back up, I can see that. I see mistakes. When I am done with my first draft, which could take a while, I think I have covered it pretty much. After I read it, I hate it, and then I say, "Why did I bother doing this?" But I start on page one every day.
Well, it is probably not the right word for it, but it is like trying to shore up what is kind of falling down. That is how I look at it. Why is this not quite working? How do I make this as imaginative as it can be? How do I make it fresh, something surprising, the things you want to have in anything you write? When I see something that feels tired, I want to make it feel alive.
David [01:34 - 01:47]: Do you ever find that when you are writing it for the first time, you are sparkling with enthusiasm, and then you come back to the end, and it loses that life? Or do you feel like you intuitively know now when something has life?
Eric [01:48 - 02:55]: I think I have always felt that I knew what had life. I do not know what that is. I have never had writer's block. I love that I get to write, so every day is an adventure in that sense. It is almost corny that I can be a journalist one day and a prose writer the next. I think I am probably a frustrated novelist because I have not written a novel, but I write a lot of prose in my screenplays.
I always tell this cute story: we were doing a movie, Benjamin Button, and they were doing a read-through. They were reading the narration, which was text, and Brad Pitt said, "Oh, look at Eric, he's got a prose boner". I probably did. That is a story I have told many times, but I have always gotten a kick out of it. I am, I think, a frustrated novelist. It is a little more difficult now because if you are going to write a lot of prose, the scripts are probably going to be longer than people want to see. To be concise is also difficult, maybe even more difficult.
David [02:56 - 03:06]: How do your scripts compare to other screenwriters' scripts? When you turn something in, and people say, "Oh, that's an Eric script," what does it have about it?
Eric [03:06 - 05:02]: I do not know. You would probably have to ask somebody else what they find attractive or not attractive about it. Many do not get made either. I think I am particularly visual. More importantly, I think my scripts are particularly human and very emotional. All the characters are singular to themselves. I believed a long time ago that you have to be true to the psychology of a character so that the voices are all different.
I always tell this story too: I did a rewrite for a movie that Michael Cimino made called The Year of the Dragon, which was an okay and interesting movie. I saw that he had given Mickey Rourke a wallet that had all the stuff about this particular character's life. I am sure Mickey Rourke never looked at the wallet, but he knew in his back pocket was a picture of his supposed daughter. Some things were obvious, some things less obvious, maybe a saying he thought was interesting and put in there, or an old crumpled phone number. But something that as an aggregate, you form a life. If you are trying, whether novelist, poet, or anybody, you are trying to make something out of nothing.
In my case, I mostly do adaptations. Even though I think a good 60-70% of the adaptations I do become original, it is only because either bad books make good movies — that is a slogan — or bad plays make better movies. Adaptations, I think, give you something to look back at. Even if it is not very good.
David [05:03 - 05:11]: Tell me this, we have a lot to talk about here, but I want to jump back to the psychology you are talking about. True to the psychology of the character. Paint that picture for me. What do you mean?
Eric [05:11 - 05:53]: I think you have to know something about his backstory, something of hers, what makes this person tick. Why are they neurotic, or why are they giddy, or why are they quiet, or what makes them angry? You do it as concisely as you can within the thing, but everybody should be different. Everybody is different. So you can find some pretty unique characters within my scripts, I hope. Obviously, great writers' stuff comes with surprises and curiosity.
David [05:53 - 06:09]: If I think of something like Forrest Gump, I think of his voice, his relationships, his dress, always very simple, the simple wisdom of the character. So what else is it as you are building a character and beginning to create that?
Eric [06:09 - 07:34]: With that character, that was from a book, so it was semi-given, even though the book was particularly farcical. The guy is supposed to weigh 400 pounds. I got to take off and kind of. It was as much about me looking back on my life from that point, when I was probably 50, at what had passed. That started to resonate with people who wanted to see the movie because it was all these touchstone moments in all of our lives at that point.
I was aware of that. Time is very important to me. Time is of the essence, in a way, and memories and remembrances. But that character I knew less of, but I somehow could hear his voice. So I knew, in a simplistic way, because it is a very simplistic movie, it is not high sophistication, but he seemed human to people. He had two or three things he loved, like his mother, his girlfriend, Jenny, and I guess, God in America or something. Quentin Tarantino said that he felt it was the most ironic mainstream movie ever made. Whether it is or not, I do not know.
David [07:34 - 07:35]: But why is that?
Eric [07:35 - 08:07]: The ironies are like, he gets to go to the White House and he meets John Kennedy. Bob added some humor, wonderful humor. Bob Zemeckis is a terrific guy and a terrific artist. You have a picture of Marilyn Monroe in the bathroom, or whatever. I call them ironies. Maybe they are not quite. Maybe they are ironic. Some of it is just how everybody got shot. He would do those kinds of runs with a movie.
David [08:07 - 08:25]: Like Forrest and even Benjamin Button. One takes place in Alabama, the other New Orleans. How do you get that sense of the Southern accent, the Southern way of speaking? Is that something that you deliberately research?
Eric [08:25 - 09:31]: I research a lot. The best thing that ever happened was the Internet. I have sheds filled with research books in the backyard here from before there was an Internet. But I do not know, it is just a sound you get. I think it is also the characters, and the actors obviously can portray them in a Southern way. I never thought of it that way. I just thought that these people are Southerners. I do not know if I even know that much about the South, particularly more so in a movie.
I am just finishing a script now about the Mafia coming to New Orleans in 1890. I am doing it for Marty, and we will see what happens with it. But this does embrace the Southern. The wisteria and the difference in time, the way time moves in the South. I do not know if it does or not. But a Southern way used to be a fake chivalry and gallantry.
David [09:31 - 09:33]: But it is in the details that things come.
Eric [09:33 - 09:39]: God is in the details. If the details are no good, you are not going to succeed.
David [09:39 - 09:42]: That is going to come out of the research.
Eric [09:42 - 10:49]: Research the voice and then maybe things I have lived. Benjamin Button is a good example because I wanted to do something that was out of the ordinary with it. I remembered a scene in P.T. Anderson's movie Magnolia. I know a lot about movies and remember movies distinctly. I think a young man was committing suicide, jumping out of a window a floor above where his parents lived. His father was, I do not know, testing a shotgun or something, so he shot his son on the way down.
So anyhow, I then got about five of these books, called The Darwin Awards. That is where I came up with four or five of the characters. There was a man who got hit by lightning seven times. Whatever some of those characters were. So I said, if I could humanize them and make them seem real and have whatever problems they really have, aside from the extraordinary events that affected them, that would be interesting. So that is what happened.
David [10:49 - 10:52]: The tugboats came out of research, and I bought a tugboat.
Eric [10:52 - 11:28]: I wanted to put it on a tugboat, so I had that captain. Then I had to find out, was there ever a tugboat incident with a submarine? In World War II, there was. There is a famous thing exactly what would happen in the movie where the tugboat rammed the submarine as it was coming up, and a number of people had gotten killed. There was a tugboat guy who made tugboats for sale at a little shop in Massachusetts. He told me all this stuff. He gave me all the information.
David [11:28 - 12:05]: One of the things is with voice, you have this way of bringing the voice out in the characters. In Button, the mom, she says, "Oh, that baby's still a child of God". I really feel her soul. But I was thinking about what is the one that I remember the most, that I quote the most? It is Bubba when he goes, "Anyway, like I was saying, shrimp is the fruit of the sea. You can barbecue it, boil it, broil it, bake it, saute it. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Shrimp and potatoes, shrimp burger, shrimp sandwich. That's about it". I know, where is that voice coming from? Because it is vivid like that.
Eric [12:06 - 13:47]: I thought about that. They were doing two or three things in their duties as soldiers. I think they are cleaning a floor with toothbrushes and whatever. However, we staged it. I was just sitting, so I said, I think I will give every possible thing I can think of with shrimp, what you can do with shrimp. I was sitting with my family in a vacation house that we happened to own in Canada. Everybody was sitting around, and I would just yell, "Give me shrimp dishes!" and I would type them as they gave me the dishes. We eventually ran out, I think.
What I like about that is it is not unusual because we will find other things that happen like that. Then you find that, well, that is interesting. How do we dramatize that and make it feel something that resonates, that feels like something that would make the thing more special that will be remembered? With movies, I always feel like there is something primal about them that they stick. They stay with these books too. When you visualize a character. Movies, at least in particular to some extent, have things that stay in your soul. It is not that I search for that, but I like to have things that become memorable in some way that will then start defining the movie.
David [13:47 - 13:51]: How do you think about creating those memorable characters? Is it the voice? Is it the value?
Eric [13:51 - 15:13]: I think it is all of them. At least I start with, what is the theme of the movie? What is the movie literally about? This is not a story; this is something else. This is about, why are we writing? Why are you doing this altogether? Sometimes it is just a good story, but you need more than that. I think you have to have some thematic about what you are trying to say that is always going to be underneath it. So when you have a scene that feels inert, you have to find a way to utilize it with the theme of the movie.
People have different ideas of what the themes are, which is okay if you are somehow oddly on the same page at some point. So, thematics is very important. The other thing that is important is to try to. I am not sure I have mastered it. Great writers know how to write subtextually. They do not write what is literal. They will say it in a metaphor or in some other way that is saying the exact same thing. But in other words, they are not saying what is sort of evidence. It is hard to do that, and really only the great writers can do it very well. Some just do it instinctively.
David [15:13 - 15:20]: Walk me through something that maybe started off as explicit where you said, "I have to bake this into the subtext".
Eric [15:22 - 17:57]: I will give you something that somebody else wrote. I did a play of High Noon. Carl Foreman wrote the original screenplay. There is a part of a scene where a judge is telling Gary Cooper, who is about to leave on his honeymoon and leave this town, what is going to happen. He is giving an example of what happens from Athens, Greece. He is not talking about him on the bench, this judge. He is talking about something that happened in Athens.
It was more about what is going to haunt this whole thing. In other words, they did not really get justice. I forget what it was exactly. But when you do it through some other whole story about someone burned their hand, really good writers can do it. About what memories are for kids or something. But it is not about what screenwriting 101 is, people who tell you exposition about what is going to happen, saying. All they are doing is laying out the story in a certain way, and it is not very good writing, I do not think.
Television does it a lot, more traditional shows. But sophisticated writing, if you can get there, is when you talk about things that do not seem to apply, but then when you think about it, they are great metaphors. Great writers like David Mamet can do it in their sleep almost. It is hard to do. It is the first thing I like to try to teach writers to try to do. Talk about a dream you had rather than tell us that you are upset with your mother. Maybe it is better to do it off-center. It is very hard to do, and it is also hard not to become pretentious with it. It is tricky. But it is much better than two brothers exchanging information that they both know.
A director I work with said the worst line of exposition was "Good morning, Mr. Water Commissioner". Maybe I could have found a different way to do that.
David [17:57 - 18:03]: Go back to the dream thing. So if you are talking about the dream, explain what makes that better writing.
Eric [18:03 - 18:54]: I think you are getting two or three layers of things. You are getting whatever the information is you want to give the audience about what is the problem or what is happy or emotional between these two people. Then you get a kind of a fortune cookie aspect of it, some kind of lesson for life if you are able to do without becoming pretentious. Then, in the day, you might even find a way that is surprising because it is not exactly what you thought it was going to be. So you get a whole host of possibilities within just one. It can be a monologue or just 10 sentences, but you have a way of expressing things in a more sophisticated way.
David [18:54 - 19:01]: The question I am getting at here is, do you go on the emotional journey that we go on as viewers sitting in your office?
Eric [19:01 - 19:02]: I think I do.
David [19:02 - 19:03]: You do?
Eric [19:03 - 19:32]: I do. I try to do the dialogue, and it always sounds so bad because every voice probably sounds the same coming from me saying it out loud because I am not an actor. I am self-conscious about actually acting. But I try to think, will this be emotional? It is emotional to me. Will this be emotional to an audience? I think I have succeeded a number of times in doing that, sometimes better than others.
David [19:32 - 19:39]: I mean, on the phone with a friend this morning, he said, "There are two movies that just make me weep every time: Gump and Benjamin Button".
Eric [19:39 - 19:40]: Oh, yeah.
David [19:40 - 19:42]: He said the same guy wrote both of those.
Eric [19:44 - 20:57]: They are similar in certain ways. Some people have taken me to task, feeling that they are too similar. But I always say, "Gee, Marty Scorsese, you do not mind making four movies about the Mafia". Even though he is a genius. But they are both. I hope that most of my movies are about people and about how people are dealing with problems and what is meaningful to them. Where you then start to feel tapped into how emotionally they are handling things, whether, and you are moved by it.
I liked, even though it was melodramatic at some point, the work I did on Star is Born. The whole audience was just sobbing. Maybe it is a cheap sob because the guy committed suicide. But it is an emotional thing, and that movie has really held its own. It has lasted, which is really nice. Everything I write, I try to give some human quality to it that will make people feel something.
David [20:57 - 21:04]: If you are trying to feel something, are you a coffee drinker? Because I would imagine that could be a strong.
Eric [21:04 - 21:07]: Never. I never drank coffee in my life.
David [21:07 - 21:08]: That is a strong.
Eric [21:08 - 21:12]: I never liked the taste of it. I do not drink liquor either.
David [21:12 - 21:15]: Huh. That is interesting because drugs.
Eric [21:15 - 21:22]: I have had too many hallucinogenics of every kind known to man, except for ayahuasca. I have never tried that. I guess I should.
David [21:22 - 21:23]: Okay.
Eric [21:23 - 21:24]: Interesting.
David [21:25 - 21:44]: So you are sitting there, and I mean, certainly, you are not always trying to get to some of those more emotional moments, but I think that is what stands out. For me, I was just getting ready for this, and I went into YouTube, started watching some clips from Button, and I just could not watch them. They just moved me too much.
Eric [21:44 - 21:51]: They were quite emotional. It was also a personal experience. I lost both my parents while I was writing it.
David [21:51 - 21:51]: That is right.
Eric [21:51 - 22:43]: I was affected by that. I said, how can I somehow translate this to the audience? David Fincher, who I love so much, really bent over backward to try to make this work, which I think is not the usual movie David would make. He tried. I think it had to do with maybe the loss of his father, not that year, but. So there is a humanity in David that is wonderful. He was willing to go into a different direction. He is much tougher and colder in a good way. So he was willing to take the emotional quality of that and make it feel important.
David [22:44 - 22:47]: Is it okay if I ask questions about the death of your family?
Eric [22:47 - 22:48]: You can ask anything.
David [22:48 - 22:49]: Okay. Well, I just want to be respectful.
Eric [22:49 - 22:50]: Anything you want to know sexually.
David [22:52 - 23:00]: All right, well, who knows where we will be in 10 minutes now? No, but does that show up in Daisy's character? Walk me through Daisy.
Eric [23:00 - 23:13]: Daisy's character, I am trying to think because it is a combination. My ex-wife was a big ballet of Maine, dancing.
David [23:13 - 23:14]: Yeah.
Eric [23:14 - 23:17]: So I made her a ballet dancer. That was really important.
David [23:17 - 23:18]: It is all about the line.
Eric [23:18 - 25:22]: The line. Exactly. That led me to the whole, which I think is pretty clever, the sliding doors thing. If the cab had not been late, and the thing where she ends up getting hit by a car, which then changed her life because she got her legs where she could not use them as ballet anymore. Once I could. So I looked back and my. This is set in a whole different era, but what was a ballet then? It was Balanchine. That was the research I did. Then you start looking at the things that could be so beautiful from it. One thing starts going on top of another.
So as I was writing that, I would. My wife's name was Deborah, and it is still Deborah. But, I would go to the opera, the ballet with her, and it was just so beautiful, and the music is so beautiful. So who is this person who is a ballet dancer? Then how does she meet this guy? What does that mean? When she has a child, and the child is growing back, where is all that stuff? At the end of that movie, it is just so gorgeous to me when she has that little baby that is this man she loved. So, "What's my name? What's my name?" It is pretty amazing. I love that movie. I do not think it is perfect by any means. I think you could probably make it now where he is almost flawless with the prosthetics and everything. They do not need to probably do a lot of that anymore.
I did this little movie called Here that did not work for anybody except for us. Even though now I think someone told me there is a whole subculture who has embraced this movie as kind of pretty genius. We will see. But there again, it was about. That was Bob Zemeckis and I wrote it together, and he directed Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. It is about time passing, what happens to a family. It is just the stuff I am interested in.
David [25:23 - 25:33]: If you are writing something like that, how did you think of the different layering of time? Because there was a lot of work that happened visually to communicate that, but I would imagine that is hard to do as you are.
Eric [25:33 - 25:56]: It was hard to do. We had to really keep track. Then I realized how hard it was going to be for Bob with all the art direction they would have to do, keeping track of what the lamps look like and everything else. But it had a logic to it that was in keeping with what the piece was about.
David [25:56 - 25:58]: You found the comic book, and you said.
Eric [25:58 - 27:21]: No, Bob. I called Bob. I wanted to do Contact 2. I said, "Is there a big joke? Is that something we could do, Bob?". He said, "Well, it is very problematic. Carl Sagan's estate or the wife or somebody owns the whole thing. It is a little more probably said, but you know what? I have this book here. Take a look at this graphic novel and see if you think this is a movie". I did. I said, "This is great. I love the whole idea of this". Wherever you are in some space and time, these are the lives that you lead, and this happens to be the one. But there had been all sorts of other people who lived in the same house, so it reminded me of City of God. That did a wonderful thing with people who lived in an apartment.
The whole thing of time and place is amazing. One of the reasons Marty and I, Scorsese, get along so well is we both love Proust. So this whole idea of what does time mean, how is it? You cannot stop it, so you have to appreciate it in some way. One is it becomes a big crushing force in your life, and to the good, too.
David [27:22 - 27:38]: That is what is so unique about Gump, Button, Here. We see the arc of a life. In Here, the part that melted me was when they get divorced, and there has been so long.
Eric [27:38 - 28:42]: I thought it was a beautiful speech when she has that cake and she said, "I never went to Paris. I never got to go to Yellowstone in the summer". She gives all the things that we miss out on, so she finally gets to do them. I also loved a little thing I wrote, which is kind of sappy. But he, we had this kind of Thanksgiving of them together. He said she, he says they agreed that she was going to bring Chinese food. So I made that up. Then I said, "Let's see how this works". I said, "Let's start." He has a thing where he says, "Let's start a new tradition. Open the fortune cookies first". Which is only so I can get the scene written. He opens one, and it says, "An old love will come back to you". She says, "Is that true?" And he said, "No". Somebody said, "Maybe that was not even the fortune that was in the fortune. Maybe he just made that up". I do not like that you have so.
David [28:42 - 28:53]: Many one-liners that are iconic. Let us go back to Button because you are right, we are meant to lose the people we love. How else would we know how important they are?
Eric [28:54 - 29:37]: I do not know why these things come. I am always nervous that they are going to sound completely pretentious, and maybe they are. One of the things that is interesting about Button is that I wrote a speech I am really proud of that is in there. Brad Pitt gives it about part of a letter he is supposed to be reading aloud to his daughter, even though he is all over the world. He says things like, "There are no rules to this. If you find that you are not doing it the way you wish you were, then you can start all over". People have made it into a plaque. They have it on their walls, but they have attributed it to F. Scott Fitzgerald.
David [29:38 - 29:38]: Oh, really?
Eric [29:38 - 30:01]: Yes. I wrote it, and it is meant because it is from his short story. Which was actually a magazine article. I thought it was always funny. It is like, "Gee, I know he is a better writer than me. This is pretty good though". Look, you have been dwelling on those two movies. I have other movies I think I am equally proud of.
David [30:01 - 30:03]: No, those are just the ones I know really well.
Eric [30:03 - 30:22]: I think probably the best, I do not know if it is the best, but the most serious movie is The Insider. That is a great movie. I really think it is a great movie. I think Munich's good, very good. It had a lot to say. Ali, I think, was a good movie.
David [30:22 - 30:27]: Well, it had a lot to say. That is interesting you say that about Munich. Yeah, it is important.
Eric [30:28 - 30:38]: I think it still resonates from what is still going on. It was the same dilemma back in 1972.
David [30:39 - 30:40]: What happens?
Eric [30:41 - 30:43]: We have the book that is from the book Vengeance.
David [30:43 - 30:46]: So what happens? You take the book, and then you.
Eric [30:46 - 30:48]: You mark it up.
David [30:48 - 30:49]: So what is going on here?
Eric [30:49 - 31:22]: Generally, what I do is I read the book. While I am reading it, I. First, I will read it just to read it. Then I go back and say, "What do I want to dramatize?". Also, what are these characters' names, all the logical things? I start. Many times I have underlined almost the whole book, and I said, "That is of no value". But the one you have there, I think I was pretty concise with what I decided I was going to use.
David [31:22 - 31:44]: I am trying to bring all these things together. It is funny because your presence is down to earth, and you have written so many lines that are very iconic, sentimental, and valuable to people. But then you keep saying, "I do not want it to almost be cheesy or something like that". You draw this very fine line.
Eric [31:44 - 32:17]: You have to try to be careful. I do not think you necessarily set out to write these things. Maybe you hope they will become something. Forrest Gump is a little easier because he would speak with aphorisms about things, and, you know, "Sometimes there just are not enough rocks," or "Stupid is as stupid does". All the stuff that he said, if they worked for people, they become memorable. That was a lucky byproduct.
David [32:17 - 32:25]: Even in Gump, the classic one is, "Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get". But the book line is, "Being an".
Eric [32:25 - 32:59]: "Idiot is no box of chocolates". I do not know why it changed. I do not know. That is just what it felt like to me. I am not even sure that makes much sense. "Life is like a box of chocolates. Never know what he". I guess that would not be my favorite one, even though that may be the most memorable. I still liked, "Sometimes there just are not enough rocks," and she is throwing those rocks at that house. You cannot undo things that happened and made you traumatized.
Eric [33:01 - 33:08]: Many times I tried to write things that would hopefully be remembered.
David [33:08 - 33:09]: Yeah.
Eric [33:10 - 33:28]: For that movie in particular. I am just trying to think what I am writing now, whether there are. I think there might be some things that are kind of memorable. Some of the sayings. The early Mafia in Sicily had a saying, "We do what we must". I have that a lot.
David [33:29 - 33:30]: What does that mean?
Eric [33:30 - 34:07]: It means that we are going to do what we have to do to protect ourselves, to protect our honor, whatever it is. It is used a bunch of times. Like, think of The Godfather, the great things that came out of that. It is like, "Make him an offer he cannot refuse". "Take the cannoli, leave the gun". There are so many great lines. I am sure they did not think of it that way. They just came out of what was natural to the people's language.
David [34:07 - 34:15]: When you are writing characters, do you find them saying things that you feel like you would have never said, or do you feel like you have a good grasp of these people?
Eric [34:15 - 35:58]: Honestly, I do not think they are real people. I am not sure I am going for some authenticity within their characters unless I am doing something that is more like The Insider, which is about real people. Otherwise, I see it as fanciful in a way. Even though I try to make them feel like they have a life, they have their issues, they have a whole corpus delicti and all that, and they are somebody who exists. These are what I call the Other Side of the Moon. These are really good movies. It is almost like there is. I say they are the Other Side of the Moon because it can still feel like Fredo and Michael in The Godfather, where he is saying, when he kisses him, he said, "I loved you," and "Don't you ever". It is almost like it is going. With Forrest Gump, even if I see it on television, if I am flipping the channels, I will stop and watch it till the end. Great movies last, and I guess great literature does, and music, and all these things that are part of you. I always felt this idea, these people are all living these lies while we are going about ours. They are real to that extent, but it is all fiction. There is nothing real about them.
David [35:58 - 36:05]: You use the word fanciful. Where does fanciful end and caricature, cartoonish, begin?
Eric [36:05 - 37:55]: I think you have to be very careful. That is what you want to try to avoid so that they do feel real, even though you are going in knowing they are not. Forrest Gump to me is Candide, which is a famous play about a guy who is just going through life, and what comes, comes, and what does not come, does not come. It is a little unusual because it always has the same three-act or four-act Shakespearean structure. I do not care who you are or what you are doing, you cannot break that. The simplistic version is you state the problem in the first act, complicate the problem in the second act, and in the third act, you resolve it or do not resolve it, whatever you decide to do, and it does not matter. You can stand it on its head, you can do it backward and forward. It will always have three acts. You will eventually come to a catharsis or deus ex machina. That is just part and parcel of what it is to dramatize something.
It is always interesting to me. I wrote a version of Cleopatra, which I thought I did a pretty good job. But I knew the same material that Shakespeare did because they really did not have anything that was contemporaneous with her, very little bit. So it is like from a historian 150 years later, but he had the same. These were real people, and then it is hard to believe because of all the things that you think about them. None of that is fanciful though. I am talking more about the miasmic quality of a Forrest Gump or something. They are just not real, but they take on a reality for two and a half hours.
David [37:56 - 38:00]: When you see a character in a book, in a movie that you feel like is wooden, that is hollow, what is?
Eric [38:00 - 38:34]: Usually I do not like it. I will even start books where, if I do not think the names seem accurate to where they feel like they are invented, I stop reading. I mean, I want some authenticity. But on the other hand, I do not mind people being, as you say, almost cartoon to some extent, but I would rather they were felt as. People cry not because they are cartoons in Forrest, but people embrace them, thinking this is somebody worth caring about.
David [38:35 - 38:58]: This is from the beginning of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. You say, "As all things do, it begins in the dark. Eyes blink open, blue eyes. The first thing they see is a woman near 40, standing, looking out a window, watching the wind blowing, rattling a window". So what is going on there, and how are you thinking about?
Eric [38:58 - 41:48]: I thought about that. It begins in the dark because it is like somebody being born. Everything begins in the dark. For that, because the baby is being born. Then there is the prose that I wrote to put you in the situation of, you know, already blue eyes and a woman in her 40s. So you already know this woman exists, probably his mother, I guess.
It is a good cinema moment because it is big. But when she is standing at the window, the winds rattling it. I like that. I use that a lot. Not the wind rattling windows, but I like when people in movies have their clothes being ruffled by wind or something. It stops time to a certain extent. I did that today. I wrote something similar. It is about a church wedding that is going on, and it is very windy outside. It is supposed to be in New Orleans. The windows are rattling in the church. Then the director's choice is how much he wants to make them rattle or not rattle at all. He may think it is stupid. But it will give you a feeling of the time and place. I think that is pretty good because that tells you a lot in the space of like two sentences.
I always know the beginning scenes and the end scene. The only one in any movie I have ever written that changed was in Munich. He moved it. It was, I think, just on the street in Brooklyn, but he moved it to be outside the World Trade Center, which was no longer there when he filmed the movie. Otherwise, I think it is. I think opening scenes are incredibly important so you bring the audience in. The ending you have to hopefully get right so that they leave feeling either exalted by what they just saw or moved by it. That still has a lot to do with the theme of it. The Forrest Gump feather is about whether it is destiny or if it is just random. Where is it going to go next, because everybody has their own life? Those are all the things you think about. Then you have to try to visualize them when you are doing a movie so that they are made clear to an audience what you are saying.
David [41:49 - 41:53]: When Brad Pitt makes the joke about prose, he is talking about what we just read?
Eric [41:53 - 41:53]: Yes.
David [41:54 - 41:56]: Versus just the dialogue.
Eric [41:56 - 42:15]: No, it is more than that. Many people now will write maybe just two lines. It is fall in Brooklyn, and it will go exterior, Brooklyn, night, it is fall. Then they will go into the scene. It may be just dialogue.
David [42:15 - 42:17]: So that means you are very visual? Is your directorial?
Eric [42:17 - 42:30]: I like to be very visual. Some directors do not like it. They think I am giving too much because I also give tone in it, and they sometimes do not like that. Which is a tone, I think it should be.
David [42:30 - 42:34]: Her name is Daisy Fuller. She speaks with a Southern lilt.
Eric [42:34 - 42:37]: Nice. Yes, she does.
David [42:37 - 42:39]: That is exactly what you are saying, right? That is that.
Eric [42:39 - 42:44]: But the director may not feel she speaks with the Southern lilt.
David [42:44 - 42:54]: So with the dialogue, "What are you looking at, Caroline? The wind, Mother. They say a hurricane is on its way. You have been asleep. I was waiting to see". Why start the movie there?
Eric [42:55 - 43:05]: Sometimes it is good to start at the end, and then you can go back and tell us why they are there. I do not know. That is a good question. It felt right, I guess.
David [43:05 - 43:29]: Tell me more about the theme. You find the theme, you bring out the theme, and you come back to it over and over again. Once again, the core tension that has shown up, the thread through all of this conversation, is making a lot of these things simple and explicit, but teetering at the edge of going too far, cartoonish, where you almost pollute the whole thing and cheat it.
Eric [43:29 - 44:04]: A lot of people do not like Forrest Gump, for instance. They think it is saccharine, or that is not real emotion, or that is emotion, which is fine. It is just the way the ball bounces. I think Killers of the Flower Moon, which is one of the better movies I think I wrote, is about justice, inevitably about justice. How these people did not get any justice. You could probably say 14 other things, but that was always on my mind.
David [44:04 - 44:05]: Justice.
Eric [44:05 - 45:55]: Justice, yes. In other words, what do we do to them? Never mind man's inhumanity and all that, which is. I think it is almost complicit with the whole thing. But what about just one moment of justice? It ended originally. Maybe it is still there where somebody says, "You got justice," and he says, "There is no justice". He said, "A jury is just as likely to sentence a man for kicking a dog more than he will for killing an Indian". So you get a sense of it. It is a long history in America. It has gone through a lot of stuff.
I am very interested right now because of High Noon in vengeance. Is that a male characteristic? I am sure there are females who also want vengeance. But what does that mean? What does that mean about anger and everything? So I am interested in that. This thing I am writing for Marty right now is about what we were brought up to be. We end up being, in a way. I am not necessarily, but these people were brought up in 1860, 1870, in Sicily, and they went uncertain. They are part of a Mafia, and they believe in what this is, and they are not going to really ever get out of it. They do what they have to do, or we will do what we must.
David [45:56 - 46:19]: There is a discipline about the questions, a discipline about the themes. You could take, "Oh, we are just going to do a simple theme," and somehow it feels shallow or flat. But it seems like my brain does not work like this. I cannot take a very simple theme and just keep going. I think you can. It is like you have a faith in the theme and just the ability to kind of stick with it.
Eric [46:19 - 46:43]: That is what the movie is eventually about. If I get in trouble with the scene, I will say, "How does this apply to the theme of the movie?". I can go far afield or be close to home with it, but to find it interesting as to what you are saying, relating to what this movie is supposed to be about so that you do not try not to go too far afield.
David [46:45 - 46:49]: What is it that I read about if you do get stuck? Change the weather.
Eric [46:49 - 46:50]: Change the weather.
David [46:50 - 46:52]: Tell me about that. I like that one.
Eric [46:52 - 47:48]: It is very simple. It is as close as I get to writer's block, is that you are stuck. I just think, "Well, I think I will make it rain". All of a sudden, you look at it differently. It feels like a Sunday afternoon in the rain, or you make it snow. Whatever you want to do. I always go to the rain, it seems. All of a sudden, you have people acting slightly differently. It sort of unlocks to me, or always unlocked me, as to where I can go with this now. They are putting on coats, they are going out, they are putting on a hat, whatever it is.
I just try to think. What I wrote recently I really liked about, oh, I was very windy. It was supposed to be very windy. I got in trouble with the scene. I was writing this thing for Marty, and I decided I would make it really windy where they are, and people's hats are all coming off. So you have a whole. I would like to have 50 hats.
David [47:48 - 47:49]: Like a swirl.
Eric [47:49 - 47:53]: Yes, they are all swirling around. I think that looked pretty good.
David [47:55 - 47:57]: So the weather. Are there other ones that you can?
Eric [47:58 - 49:02]: No, I do not think. I do not think I ever did it too much. But I am big at, I will say that that is a corollary, that I am big on what time of day it is. So I like, if you are doing something that feels melancholic, maybe have it late in the day, not right before evening, or maybe something at dawn or dusk. They used to put in the scripts, between, this is a saying from, "Between the dark and the daylight, when the lights begin to lower, comes a pause in the day's occupation, which is known as the Children's Hour". As Lillian Hellman.
So you get a sense of five o'clock on a street in Brooklyn, and mothers are about to call their kids in for dinner, and there is this pause that kind of. Everybody is doing. No one is doing anything that may be of any importance, but it is like something that you can almost touch. I love that.
David [49:02 - 49:16]: What is cool about your movies is that the moments that really move us as viewers are just everyday moments, which means that I would imagine there has to be a sensitivity to life that you have.
Eric [49:16 - 50:52]: Yes, I think I do. But I do not think I am as good as. There is a writer now, Jack Thorne. He wrote Adolescence along with this other writer, actor. He has done five or six things. He is quite extraordinary at doing the most basic things within dramatic situations. I am not sure I am as good as him that way.
It is a very moving thing he did. He is big on disabled rights. He has a thing that was on Britbox or Acorn TV. It is about a little girl who is like 15, I think, who has muscular dystrophy. She is doomed and it becomes a battle between her parents. One parent wants to do everything to keep her alive. He thought, she is in a coma now, and the father wants to pull the plug, basically. But he then does such normal human things within that that are really quite amazing where it is not always about what the drama is. I just liked one little moment where he got in a car, and someone got in with him. He is driving to work, I think, and the guy offers him a stick of gum, and he says, "No, thanks". He said, "Yeah, you need it". So he had bad breath. He was able to put this humanity in there. It makes you like the characters more and understand them better.
David [50:53 - 50:56]: Do you feel like it is important for every character to be likable?
Eric [50:56 - 51:54]: No, no, no. I think. Villains make great movies. If you can find a great villain, you are in good shape. No, I do not think they should be likable. I think you should potentially understand why they are, what makes them tick, even if you may not always understand it. I am not sure I understand psychopaths or something, but you can get close to figuring something out. It gets a little more complicated when people have kind of normal lives where no one is putting their hand in an oven or something. Where you are getting hurt, where you are traumatized so bad that you want to lash out and kill somebody. You wonder, for instance, about those two boys at Columbine who had seemingly a pretty normal life and decent parents. They worked at a pizza parlor and this and that. Why did they decide to go shoot all these people? I do not know the answer.
David [51:55 - 51:57]: You said that a few times, "What makes them tick?".
Eric [51:57 - 52:46]: Yes. What makes them tick? Why are they who they are? You are going to start understanding when you read enough about a sociopath, what has caused it possibly. And who are they, psychopaths? But when somebody does something surprising that is not what you expect, that makes really interesting characters. I brought in, I am not sure how this is going to work, but in this same Marty movie I am writing, the lawyer who takes charge of things for our hero, or in quotes, our main character, is a small person. He is a great Southern character. So we will see how.
David [52:46 - 52:47]: You have all these Southern characters.
Eric [52:47 - 52:49]: Well, this is New Orleans.
David [52:49 - 52:50]: Two movies.
Eric [52:50 - 53:30]: This other one is New Orleans. It is nothing. This was just. There was a great historical interest in 1890 that happened, and that is just where it was. Killers of the Flower Moon is in Oklahoma. You go where it takes you. I do not think you have a choice about it. Everybody acts how they were brought up. Why were the Native Americans sent to all these Catholic schools, and had their hair cut, and all this stuff? You start building up with the details what these people might become.
David [53:30 - 53:36]: So you have the beginning of the movie planned out. You have the end of it planned out. Now, in the middle.
Eric [53:36 - 55:15]: How much middle seems like a great big blob? I have no clue. Then I get. What is the next three scenes? I always want to leave the day of writing with a scene I basically licked so I do not have to go straight fight with it the next day. I can make it something that will hopefully soar or not, but at least you will feel like this is something that is great or good. I am going to approach that the next morning when I wake up. So you are not afraid of what you are facing.
I always outline just with one word, like five scenes in a row. Wedding, shootout, whatever. That is it. Then it starts taking hold of the story you want to tell and where you are going. As you get to the last act as to where you are going to end this thing. So you have to try to start building on what is the tension, what is the movement? What do you want to say about the people? What happens to them? How do they feel? In the beginning, you start exploring who they are, and they may surprise you or may not. In the middle, you want to do things that you are not as sure as you were in the beginning as to who they were. Maybe they are doing things that are even exceptional or something that confuses you. Then you are back to trying to finish the whole tale.
David [55:15 - 55:22]: As a writer is thinking through scripts, I am seeing there is the character dimension, there is the theme dimension, there is the plot dimension.
Eric [55:22 - 55:58]: Yes, for me. And dialogue. You have to say what you are saying, and then you also have what it is going to look like visually and sound like. You have to get back into the music of the piece and what the dialogue is like. There are all these agreements, most of us. Or you can be very simplistic and write a story that has maybe even a great theme. You do not have to have all the stuff that I go into, but that is part of what I enjoy. Some people do it almost effortlessly. They do not have to fight it at all.
David [55:58 - 56:04]: You talk about what it is going to look like. How have you expanded, refined, honed your visual palette?
Eric [56:05 - 56:45]: I do not know. I always had a pretty great visual mind as to what I think would make a good scene. What would be memorable about New Orleans, for instance, and what would be great? I am not going to tell you what I did, but it is pretty great. I think it is something that is almost expected, but unexpected, so I think it is something that will be very special that people say, "Oh, yeah, remember the scene when they did X, Y, and Z?". Then there are things you learn that you did not know. I did not realize they had a streetcar already there in 1890. It was actually founded in 1840. So how do I use a streetcar?
David [56:45 - 56:46]: Do you go to New Orleans?
Eric [56:47 - 57:11]: I have been there. I mean, it was on Benjamin Button. I have been there a few times. One of my first jobs was to rewrite a Paul Newman movie. I was very young, and they sent me down to Louisiana. I always tell this story: I bought a new pair of corduroys and had a faux leather briefcase and walked on the set, and Paul said, "Our savior is here".
David [57:11 - 57:11]: You are right.
Eric [57:11 - 58:16]: I was literally 19 years old, like a kid. It is always exciting that you. It is exciting to hear what people. It is exciting to see the movie, hear what the characters are saying, how they interpreted what you wrote, what these genius directors I have been lucky enough to work with, how they envision these things and make them much more, I think, in most cases, more interesting than you imagined it was going to be. Not all cases, but in many, many. Then it becomes this whole thing that is an entertainment. I do not have a. I think you can do the same thing on a streamer. This show, Adolescence, just because it is contemporary right now, is amazing. The writing, acting, so that it just makes you think about things that all of a sudden you had not thought about and care about things you might not have cared about.
David [58:16 - 58:20]: So a place like New Orleans. Are you a note-taker?
Eric [58:21 - 58:37]: A little bit, not crazy. I will write what I think are the highlights of something that will remind me what I need to do. Like, I will just write "tension". Somebody will say they think we need more tension. I will write "tension" so I will know where it came from.
David [58:38 - 59:15]: All right, so let us talk about the beginning of Forrest Gump. "There is nothing but blue sky. A legend appears. A lot of this is true. And we see a feather lighter than air, floating, like time passing slowly, floating by". It is interesting how you wrote that. Lots of commas to match the cadence of that sentence, really matches the cadence of that scene. "And we see it is over a city. A breeze catches it, moving it here and there above the city". I saw another version of this intro, I swear, that said Savannah explicitly. Maybe that was a later one.
Eric [59:15 - 59:18]: Probably later, because then when they decided where they were going to shoot it.
David [59:18 - 59:26]: Yes. Because that is. Now, the feather is the beginning of the movie, the end of the movie. So that is explicit, deliberate. Why a feather?
Eric [59:27 - 59:45]: Because I think it. You can decide that somebody put it there, or it is just floating around in a breeze. That had to do with the theme of the movie. Where is it going to go next and all that? That was smart, I think. I think so.
David [59:45 - 59:52]: What makes for good intros? If I am sitting down, I am ready to write a movie. What should I be focused on in a good intro?
Eric [59:52 - 60:38]: Oh, gee, I do not know. I think it depends on how you want to get the audience into the same thing of writing a book. What is going to compel people to want to read past page two? The great ones are, "It is the best of times, it is the worst of times". You say, "Oh," or, "Call me Ahab". All these great moments that start things that you say, "Gee, I want to find out more about this". That is what I try to do in a literary way, try to bring people into the environment, sight, sound, etcetera. And have you start feeling that you have found a home.
David [60:38 - 60:39]: Found a home?
Eric [60:39 - 62:00]: Yes. You feel comfortable where this is. It might be uncomfortable to you, but you feel like this is somewhere you would be willing to live for two hours. Or it might be something that is frightening to you, that you will say, "I want to see what this does to me for a couple hours". Yes. I think it is important in some of these movies, when I say find a home, is that you feel comfortable that you are in with Forrest Gump. You find that he is comfortable to you, that he is compassionate in his own way.
In Benjamin Button, they actually. It is a home, and they have borders and people, and there is noise and life going on. We almost did this, which I found was lovely. David decided eventually not to do it, but we were going to end the first Benjamin Button with the end credits going to be, supposedly, obituaries from various newspapers of all the characters. It was spectacular what he had drawn up and everything from wherever they. The Times Picayune, I think, was the New Orleans newspaper, or if they had moved. Like a man killed by, hit by lightning seven times.
David [62:00 - 62:00]: Right.
Eric [62:00 - 62:07]: That kind of thing. It is kind of great. So you have these whole lives that you feel like you have now experienced.
David [62:08 - 62:18]: When you are teaching the writers workshop, what do you feel like the writers do not get that you really need to impart on people?
Eric [62:18 - 63:03]: I think part of it is somebody's ability to just tell a story and try to encourage you to join it and benefit every. I was thinking of a script that I did not like, one of the writers had, and I think it made you feel like you are not going to be part of this. It pushes you away. If you can get people to come in and be a party to it, they do not have to like it. You want them to love it, obviously, you want them to be charmed by it and moved and all those things. But you have to make it so that I think that is why I say they feel like they are home.
David [63:03 - 63:08]: Well, here. I am just looking at this now. You can see there is a lot of prose here.
Eric [63:08 - 63:13]: Yes, that is too much. They would never let that happen again. How many pages is that script?
David [63:13 - 63:15]: Well, this is just one page.
Eric [63:15 - 63:18]: No, I am just saying, how many pages is the whole script? Oh, yes.
David [63:18 - 63:23]: Let us see. This is 260-something pages. It says cherry revision.
Eric [63:23 - 63:41]: So maybe this is a compilation, that is all. Yes, so you are going to have half scenes. There is no way in hell 266 is, you know, it is a minute a page. So 60 into 260 is a four and a half hour movie or something. That is not happening.
David [63:41 - 63:42]: No, that is a compilation.
Eric [63:42 - 63:44]: No, that is a compilation of stuff.
David [63:46 - 63:48]: How did you improve your ability to write dialogue?
Eric [63:48 - 64:46]: I do not know if I ever was good or bad at it. I just write what I think I want them to say. The director will change a lot of it. The most impactful one for me was on the movie The Insider. I had written like a page and a half monologue that I thought was pretty good. Pacino called me that morning before he was going to shoot it. He said, "I can do this with one look". I said, "Really?". I said, "Let's call Michael Mann. See what Michael says". Michael said, "Let's shoot it both ways". In the movie, it is one look. So he did not need all the words. Sometimes I am trying to find ways to describe things, and maybe I go overboard or something. Or maybe an actor can take it and make it their own way of speaking. As long as they are able to impart what you are trying to say, I do not have any big feeling about it.
David [64:46 - 64:50]: What are the things that you are thinking about, the axioms, the principles, as you are writing dialogue?
Eric [64:50 - 65:11]: I think you have to carry the scene. You want to present issues in the scene that they are trying to work out, or they are romancing about, or whatever, so that it becomes valuable. You do not want to just kill time, what they call "shoe leather".
David [65:11 - 65:12]: Why is it called that?
Eric [65:12 - 66:07]: Because it is just wasting time walking around. You want to have something. It does not have to be a gigantic revelation, but you also want to move the story along. If you have a character say, "Will you marry me?" all of a sudden, you are into something that could be way larger than what you had anticipated. This thing I am writing, the woman he is in love with is the daughter of his rival, like Romeo and Juliet, in a way. It is dangerous. As they get closer and closer, it becomes more fraught. Eventually the father says, "You are dead to me". So eventually he may even kill her. So anyway, it becomes just more dramatic, I hope.
David [66:08 - 66:15]: Your stories are simple. I can just hear that, and I can see it. There is a discipline to simplicity, I think.
Eric [66:16 - 66:44]: Yes, I wish I had more of it, in a way. Some people can write simply and with such sparse prose and sparse language, but it says the same things with so many fewer words than I use. I am less sophisticated using language as I wish I was. That is just how some people are. I am mixed about Jonathan in some of his works, but.
David [66:44 - 66:45]: Saffron?
Eric [66:45 - 67:10]: No, him I know quite well. We did Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close. He is a good writer, very good. I was thinking more of, who wrote Crossroads and Connections? Jonathan, what the hell is his name? It is ridiculous, but he probably writes the best sentences. I do not know if he spends time looking up words because he uses words I have never heard of, but they seem to come naturally to him. Jonathan Franzen.
David [67:10 - 67:11]: Jonathan Franzen, yes.
Eric [67:11 - 67:47]: It is natural to him. When you read his, you gush because you go, "Oh, my God, how do you write this sentence?". Then here comes another one. They are unbelievable. The big deal with a writer is that you have to put one word in front of another, and you hope you are putting the right words in the right way. That is the best lesson you could get. Those who are good at it are simple, like Hemingway. Those writers just come by it second nature. I do not know what makes it bubble up inside of them.
David [67:49 - 67:53]: What is it about rewriting that feels laborious to you?
Eric [67:54 - 68:09]: You have had the adventure of trying to create something new, so now you are just trying to improve what you have already written, which is fine, but it does not feel so adventurous, and it is a little more like work.
David [68:09 - 68:15]: I think that is revealing that you just said the adventure of creating something new. I think that tells me a lot about how you write.
Eric [68:16 - 68:56]: Yes, I think it is true. I think I have lived my life that way. I have had a lot of children. I have had more than one wife and things, and I think it is a great adventure. Sometimes I have not behaved the way I should have, but I have learned what I have learned and decided not to take lessons from what I have learned and all that. That is with writing too. Trying to create something that people will say, "Wow, this is really". It might be too big, might be too expensive, might be all sorts of things, but they will never say they are not interesting or a good story.
David [68:57 - 69:03]: I do not know why I had the, maybe it is because we are in Santa Monica, I just had the image of someone who is just like surfing a giant wave, and you are kind of like, "I do not".
Eric [69:03 - 69:04]: I am going to go.
David [69:04 - 69:25]: You kind of come back up, and you are just on this wave, and the entire time you are like, "We are just going to stay on this wave". I know that if I can stay up, the whole thing is going to go. But the fact that you are calling it the adventure of trying to figure out something new, I think just says so much about what it is that you are going for and the kind of unfolding. But then you do also know what your destination is because you start with that end in mind.
Eric [69:25 - 71:06]: Yes. I am helped along by, as I said, I do a lot of adaptations. I know what the material is unless I am creating something. A lot of the things I have written are strict adaptations to some extent, even though I play with them in major ways, or they are almost all original writing. Benjamin Button was just a bad short story that Scott Sugar wrote because he needed some money for Collier's magazine. But what it was, obviously I did not come up with, was the idea of aging backward, which is profound. Yes, it is profound.
The closest I came to that in my own writing was I had someone else write it, and we will see if it ever gets made. I had someone write it about 10, 15 years ago. I woke up and I said to my wife, "I had this idea. What if I died? You woke up and you found I am dead, and you happen to like me, and you are grieving, and you are with a priest or a rabbi or somebody who could give you some consolation". And you say, and he says to you, or she says to you, "What could I do to make your grief feel easier to you?". She says, "I would like to spend just one more day with him". So I had a thing written about a 24-hour bit where it comes true that this guy who was dead all of a sudden came back to life, and they had 24 hours left to live. And what was their relationship, and what did they get to solve, and what did they get to? It is pretty great.
David [71:06 - 71:07]: That is beautiful.
Eric [71:07 - 71:26]: Yes, it was really beautiful. As the time compressed, as you near the last hour, and she knows that he does not know it, and things that she wants to accomplish in those moments, it is pretty beautiful. I do not think it is as profound as aging backward, but there is something to it that I think was quite touching.
David [71:26 - 71:31]: When you win your Oscar, at the very end, you say, "I may not be the smartest man around".
Eric [71:31 - 71:33]: "But I know what love is. I sure do. Thank you".
David [71:33 - 71:38]:Forrest Gump says, "I am not a smart man, but I know what love is".
Eric [71:38 - 72:02]: Yes, I did that because of that. I did know, I do know what love is for me. As I say, I have a lot of children, so I know that when they love me and I love them, and I have many, many people in my life, so I am surrounded by love as best as possible. He was saying it quite differently because he is saying that he is not intelligent, but that he knows.
David [72:03 - 72:28]: I think that is what we see in a lot of your movies, that feeling of love. I mean, to go to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It is losing your father. My goodness. It is like a sense of just aching grief and separation, and you really feel the pain of that. There is something about the way that your movies.
Eric [72:28 - 73:10]: I think it was Elvis Mitchell, you know, he was a New York Times film critic. He does for NPR, he has radio interviews with a lot of film people. He is a friend, and when I, he said, "Your movies are all about loneliness". Yes, I think it is true. They are about when you really think about us as people being. I am not sure I am that lonely, but I do not like being alone. I am not great with that. But loneliness is probably a driving force. It might be a driving force for my career.
David [73:11 - 73:51]: What was wild is after I finished a rewatch of Button, and after I finished it last week, I wept about things in my own life. I had not wept in so long. I mean, I cried out to God. It just fully. I was on my bed, and I practically had to wash the pillowcase because I. You made me feel certain pains that I have had around loneliness and sadness and feelings of emptiness in my life. Something about that movie just brought it up, and I just wept. I wept. Crying.
Eric [73:51 - 73:52]: Was it cathartic?
David [73:52 - 74:12]: Well, that is the thing, when you are just weeping, and you are completely out of yourself, afterwards, it is really nice. There is something about the shedding of tears that is a kind of catharsis. What is strange is it feels really good to cry that much because there is no resistance.
Eric [74:12 - 74:20]: Yes. Once you can do that, it is important, I think. Wow, wow. I am glad that it affected you that way.
David [74:20 - 74:21]: Yes.
Eric [74:21 - 74:22]: Love that.
David [74:22 - 74:28]: What is wild is that first the movie affected me, and then it influenced, it showed me something about my own life.
Eric [74:28 - 74:39]: Yes. That is nice. Maybe there is some truth to it. Maybe I hit on the truth. I do not know. But hit on a truth to you anyway. I am sure there are other people who say it is ridiculous.
David [74:40 - 74:46]: I just cannot even imagine what you experience writing these movies emotionally.
Eric [74:46 - 75:45]: I am moved by them, and a lot comes out of my own life. Things that are painful to me, or how I can experience them. It is a lot. I was at a panel discussion at the Writers Guild, and I think I had been nominated for a Writer's Guild Award. Anyway, that was who the people were. The moderator started by saying, "I want to be Eric Roth". I said, "Okay, well, you have had to have had cancer three times". "You have to have been divorced a few times." "You have to have had some other tragedies and children things". After a while, it was laughable. Everybody was laughing because everybody has their own stuff. You may want to be successful in some way, which I am, but it is not. I am still me.
David [75:46 - 75:52]: Do you feel like going through those things makes the grief, the suffering, so much more real in your films?
Eric [75:53 - 78:20]: I do not know if. I cannot speak to that. We have this thing I am doing with Ben Affleck, which is really interesting. He calls me, he says, "I want to do a Mank Room". I said, "What are you talking about?". He says, "You know that movie Mank you wrote?". Actually, David Fincher's father. We helped it out anyhow, and I was a producer on it. I said, "Yes, that is how they did writers' rooms". That is how they did movies in the 30s and 40s, whatever. They would bring in great writers, and they paid. Overpaid everybody, and they would sit around in the studio and say, "We want a movie about a vampire". So they would figure out a vampire movie. They would go away and write anyway.
He says, "Yes, that is what I want to do". "I want you to find me, if you are willing to do this, find me, like, four or five writers, and you be Yoda, and let us put together a room". "And I am probably going to pay just basically minimum". Which made my ability to get all the writers I would have maybe liked, even though I ended up with great writers, they were all TV writers because they had not, you know, they were. They were pretty successful, like showrunners. So we had a room of four, and I think we got maybe three really good scripts, four, which was great. Now he wanted to do it again. So now we have eight more writers, and I am like Yoda to them. I like doing that, but everybody is different. So you learn from everybody else.
On Fridays, every week, for the duration of our first room, anyway, we had a salon. Fincher came in, and Michael Mann, and David O. Russell, and Bradley Cooper, and Rob Reiner. It was spectacular. But there were no cameras, no nothing. Just them talking to the writers and some guests we had. But the thing that was most consistent about everybody was authenticity. They wanted authentic. You can be in the most unauthentic Marvel movie, and they wanted that to be authentic within that realm. So that was the key thing for everybody. Whether that is true or not, I do not know.
David [78:20 - 78:33]: What is it about collaborations that you have really been drawn to? I mean, you have collaborated with the most insane group of people. Spielberg, Fincher. You are talking about Bradley Cooper. We have talked about.
Eric [78:35 - 78:36]: No, it is insane.
David [78:36 - 78:37]: Michael Mann.
Eric [78:37 - 79:15]: I think I learned. I am not stupid. I learned that directors, for me, were the key to getting movies made. So I linked up with directors having them like my material. So I was a leg up on that. I wrote a movie for Kurosawa called Rhapsody in August. I have worked with the best actors and best directors in my. For the 60 years I have been at it. There are a bunch of people I wish I had worked with. Each one is different. It is a marriage, though. You have to be willing to get married.
David [79:16 - 79:17]: What did you learn from Spielberg?
Eric [79:18 - 80:04]: Some things I will not say, but I will say he has an incredible sense of entertainment. Also, being able to portray things that are childlike in some ways. The entertainment value of his work is incredible. He can do what I call Rube Goldberg. He can do a maze of things. I think his Saving Private Ryan had a thing where someone got shot on the thermos, and blood was dripping, and something else. I do not know. He can do that. In other words, something. He can reach for a box of cereal, and 12 other things happen.
David [80:04 - 80:04]: Right.
Eric [80:05 - 81:20]: He is very talented that way. He is very quiet. He is a lonely sort of man, in a way. A nice man. But he lives in his own world to some extent. Everybody is different. Some are more generous, some are less generous. It is a marriage. You have to find a way to negotiate because as strong as you may feel about something, eventually, it is the director who is going to make a decision. So I like to find what I say is like the third rail or the third way where we then both can agree on what we would like it to look like. That does not always happen. Sometimes I am disappointed, and sometimes I am thrilled. So I continue to work with directors as much as I can. I will work with Denis Villeneuve again. Yes, yes. I will work with Marty again, I hope. We are just getting pretty old, both of us, so we will see. I like to. There are a few new directors I like maybe to work with. But they are all there.
David [81:20 - 81:23]: You said to me in the kitchen, "I always enjoy the writing. I always enjoy".
Eric [81:23 - 81:26]: I love the writing. I enjoy it.
David [81:26 - 81:29]: Is that because of the topics that you choose? Is it part of it?
Eric [81:29 - 81:34]: Yes. I go into worlds that I love, love trying to negotiate.
David [81:34 - 81:40]: What do you do? Do you just wait for the pitch, wait for the pitch, and then you kind of find the fat pitch and you just go for it, or?
Eric [81:41 - 82:06]: I have an idea of what I want to write, what is the gold in the thing. It is true what you said, though. I, going back to page one, I know the first time I go and write it, it is not right. What is the story I am telling? Why is it going this way? Why is it stopping? How can I do this better? Then all these details start filling in, and I say, "I like this".
David [82:06 - 82:07]: Okay, tell me more about the details.
Eric [82:07 - 83:25]: The details just pop up when you are doing, like, 1860 Sicily. Then you start reading about, well, they were fighting for citrus. Who was going to control the citrus crop? The winner was eventually this one family. I love this detail: as a sign of their victory, they put a lemon on top of their gate. It was a high, tall gate, but a lemon on top, and that made them the victims.
I had a scene where, in this thing, I have a scene where our hero, I am not sure he is so hero, but the lead in the movie wants vengeance on a rival don. He comes sneaking into an opera. While the opera is going, I have him slit his throat. The guy whose throat he is slitting is a guy who cast himself as a singer. So he is doing a baritone with the opera singer. That was pretty good.
David [83:25 - 83:33]: Wait, so how in the world, with like 1860s Italy, I would not even know how to think through character? I mean, I guess you can read a lot, but there is.
Eric [83:33 - 84:34]: I read some, but also I just envision. Well, let us say it is an amphitheater. So it was outdoors. I did it because they had outdoor amphitheaters. It is supposed to be a small kind of town. He sneaks behind this guy, this kind of rotund guy who is full of himself and unscrupulous. He probably deserves to get killed if you believe in that stuff. I have him cut his throat. What I did then was, because that was not enough for me, I have that the opera singer is the only person who saw him cut his throat. So he has this for the rest of our movie, and he becomes a slightly instrumental character because the whole group of them came to New Orleans for various reasons. They brought all these Sicilians to New Orleans, and that is where the Mafia started in America. But this guy knows that he cut this guy's throat, and he has that on him in a certain way.
David [84:35 - 84:49]: How deliberate are you about cultivating inspiration? I mean, we have talked a lot about, mentioned Proust. You read a lot of novels, you watch a lot of movies. There are thousands of references you can pull from. Is that something that is deliberate, or is that sort of a?
Eric [84:49 - 85:32]: That is deliberate. But it is also. I like to even quote things because I am just so moved by them. So I like to use them. Like that Lillian Hellman thing I said to you. I think I have used that in a couple of scripts, but because I love it less. It is so textual and everything else. I have quoted other things or used them where I will give credit. I do not plagiarize them, I will say. So, I just think it makes a richer reading experience for the reader. Because most people now just read the dialogue. They avoid the rest of it.
David [85:32 - 85:34]: The reader. So as you are trying to shop the phone.
Eric [85:34 - 85:51]: Yes. You have that also. So you have to. Do you have to make a script for a reader for somebody to say, "Oh, boy, I see this"? "I can see why I would want to make it"? Aside from whatever their judgment is about the commerciality of it, with expenses, and how long is it going to be? All those things. Earlier you.
David [85:51 - 85:56]: Were talking about things standing the test of time. How do you think about making something perennial?
Eric [85:57 - 86:08]: I do not know. I think certain things, like, I think Forrest Gump survived and continues because I think parents show it to their 11-year-olds.
David [86:08 - 86:09]: That is what happened to me.
Eric [86:09 - 86:16]: Yes. So their 11-year-olds love it, and you censor out the little bit of sexuality in it. Or just say. I actually.
David [86:16 - 86:26]: I did not realize until I was preparing for this that Forrest Gump's mom had sex with the principal. So I learned that this morning. I was like, "I have seen that movie like five times".
Eric [86:26 - 86:27]: I know. Yes.
David [86:27 - 86:29]: Somehow Bob and I laugh.
Eric [86:30 - 87:25]: "We can do something for you, Mrs. Gump". I had no idea. Anyway, I think that is why that is persistent. Benjamin Button, we will see. I think maybe the loveliness of it will make it persist, but I do not think you can know. Certain things last, and certain things do not. I could tell you that I think Star is Born is really lasting, and it has outlasted movies like the movie that won Best Picture, Green Book. I defy anybody to have the same feeling about. They may like Green Book or whatever, they like it. But I think Star Is Born, though, because the music and Lady Gaga and all that makes it still feel very fresh. I do not know. I am not sure about Dune, whether it will last the same way. I do not know Dune 1 and 2? I do not know.
David [87:25 - 87:26]: Did you write Dune 2?
Eric [87:26 - 87:32]: No. No, I told him I had other worlds to conquer, which was funny, I thought.
David [87:33 - 87:39]: How do you think about the premise? Are you looking for that a lot? Because that is what you found with Benjamin Button. We have been talking about character.
Eric [87:41 - 88:49]: I think the premise comes along with the, when you are adapting something. There is something in it that I am about. I am going to do a Sydney Sweeney movie. Oh, wow. Yes. She found this wonderful short story called "I Pretended to be a Missing Girl". So the premise is a down-and-out 20-year-old sleeps around and uses drugs or alcohol and sees on a motel lobby a poster for a missing girl amongst other posters. The girl kind of looks like her, and she says, "I think I will go scam this family and get some money from them and get the hell out of there". So she goes to the family and knows enough about the girl and learns enough about her to where the parents want her back so bad that they are convinced it is her. She is going in to meet her younger brother, who is like 9 years old, and the younger brother says, "Run, run as fast as you can". It is spectacular what happens.
David [88:49 - 88:53]: So when you hear a premise like that, what is your thought? Is it like that?
Eric [88:53 - 88:53]: I love this.
David [88:53 - 88:56]: Is it juicy? Is it that you can do something?
Eric [88:56 - 89:40]: Yes, it is juicy. It makes me, it also, I was interested in doing something that I could get made rather quickly as I am getting. I am 80 years old, so I am running out of time here. So I thought with her being a big movie star, and this kind of idea which I think I could build on, I already said, well, it should not be just this girl's missing photograph there. It should be hers too. So in other words, we know that she is a missing person, and have her. Then maybe I will. Probably. That is probably how I will start the movie, and they will have her go park out in front of her home, and you will see her mother and father, and she will eventually leave.
David [89:41 - 89:45]: Now, as you think about themes for that movie based on what you said.
Eric [89:45 - 90:23]: I am not sure what that is yet because I do not know. That may just be a potboiler. Some things are just Hitchcock movies or something. So I am not sure. I will probably find something in it. I know I want the villain, which is the father, because he actually has his daughter in the basement. But I want him to be so evil. But he is intelligently evil, like Silence of the Lambs. So he is a great kind of. You have this dynamic between these two people. I know that. That is what I know so far.
David [90:23 - 90:31]: Is your writing. You are still writing on that program that gives you no access to the Internet? That was invented by the Egyptians, right?
Eric [90:32 - 91:09]: Yes, it is a DOS program. The worst part about it is it runs out of memory at like 40 pages or something. 40 pages, yes. So at least you have got an act written. You better print it out, or it is going to go away. Because once all of a sudden, it will say "too much memory" or something, or "overloaded memory," and it will make pages disappear. So you do not want to get there. I am just superstitious. I should probably learn how to use Final Draft and call it a day.
David [91:09 - 91:11]: Then what do you do? You print, and you just?
Eric [91:11 - 91:14]: I print it, and then my assistant retypes it.
David [91:14 - 91:15]: Based on your edits.
Eric [91:16 - 92:06]: Yes. I have edits. Then we will edit together, and I will keep going through it till I am going to turn it in, and she will retype it because I do. My movie program is the bulk of the writing. But I will also. Because when you are a writer, I say most, or 24 hours a day, it is on your mind. So I will put an email. I will write a scene in email or in text and just on a scrap paper or something. So it is always evolving in some way, you hope, or you think of something. "Oh, my God, I have to put that in". I realized they had left out something in the script. It was a little tiny thing, but I had to run back, and I wrote myself a note so I did not forget it.
David [92:06 - 92:11]: How much of what you write comes out of your own life, conversations that you have?
Eric [92:12 - 92:46]: Not that much, I do not think. It depends, probably, on the milieu. If it is something that is more. I wrote a not very successful movie called Lucky You, which is about a poker player. I know a lot about gambling. So I could put a lot of stuff I knew in there, but that was because of the subject matter. I also had a television show called Luck with David Milch, and that is about horse racing, which I know a lot about. So I could put all sorts of.
David [92:46 - 92:50]: Do you feel like you learn more from the successes or the failures?
Eric [92:51 - 94:09]: I do not know. I think it is a different question you would have to ask a different writer. Because I have had so many movies made. A lot of things were not successful, that it becomes, I do not want to say less important, but not as important in a certain way. The writing is equally important to me, or maybe even more important, that I can create something that is new and different, explores areas and all that that I love about it. If it does not work, then I probably missed something, which is fine. I do not have the same ego that way in it now. I just love to do the work without questioning what is going to happen with it, even though I still care. It is meaningless to have a screenplay that is not going to be filmed. It is just going to go in a drawer. So I do not know. That is a great question. What you learn from when you made mistakes. I am not sure. If you do not try to start attributing those mistakes to others, it is a good, cheap way out. To a director or the actors did not do it right, or they did not cast the right people. I do not know.
David [94:09 - 94:22]: Do you feel like the market for movie popularity, the Oscars, is efficient? What I mean by that is, if you were to take your most popular movies, how much does that correlate with what you feel are the best movies?
Eric [94:24 - 94:25]: My movies?
David [94:25 - 94:25]: Yes.
Eric [94:26 - 94:36]: I think each year is different as to what I would say is a movie maybe I would have rather written. Something that is not in my.
David [94:37 - 94:48]: But do you feel like the movies that you are known for, that are the most popular, are those your best movies, or do you feel like there are these other movies that either did not get picked up, they did not do well, where you were like, "Dang, that was a darn good script"?
Eric [94:49 - 95:13]: I have a few of those. I have a pretty ridiculous batting average for getting movies made. So I do not have that many scripts that have not been made. So I cannot hearken back to that. I am batting pretty high. It has gone a little less as they make fewer and fewer movies. So it is harder to get to me.
David [95:13 - 95:21]: I love the line from Button. They are at the funeral. "She taught me to play the piano and what it meant to miss somebody". Very much your line.
Eric [95:21 - 95:43]: Yes, that is. I like that line. I think one of the lines I remember from that movie, and I do not remember exactly what he said, was when the tugboat captain is dying, he says, "You can rail at God," and something like tha
David [00:00 - 00:06]: You said you were writing today, and you're still writing every day from page one.
Eric [00:06 - 00:13]: From page one? Well, yes. Sometimes I do not touch page one, but I always start from page one.
David [00:13 - 01:00]: Tell me about that. Tell me about erosion.
Eric [00:14 - 00:59]: It is a way of keeping myself involved with the material where I am living it. I call it a sense of erosion. If there are things that need to be fixed and backfills, like dirt piled back up, I can see that. I see mistakes. When I am done with my first draft, which could take a while, I think I have covered it pretty much. After I read it, I hate it, and then I say, "Why did I bother doing this?" But I start on page one every day.
Well, it is probably not the right word for it, but it is like trying to shore up what is kind of falling down. That is how I look at it. Why is this not quite working? How do I make this as imaginative as it can be? How do I make it fresh, something surprising, the things you want to have in anything you write? When I see something that feels tired, I want to make it feel alive.
David [01:34 - 01:47]: Do you ever find that when you are writing it for the first time, you are sparkling with enthusiasm, and then you come back to the end, and it loses that life? Or do you feel like you intuitively know now when something has life?
Eric [01:48 - 02:55]: I think I have always felt that I knew what had life. I do not know what that is. I have never had writer's block. I love that I get to write, so every day is an adventure in that sense. It is almost corny that I can be a journalist one day and a prose writer the next. I think I am probably a frustrated novelist because I have not written a novel, but I write a lot of prose in my screenplays.
I always tell this cute story: we were doing a movie, Benjamin Button, and they were doing a read-through. They were reading the narration, which was text, and Brad Pitt said, "Oh, look at Eric, he's got a prose boner". I probably did. That is a story I have told many times, but I have always gotten a kick out of it. I am, I think, a frustrated novelist. It is a little more difficult now because if you are going to write a lot of prose, the scripts are probably going to be longer than people want to see. To be concise is also difficult, maybe even more difficult.
David [02:56 - 03:06]: How do your scripts compare to other screenwriters' scripts? When you turn something in, and people say, "Oh, that's an Eric script," what does it have about it?
Eric [03:06 - 05:02]: I do not know. You would probably have to ask somebody else what they find attractive or not attractive about it. Many do not get made either. I think I am particularly visual. More importantly, I think my scripts are particularly human and very emotional. All the characters are singular to themselves. I believed a long time ago that you have to be true to the psychology of a character so that the voices are all different.
I always tell this story too: I did a rewrite for a movie that Michael Cimino made called The Year of the Dragon, which was an okay and interesting movie. I saw that he had given Mickey Rourke a wallet that had all the stuff about this particular character's life. I am sure Mickey Rourke never looked at the wallet, but he knew in his back pocket was a picture of his supposed daughter. Some things were obvious, some things less obvious, maybe a saying he thought was interesting and put in there, or an old crumpled phone number. But something that as an aggregate, you form a life. If you are trying, whether novelist, poet, or anybody, you are trying to make something out of nothing.
In my case, I mostly do adaptations. Even though I think a good 60-70% of the adaptations I do become original, it is only because either bad books make good movies — that is a slogan — or bad plays make better movies. Adaptations, I think, give you something to look back at. Even if it is not very good.
David [05:03 - 05:11]: Tell me this, we have a lot to talk about here, but I want to jump back to the psychology you are talking about. True to the psychology of the character. Paint that picture for me. What do you mean?
Eric [05:11 - 05:53]: I think you have to know something about his backstory, something of hers, what makes this person tick. Why are they neurotic, or why are they giddy, or why are they quiet, or what makes them angry? You do it as concisely as you can within the thing, but everybody should be different. Everybody is different. So you can find some pretty unique characters within my scripts, I hope. Obviously, great writers' stuff comes with surprises and curiosity.
David [05:53 - 06:09]: If I think of something like Forrest Gump, I think of his voice, his relationships, his dress, always very simple, the simple wisdom of the character. So what else is it as you are building a character and beginning to create that?
Eric [06:09 - 07:34]: With that character, that was from a book, so it was semi-given, even though the book was particularly farcical. The guy is supposed to weigh 400 pounds. I got to take off and kind of. It was as much about me looking back on my life from that point, when I was probably 50, at what had passed. That started to resonate with people who wanted to see the movie because it was all these touchstone moments in all of our lives at that point.
I was aware of that. Time is very important to me. Time is of the essence, in a way, and memories and remembrances. But that character I knew less of, but I somehow could hear his voice. So I knew, in a simplistic way, because it is a very simplistic movie, it is not high sophistication, but he seemed human to people. He had two or three things he loved, like his mother, his girlfriend, Jenny, and I guess, God in America or something. Quentin Tarantino said that he felt it was the most ironic mainstream movie ever made. Whether it is or not, I do not know.
David [07:34 - 07:35]: But why is that?
Eric [07:35 - 08:07]: The ironies are like, he gets to go to the White House and he meets John Kennedy. Bob added some humor, wonderful humor. Bob Zemeckis is a terrific guy and a terrific artist. You have a picture of Marilyn Monroe in the bathroom, or whatever. I call them ironies. Maybe they are not quite. Maybe they are ironic. Some of it is just how everybody got shot. He would do those kinds of runs with a movie.
David [08:07 - 08:25]: Like Forrest and even Benjamin Button. One takes place in Alabama, the other New Orleans. How do you get that sense of the Southern accent, the Southern way of speaking? Is that something that you deliberately research?
Eric [08:25 - 09:31]: I research a lot. The best thing that ever happened was the Internet. I have sheds filled with research books in the backyard here from before there was an Internet. But I do not know, it is just a sound you get. I think it is also the characters, and the actors obviously can portray them in a Southern way. I never thought of it that way. I just thought that these people are Southerners. I do not know if I even know that much about the South, particularly more so in a movie.
I am just finishing a script now about the Mafia coming to New Orleans in 1890. I am doing it for Marty, and we will see what happens with it. But this does embrace the Southern. The wisteria and the difference in time, the way time moves in the South. I do not know if it does or not. But a Southern way used to be a fake chivalry and gallantry.
David [09:31 - 09:33]: But it is in the details that things come.
Eric [09:33 - 09:39]: God is in the details. If the details are no good, you are not going to succeed.
David [09:39 - 09:42]: That is going to come out of the research.
Eric [09:42 - 10:49]: Research the voice and then maybe things I have lived. Benjamin Button is a good example because I wanted to do something that was out of the ordinary with it. I remembered a scene in P.T. Anderson's movie Magnolia. I know a lot about movies and remember movies distinctly. I think a young man was committing suicide, jumping out of a window a floor above where his parents lived. His father was, I do not know, testing a shotgun or something, so he shot his son on the way down.
So anyhow, I then got about five of these books, called The Darwin Awards. That is where I came up with four or five of the characters. There was a man who got hit by lightning seven times. Whatever some of those characters were. So I said, if I could humanize them and make them seem real and have whatever problems they really have, aside from the extraordinary events that affected them, that would be interesting. So that is what happened.
David [10:49 - 10:52]: The tugboats came out of research, and I bought a tugboat.
Eric [10:52 - 11:28]: I wanted to put it on a tugboat, so I had that captain. Then I had to find out, was there ever a tugboat incident with a submarine? In World War II, there was. There is a famous thing exactly what would happen in the movie where the tugboat rammed the submarine as it was coming up, and a number of people had gotten killed. There was a tugboat guy who made tugboats for sale at a little shop in Massachusetts. He told me all this stuff. He gave me all the information.
David [11:28 - 12:05]: One of the things is with voice, you have this way of bringing the voice out in the characters. In Button, the mom, she says, "Oh, that baby's still a child of God". I really feel her soul. But I was thinking about what is the one that I remember the most, that I quote the most? It is Bubba when he goes, "Anyway, like I was saying, shrimp is the fruit of the sea. You can barbecue it, boil it, broil it, bake it, saute it. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Shrimp and potatoes, shrimp burger, shrimp sandwich. That's about it". I know, where is that voice coming from? Because it is vivid like that.
Eric [12:06 - 13:47]: I thought about that. They were doing two or three things in their duties as soldiers. I think they are cleaning a floor with toothbrushes and whatever. However, we staged it. I was just sitting, so I said, I think I will give every possible thing I can think of with shrimp, what you can do with shrimp. I was sitting with my family in a vacation house that we happened to own in Canada. Everybody was sitting around, and I would just yell, "Give me shrimp dishes!" and I would type them as they gave me the dishes. We eventually ran out, I think.
What I like about that is it is not unusual because we will find other things that happen like that. Then you find that, well, that is interesting. How do we dramatize that and make it feel something that resonates, that feels like something that would make the thing more special that will be remembered? With movies, I always feel like there is something primal about them that they stick. They stay with these books too. When you visualize a character. Movies, at least in particular to some extent, have things that stay in your soul. It is not that I search for that, but I like to have things that become memorable in some way that will then start defining the movie.
David [13:47 - 13:51]: How do you think about creating those memorable characters? Is it the voice? Is it the value?
Eric [13:51 - 15:13]: I think it is all of them. At least I start with, what is the theme of the movie? What is the movie literally about? This is not a story; this is something else. This is about, why are we writing? Why are you doing this altogether? Sometimes it is just a good story, but you need more than that. I think you have to have some thematic about what you are trying to say that is always going to be underneath it. So when you have a scene that feels inert, you have to find a way to utilize it with the theme of the movie.
People have different ideas of what the themes are, which is okay if you are somehow oddly on the same page at some point. So, thematics is very important. The other thing that is important is to try to. I am not sure I have mastered it. Great writers know how to write subtextually. They do not write what is literal. They will say it in a metaphor or in some other way that is saying the exact same thing. But in other words, they are not saying what is sort of evidence. It is hard to do that, and really only the great writers can do it very well. Some just do it instinctively.
David [15:13 - 15:20]: Walk me through something that maybe started off as explicit where you said, "I have to bake this into the subtext".
Eric [15:22 - 17:57]: I will give you something that somebody else wrote. I did a play of High Noon. Carl Foreman wrote the original screenplay. There is a part of a scene where a judge is telling Gary Cooper, who is about to leave on his honeymoon and leave this town, what is going to happen. He is giving an example of what happens from Athens, Greece. He is not talking about him on the bench, this judge. He is talking about something that happened in Athens.
It was more about what is going to haunt this whole thing. In other words, they did not really get justice. I forget what it was exactly. But when you do it through some other whole story about someone burned their hand, really good writers can do it. About what memories are for kids or something. But it is not about what screenwriting 101 is, people who tell you exposition about what is going to happen, saying. All they are doing is laying out the story in a certain way, and it is not very good writing, I do not think.
Television does it a lot, more traditional shows. But sophisticated writing, if you can get there, is when you talk about things that do not seem to apply, but then when you think about it, they are great metaphors. Great writers like David Mamet can do it in their sleep almost. It is hard to do. It is the first thing I like to try to teach writers to try to do. Talk about a dream you had rather than tell us that you are upset with your mother. Maybe it is better to do it off-center. It is very hard to do, and it is also hard not to become pretentious with it. It is tricky. But it is much better than two brothers exchanging information that they both know.
A director I work with said the worst line of exposition was "Good morning, Mr. Water Commissioner". Maybe I could have found a different way to do that.
David [17:57 - 18:03]: Go back to the dream thing. So if you are talking about the dream, explain what makes that better writing.
Eric [18:03 - 18:54]: I think you are getting two or three layers of things. You are getting whatever the information is you want to give the audience about what is the problem or what is happy or emotional between these two people. Then you get a kind of a fortune cookie aspect of it, some kind of lesson for life if you are able to do without becoming pretentious. Then, in the day, you might even find a way that is surprising because it is not exactly what you thought it was going to be. So you get a whole host of possibilities within just one. It can be a monologue or just 10 sentences, but you have a way of expressing things in a more sophisticated way.
David [18:54 - 19:01]: The question I am getting at here is, do you go on the emotional journey that we go on as viewers sitting in your office?
Eric [19:01 - 19:02]: I think I do.
David [19:02 - 19:03]: You do?
Eric [19:03 - 19:32]: I do. I try to do the dialogue, and it always sounds so bad because every voice probably sounds the same coming from me saying it out loud because I am not an actor. I am self-conscious about actually acting. But I try to think, will this be emotional? It is emotional to me. Will this be emotional to an audience? I think I have succeeded a number of times in doing that, sometimes better than others.
David [19:32 - 19:39]: I mean, on the phone with a friend this morning, he said, "There are two movies that just make me weep every time: Gump and Benjamin Button".
Eric [19:39 - 19:40]: Oh, yeah.
David [19:40 - 19:42]: He said the same guy wrote both of those.
Eric [19:44 - 20:57]: They are similar in certain ways. Some people have taken me to task, feeling that they are too similar. But I always say, "Gee, Marty Scorsese, you do not mind making four movies about the Mafia". Even though he is a genius. But they are both. I hope that most of my movies are about people and about how people are dealing with problems and what is meaningful to them. Where you then start to feel tapped into how emotionally they are handling things, whether, and you are moved by it.
I liked, even though it was melodramatic at some point, the work I did on Star is Born. The whole audience was just sobbing. Maybe it is a cheap sob because the guy committed suicide. But it is an emotional thing, and that movie has really held its own. It has lasted, which is really nice. Everything I write, I try to give some human quality to it that will make people feel something.
David [20:57 - 21:04]: If you are trying to feel something, are you a coffee drinker? Because I would imagine that could be a strong.
Eric [21:04 - 21:07]: Never. I never drank coffee in my life.
David [21:07 - 21:08]: That is a strong.
Eric [21:08 - 21:12]: I never liked the taste of it. I do not drink liquor either.
David [21:12 - 21:15]: Huh. That is interesting because drugs.
Eric [21:15 - 21:22]: I have had too many hallucinogenics of every kind known to man, except for ayahuasca. I have never tried that. I guess I should.
David [21:22 - 21:23]: Okay.
Eric [21:23 - 21:24]: Interesting.
David [21:25 - 21:44]: So you are sitting there, and I mean, certainly, you are not always trying to get to some of those more emotional moments, but I think that is what stands out. For me, I was just getting ready for this, and I went into YouTube, started watching some clips from Button, and I just could not watch them. They just moved me too much.
Eric [21:44 - 21:51]: They were quite emotional. It was also a personal experience. I lost both my parents while I was writing it.
David [21:51 - 21:51]: That is right.
Eric [21:51 - 22:43]: I was affected by that. I said, how can I somehow translate this to the audience? David Fincher, who I love so much, really bent over backward to try to make this work, which I think is not the usual movie David would make. He tried. I think it had to do with maybe the loss of his father, not that year, but. So there is a humanity in David that is wonderful. He was willing to go into a different direction. He is much tougher and colder in a good way. So he was willing to take the emotional quality of that and make it feel important.
David [22:44 - 22:47]: Is it okay if I ask questions about the death of your family?
Eric [22:47 - 22:48]: You can ask anything.
David [22:48 - 22:49]: Okay. Well, I just want to be respectful.
Eric [22:49 - 22:50]: Anything you want to know sexually.
David [22:52 - 23:00]: All right, well, who knows where we will be in 10 minutes now? No, but does that show up in Daisy's character? Walk me through Daisy.
Eric [23:00 - 23:13]: Daisy's character, I am trying to think because it is a combination. My ex-wife was a big ballet of Maine, dancing.
David [23:13 - 23:14]: Yeah.
Eric [23:14 - 23:17]: So I made her a ballet dancer. That was really important.
David [23:17 - 23:18]: It is all about the line.
Eric [23:18 - 25:22]: The line. Exactly. That led me to the whole, which I think is pretty clever, the sliding doors thing. If the cab had not been late, and the thing where she ends up getting hit by a car, which then changed her life because she got her legs where she could not use them as ballet anymore. Once I could. So I looked back and my. This is set in a whole different era, but what was a ballet then? It was Balanchine. That was the research I did. Then you start looking at the things that could be so beautiful from it. One thing starts going on top of another.
So as I was writing that, I would. My wife's name was Deborah, and it is still Deborah. But, I would go to the opera, the ballet with her, and it was just so beautiful, and the music is so beautiful. So who is this person who is a ballet dancer? Then how does she meet this guy? What does that mean? When she has a child, and the child is growing back, where is all that stuff? At the end of that movie, it is just so gorgeous to me when she has that little baby that is this man she loved. So, "What's my name? What's my name?" It is pretty amazing. I love that movie. I do not think it is perfect by any means. I think you could probably make it now where he is almost flawless with the prosthetics and everything. They do not need to probably do a lot of that anymore.
I did this little movie called Here that did not work for anybody except for us. Even though now I think someone told me there is a whole subculture who has embraced this movie as kind of pretty genius. We will see. But there again, it was about. That was Bob Zemeckis and I wrote it together, and he directed Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. It is about time passing, what happens to a family. It is just the stuff I am interested in.
David [25:23 - 25:33]: If you are writing something like that, how did you think of the different layering of time? Because there was a lot of work that happened visually to communicate that, but I would imagine that is hard to do as you are.
Eric [25:33 - 25:56]: It was hard to do. We had to really keep track. Then I realized how hard it was going to be for Bob with all the art direction they would have to do, keeping track of what the lamps look like and everything else. But it had a logic to it that was in keeping with what the piece was about.
David [25:56 - 25:58]: You found the comic book, and you said.
Eric [25:58 - 27:21]: No, Bob. I called Bob. I wanted to do Contact 2. I said, "Is there a big joke? Is that something we could do, Bob?". He said, "Well, it is very problematic. Carl Sagan's estate or the wife or somebody owns the whole thing. It is a little more probably said, but you know what? I have this book here. Take a look at this graphic novel and see if you think this is a movie". I did. I said, "This is great. I love the whole idea of this". Wherever you are in some space and time, these are the lives that you lead, and this happens to be the one. But there had been all sorts of other people who lived in the same house, so it reminded me of City of God. That did a wonderful thing with people who lived in an apartment.
The whole thing of time and place is amazing. One of the reasons Marty and I, Scorsese, get along so well is we both love Proust. So this whole idea of what does time mean, how is it? You cannot stop it, so you have to appreciate it in some way. One is it becomes a big crushing force in your life, and to the good, too.
David [27:22 - 27:38]: That is what is so unique about Gump, Button, Here. We see the arc of a life. In Here, the part that melted me was when they get divorced, and there has been so long.
Eric [27:38 - 28:42]: I thought it was a beautiful speech when she has that cake and she said, "I never went to Paris. I never got to go to Yellowstone in the summer". She gives all the things that we miss out on, so she finally gets to do them. I also loved a little thing I wrote, which is kind of sappy. But he, we had this kind of Thanksgiving of them together. He said she, he says they agreed that she was going to bring Chinese food. So I made that up. Then I said, "Let's see how this works". I said, "Let's start." He has a thing where he says, "Let's start a new tradition. Open the fortune cookies first". Which is only so I can get the scene written. He opens one, and it says, "An old love will come back to you". She says, "Is that true?" And he said, "No". Somebody said, "Maybe that was not even the fortune that was in the fortune. Maybe he just made that up". I do not like that you have so.
David [28:42 - 28:53]: Many one-liners that are iconic. Let us go back to Button because you are right, we are meant to lose the people we love. How else would we know how important they are?
Eric [28:54 - 29:37]: I do not know why these things come. I am always nervous that they are going to sound completely pretentious, and maybe they are. One of the things that is interesting about Button is that I wrote a speech I am really proud of that is in there. Brad Pitt gives it about part of a letter he is supposed to be reading aloud to his daughter, even though he is all over the world. He says things like, "There are no rules to this. If you find that you are not doing it the way you wish you were, then you can start all over". People have made it into a plaque. They have it on their walls, but they have attributed it to F. Scott Fitzgerald.
David [29:38 - 29:38]: Oh, really?
Eric [29:38 - 30:01]: Yes. I wrote it, and it is meant because it is from his short story. Which was actually a magazine article. I thought it was always funny. It is like, "Gee, I know he is a better writer than me. This is pretty good though". Look, you have been dwelling on those two movies. I have other movies I think I am equally proud of.
David [30:01 - 30:03]: No, those are just the ones I know really well.
Eric [30:03 - 30:22]: I think probably the best, I do not know if it is the best, but the most serious movie is The Insider. That is a great movie. I really think it is a great movie. I think Munich's good, very good. It had a lot to say. Ali, I think, was a good movie.
David [30:22 - 30:27]: Well, it had a lot to say. That is interesting you say that about Munich. Yeah, it is important.
Eric [30:28 - 30:38]: I think it still resonates from what is still going on. It was the same dilemma back in 1972.
David [30:39 - 30:40]: What happens?
Eric [30:41 - 30:43]: We have the book that is from the book Vengeance.
David [30:43 - 30:46]: So what happens? You take the book, and then you.
Eric [30:46 - 30:48]: You mark it up.
David [30:48 - 30:49]: So what is going on here?
Eric [30:49 - 31:22]: Generally, what I do is I read the book. While I am reading it, I. First, I will read it just to read it. Then I go back and say, "What do I want to dramatize?". Also, what are these characters' names, all the logical things? I start. Many times I have underlined almost the whole book, and I said, "That is of no value". But the one you have there, I think I was pretty concise with what I decided I was going to use.
David [31:22 - 31:44]: I am trying to bring all these things together. It is funny because your presence is down to earth, and you have written so many lines that are very iconic, sentimental, and valuable to people. But then you keep saying, "I do not want it to almost be cheesy or something like that". You draw this very fine line.
Eric [31:44 - 32:17]: You have to try to be careful. I do not think you necessarily set out to write these things. Maybe you hope they will become something. Forrest Gump is a little easier because he would speak with aphorisms about things, and, you know, "Sometimes there just are not enough rocks," or "Stupid is as stupid does". All the stuff that he said, if they worked for people, they become memorable. That was a lucky byproduct.
David [32:17 - 32:25]: Even in Gump, the classic one is, "Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get". But the book line is, "Being an".
Eric [32:25 - 32:59]: "Idiot is no box of chocolates". I do not know why it changed. I do not know. That is just what it felt like to me. I am not even sure that makes much sense. "Life is like a box of chocolates. Never know what he". I guess that would not be my favorite one, even though that may be the most memorable. I still liked, "Sometimes there just are not enough rocks," and she is throwing those rocks at that house. You cannot undo things that happened and made you traumatized.
Eric [33:01 - 33:08]: Many times I tried to write things that would hopefully be remembered.
David [33:08 - 33:09]: Yeah.
Eric [33:10 - 33:28]: For that movie in particular. I am just trying to think what I am writing now, whether there are. I think there might be some things that are kind of memorable. Some of the sayings. The early Mafia in Sicily had a saying, "We do what we must". I have that a lot.
David [33:29 - 33:30]: What does that mean?
Eric [33:30 - 34:07]: It means that we are going to do what we have to do to protect ourselves, to protect our honor, whatever it is. It is used a bunch of times. Like, think of The Godfather, the great things that came out of that. It is like, "Make him an offer he cannot refuse". "Take the cannoli, leave the gun". There are so many great lines. I am sure they did not think of it that way. They just came out of what was natural to the people's language.
David [34:07 - 34:15]: When you are writing characters, do you find them saying things that you feel like you would have never said, or do you feel like you have a good grasp of these people?
Eric [34:15 - 35:58]: Honestly, I do not think they are real people. I am not sure I am going for some authenticity within their characters unless I am doing something that is more like The Insider, which is about real people. Otherwise, I see it as fanciful in a way. Even though I try to make them feel like they have a life, they have their issues, they have a whole corpus delicti and all that, and they are somebody who exists. These are what I call the Other Side of the Moon. These are really good movies. It is almost like there is. I say they are the Other Side of the Moon because it can still feel like Fredo and Michael in The Godfather, where he is saying, when he kisses him, he said, "I loved you," and "Don't you ever". It is almost like it is going. With Forrest Gump, even if I see it on television, if I am flipping the channels, I will stop and watch it till the end. Great movies last, and I guess great literature does, and music, and all these things that are part of you. I always felt this idea, these people are all living these lies while we are going about ours. They are real to that extent, but it is all fiction. There is nothing real about them.
David [35:58 - 36:05]: You use the word fanciful. Where does fanciful end and caricature, cartoonish, begin?
Eric [36:05 - 37:55]: I think you have to be very careful. That is what you want to try to avoid so that they do feel real, even though you are going in knowing they are not. Forrest Gump to me is Candide, which is a famous play about a guy who is just going through life, and what comes, comes, and what does not come, does not come. It is a little unusual because it always has the same three-act or four-act Shakespearean structure. I do not care who you are or what you are doing, you cannot break that. The simplistic version is you state the problem in the first act, complicate the problem in the second act, and in the third act, you resolve it or do not resolve it, whatever you decide to do, and it does not matter. You can stand it on its head, you can do it backward and forward. It will always have three acts. You will eventually come to a catharsis or deus ex machina. That is just part and parcel of what it is to dramatize something.
It is always interesting to me. I wrote a version of Cleopatra, which I thought I did a pretty good job. But I knew the same material that Shakespeare did because they really did not have anything that was contemporaneous with her, very little bit. So it is like from a historian 150 years later, but he had the same. These were real people, and then it is hard to believe because of all the things that you think about them. None of that is fanciful though. I am talking more about the miasmic quality of a Forrest Gump or something. They are just not real, but they take on a reality for two and a half hours.
David [37:56 - 38:00]: When you see a character in a book, in a movie that you feel like is wooden, that is hollow, what is?
Eric [38:00 - 38:34]: Usually I do not like it. I will even start books where, if I do not think the names seem accurate to where they feel like they are invented, I stop reading. I mean, I want some authenticity. But on the other hand, I do not mind people being, as you say, almost cartoon to some extent, but I would rather they were felt as. People cry not because they are cartoons in Forrest, but people embrace them, thinking this is somebody worth caring about.
David [38:35 - 38:58]: This is from the beginning of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. You say, "As all things do, it begins in the dark. Eyes blink open, blue eyes. The first thing they see is a woman near 40, standing, looking out a window, watching the wind blowing, rattling a window". So what is going on there, and how are you thinking about?
Eric [38:58 - 41:48]: I thought about that. It begins in the dark because it is like somebody being born. Everything begins in the dark. For that, because the baby is being born. Then there is the prose that I wrote to put you in the situation of, you know, already blue eyes and a woman in her 40s. So you already know this woman exists, probably his mother, I guess.
It is a good cinema moment because it is big. But when she is standing at the window, the winds rattling it. I like that. I use that a lot. Not the wind rattling windows, but I like when people in movies have their clothes being ruffled by wind or something. It stops time to a certain extent. I did that today. I wrote something similar. It is about a church wedding that is going on, and it is very windy outside. It is supposed to be in New Orleans. The windows are rattling in the church. Then the director's choice is how much he wants to make them rattle or not rattle at all. He may think it is stupid. But it will give you a feeling of the time and place. I think that is pretty good because that tells you a lot in the space of like two sentences.
I always know the beginning scenes and the end scene. The only one in any movie I have ever written that changed was in Munich. He moved it. It was, I think, just on the street in Brooklyn, but he moved it to be outside the World Trade Center, which was no longer there when he filmed the movie. Otherwise, I think it is. I think opening scenes are incredibly important so you bring the audience in. The ending you have to hopefully get right so that they leave feeling either exalted by what they just saw or moved by it. That still has a lot to do with the theme of it. The Forrest Gump feather is about whether it is destiny or if it is just random. Where is it going to go next, because everybody has their own life? Those are all the things you think about. Then you have to try to visualize them when you are doing a movie so that they are made clear to an audience what you are saying.
David [41:49 - 41:53]: When Brad Pitt makes the joke about prose, he is talking about what we just read?
Eric [41:53 - 41:53]: Yes.
David [41:54 - 41:56]: Versus just the dialogue.
Eric [41:56 - 42:15]: No, it is more than that. Many people now will write maybe just two lines. It is fall in Brooklyn, and it will go exterior, Brooklyn, night, it is fall. Then they will go into the scene. It may be just dialogue.
David [42:15 - 42:17]: So that means you are very visual? Is your directorial?
Eric [42:17 - 42:30]: I like to be very visual. Some directors do not like it. They think I am giving too much because I also give tone in it, and they sometimes do not like that. Which is a tone, I think it should be.
David [42:30 - 42:34]: Her name is Daisy Fuller. She speaks with a Southern lilt.
Eric [42:34 - 42:37]: Nice. Yes, she does.
David [42:37 - 42:39]: That is exactly what you are saying, right? That is that.
Eric [42:39 - 42:44]: But the director may not feel she speaks with the Southern lilt.
David [42:44 - 42:54]: So with the dialogue, "What are you looking at, Caroline? The wind, Mother. They say a hurricane is on its way. You have been asleep. I was waiting to see". Why start the movie there?
Eric [42:55 - 43:05]: Sometimes it is good to start at the end, and then you can go back and tell us why they are there. I do not know. That is a good question. It felt right, I guess.
David [43:05 - 43:29]: Tell me more about the theme. You find the theme, you bring out the theme, and you come back to it over and over again. Once again, the core tension that has shown up, the thread through all of this conversation, is making a lot of these things simple and explicit, but teetering at the edge of going too far, cartoonish, where you almost pollute the whole thing and cheat it.
Eric [43:29 - 44:04]: A lot of people do not like Forrest Gump, for instance. They think it is saccharine, or that is not real emotion, or that is emotion, which is fine. It is just the way the ball bounces. I think Killers of the Flower Moon, which is one of the better movies I think I wrote, is about justice, inevitably about justice. How these people did not get any justice. You could probably say 14 other things, but that was always on my mind.
David [44:04 - 44:05]: Justice.
Eric [44:05 - 45:55]: Justice, yes. In other words, what do we do to them? Never mind man's inhumanity and all that, which is. I think it is almost complicit with the whole thing. But what about just one moment of justice? It ended originally. Maybe it is still there where somebody says, "You got justice," and he says, "There is no justice". He said, "A jury is just as likely to sentence a man for kicking a dog more than he will for killing an Indian". So you get a sense of it. It is a long history in America. It has gone through a lot of stuff.
I am very interested right now because of High Noon in vengeance. Is that a male characteristic? I am sure there are females who also want vengeance. But what does that mean? What does that mean about anger and everything? So I am interested in that. This thing I am writing for Marty right now is about what we were brought up to be. We end up being, in a way. I am not necessarily, but these people were brought up in 1860, 1870, in Sicily, and they went uncertain. They are part of a Mafia, and they believe in what this is, and they are not going to really ever get out of it. They do what they have to do, or we will do what we must.
David [45:56 - 46:19]: There is a discipline about the questions, a discipline about the themes. You could take, "Oh, we are just going to do a simple theme," and somehow it feels shallow or flat. But it seems like my brain does not work like this. I cannot take a very simple theme and just keep going. I think you can. It is like you have a faith in the theme and just the ability to kind of stick with it.
Eric [46:19 - 46:43]: That is what the movie is eventually about. If I get in trouble with the scene, I will say, "How does this apply to the theme of the movie?". I can go far afield or be close to home with it, but to find it interesting as to what you are saying, relating to what this movie is supposed to be about so that you do not try not to go too far afield.
David [46:45 - 46:49]: What is it that I read about if you do get stuck? Change the weather.
Eric [46:49 - 46:50]: Change the weather.
David [46:50 - 46:52]: Tell me about that. I like that one.
Eric [46:52 - 47:48]: It is very simple. It is as close as I get to writer's block, is that you are stuck. I just think, "Well, I think I will make it rain". All of a sudden, you look at it differently. It feels like a Sunday afternoon in the rain, or you make it snow. Whatever you want to do. I always go to the rain, it seems. All of a sudden, you have people acting slightly differently. It sort of unlocks to me, or always unlocked me, as to where I can go with this now. They are putting on coats, they are going out, they are putting on a hat, whatever it is.
I just try to think. What I wrote recently I really liked about, oh, I was very windy. It was supposed to be very windy. I got in trouble with the scene. I was writing this thing for Marty, and I decided I would make it really windy where they are, and people's hats are all coming off. So you have a whole. I would like to have 50 hats.
David [47:48 - 47:49]: Like a swirl.
Eric [47:49 - 47:53]: Yes, they are all swirling around. I think that looked pretty good.
David [47:55 - 47:57]: So the weather. Are there other ones that you can?
Eric [47:58 - 49:02]: No, I do not think. I do not think I ever did it too much. But I am big at, I will say that that is a corollary, that I am big on what time of day it is. So I like, if you are doing something that feels melancholic, maybe have it late in the day, not right before evening, or maybe something at dawn or dusk. They used to put in the scripts, between, this is a saying from, "Between the dark and the daylight, when the lights begin to lower, comes a pause in the day's occupation, which is known as the Children's Hour". As Lillian Hellman.
So you get a sense of five o'clock on a street in Brooklyn, and mothers are about to call their kids in for dinner, and there is this pause that kind of. Everybody is doing. No one is doing anything that may be of any importance, but it is like something that you can almost touch. I love that.
David [49:02 - 49:16]: What is cool about your movies is that the moments that really move us as viewers are just everyday moments, which means that I would imagine there has to be a sensitivity to life that you have.
Eric [49:16 - 50:52]: Yes, I think I do. But I do not think I am as good as. There is a writer now, Jack Thorne. He wrote Adolescence along with this other writer, actor. He has done five or six things. He is quite extraordinary at doing the most basic things within dramatic situations. I am not sure I am as good as him that way.
It is a very moving thing he did. He is big on disabled rights. He has a thing that was on Britbox or Acorn TV. It is about a little girl who is like 15, I think, who has muscular dystrophy. She is doomed and it becomes a battle between her parents. One parent wants to do everything to keep her alive. He thought, she is in a coma now, and the father wants to pull the plug, basically. But he then does such normal human things within that that are really quite amazing where it is not always about what the drama is. I just liked one little moment where he got in a car, and someone got in with him. He is driving to work, I think, and the guy offers him a stick of gum, and he says, "No, thanks". He said, "Yeah, you need it". So he had bad breath. He was able to put this humanity in there. It makes you like the characters more and understand them better.
David [50:53 - 50:56]: Do you feel like it is important for every character to be likable?
Eric [50:56 - 51:54]: No, no, no. I think. Villains make great movies. If you can find a great villain, you are in good shape. No, I do not think they should be likable. I think you should potentially understand why they are, what makes them tick, even if you may not always understand it. I am not sure I understand psychopaths or something, but you can get close to figuring something out. It gets a little more complicated when people have kind of normal lives where no one is putting their hand in an oven or something. Where you are getting hurt, where you are traumatized so bad that you want to lash out and kill somebody. You wonder, for instance, about those two boys at Columbine who had seemingly a pretty normal life and decent parents. They worked at a pizza parlor and this and that. Why did they decide to go shoot all these people? I do not know the answer.
David [51:55 - 51:57]: You said that a few times, "What makes them tick?".
Eric [51:57 - 52:46]: Yes. What makes them tick? Why are they who they are? You are going to start understanding when you read enough about a sociopath, what has caused it possibly. And who are they, psychopaths? But when somebody does something surprising that is not what you expect, that makes really interesting characters. I brought in, I am not sure how this is going to work, but in this same Marty movie I am writing, the lawyer who takes charge of things for our hero, or in quotes, our main character, is a small person. He is a great Southern character. So we will see how.
David [52:46 - 52:47]: You have all these Southern characters.
Eric [52:47 - 52:49]: Well, this is New Orleans.
David [52:49 - 52:50]: Two movies.
Eric [52:50 - 53:30]: This other one is New Orleans. It is nothing. This was just. There was a great historical interest in 1890 that happened, and that is just where it was. Killers of the Flower Moon is in Oklahoma. You go where it takes you. I do not think you have a choice about it. Everybody acts how they were brought up. Why were the Native Americans sent to all these Catholic schools, and had their hair cut, and all this stuff? You start building up with the details what these people might become.
David [53:30 - 53:36]: So you have the beginning of the movie planned out. You have the end of it planned out. Now, in the middle.
Eric [53:36 - 55:15]: How much middle seems like a great big blob? I have no clue. Then I get. What is the next three scenes? I always want to leave the day of writing with a scene I basically licked so I do not have to go straight fight with it the next day. I can make it something that will hopefully soar or not, but at least you will feel like this is something that is great or good. I am going to approach that the next morning when I wake up. So you are not afraid of what you are facing.
I always outline just with one word, like five scenes in a row. Wedding, shootout, whatever. That is it. Then it starts taking hold of the story you want to tell and where you are going. As you get to the last act as to where you are going to end this thing. So you have to try to start building on what is the tension, what is the movement? What do you want to say about the people? What happens to them? How do they feel? In the beginning, you start exploring who they are, and they may surprise you or may not. In the middle, you want to do things that you are not as sure as you were in the beginning as to who they were. Maybe they are doing things that are even exceptional or something that confuses you. Then you are back to trying to finish the whole tale.
David [55:15 - 55:22]: As a writer is thinking through scripts, I am seeing there is the character dimension, there is the theme dimension, there is the plot dimension.
Eric [55:22 - 55:58]: Yes, for me. And dialogue. You have to say what you are saying, and then you also have what it is going to look like visually and sound like. You have to get back into the music of the piece and what the dialogue is like. There are all these agreements, most of us. Or you can be very simplistic and write a story that has maybe even a great theme. You do not have to have all the stuff that I go into, but that is part of what I enjoy. Some people do it almost effortlessly. They do not have to fight it at all.
David [55:58 - 56:04]: You talk about what it is going to look like. How have you expanded, refined, honed your visual palette?
Eric [56:05 - 56:45]: I do not know. I always had a pretty great visual mind as to what I think would make a good scene. What would be memorable about New Orleans, for instance, and what would be great? I am not going to tell you what I did, but it is pretty great. I think it is something that is almost expected, but unexpected, so I think it is something that will be very special that people say, "Oh, yeah, remember the scene when they did X, Y, and Z?". Then there are things you learn that you did not know. I did not realize they had a streetcar already there in 1890. It was actually founded in 1840. So how do I use a streetcar?
David [56:45 - 56:46]: Do you go to New Orleans?
Eric [56:47 - 57:11]: I have been there. I mean, it was on Benjamin Button. I have been there a few times. One of my first jobs was to rewrite a Paul Newman movie. I was very young, and they sent me down to Louisiana. I always tell this story: I bought a new pair of corduroys and had a faux leather briefcase and walked on the set, and Paul said, "Our savior is here".
David [57:11 - 57:11]: You are right.
Eric [57:11 - 58:16]: I was literally 19 years old, like a kid. It is always exciting that you. It is exciting to hear what people. It is exciting to see the movie, hear what the characters are saying, how they interpreted what you wrote, what these genius directors I have been lucky enough to work with, how they envision these things and make them much more, I think, in most cases, more interesting than you imagined it was going to be. Not all cases, but in many, many. Then it becomes this whole thing that is an entertainment. I do not have a. I think you can do the same thing on a streamer. This show, Adolescence, just because it is contemporary right now, is amazing. The writing, acting, so that it just makes you think about things that all of a sudden you had not thought about and care about things you might not have cared about.
David [58:16 - 58:20]: So a place like New Orleans. Are you a note-taker?
Eric [58:21 - 58:37]: A little bit, not crazy. I will write what I think are the highlights of something that will remind me what I need to do. Like, I will just write "tension". Somebody will say they think we need more tension. I will write "tension" so I will know where it came from.
David [58:38 - 59:15]: All right, so let us talk about the beginning of Forrest Gump. "There is nothing but blue sky. A legend appears. A lot of this is true. And we see a feather lighter than air, floating, like time passing slowly, floating by". It is interesting how you wrote that. Lots of commas to match the cadence of that sentence, really matches the cadence of that scene. "And we see it is over a city. A breeze catches it, moving it here and there above the city". I saw another version of this intro, I swear, that said Savannah explicitly. Maybe that was a later one.
Eric [59:15 - 59:18]: Probably later, because then when they decided where they were going to shoot it.
David [59:18 - 59:26]: Yes. Because that is. Now, the feather is the beginning of the movie, the end of the movie. So that is explicit, deliberate. Why a feather?
Eric [59:27 - 59:45]: Because I think it. You can decide that somebody put it there, or it is just floating around in a breeze. That had to do with the theme of the movie. Where is it going to go next and all that? That was smart, I think. I think so.
David [59:45 - 59:52]: What makes for good intros? If I am sitting down, I am ready to write a movie. What should I be focused on in a good intro?
Eric [59:52 - 60:38]: Oh, gee, I do not know. I think it depends on how you want to get the audience into the same thing of writing a book. What is going to compel people to want to read past page two? The great ones are, "It is the best of times, it is the worst of times". You say, "Oh," or, "Call me Ahab". All these great moments that start things that you say, "Gee, I want to find out more about this". That is what I try to do in a literary way, try to bring people into the environment, sight, sound, etcetera. And have you start feeling that you have found a home.
David [60:38 - 60:39]: Found a home?
Eric [60:39 - 62:00]: Yes. You feel comfortable where this is. It might be uncomfortable to you, but you feel like this is somewhere you would be willing to live for two hours. Or it might be something that is frightening to you, that you will say, "I want to see what this does to me for a couple hours". Yes. I think it is important in some of these movies, when I say find a home, is that you feel comfortable that you are in with Forrest Gump. You find that he is comfortable to you, that he is compassionate in his own way.
In Benjamin Button, they actually. It is a home, and they have borders and people, and there is noise and life going on. We almost did this, which I found was lovely. David decided eventually not to do it, but we were going to end the first Benjamin Button with the end credits going to be, supposedly, obituaries from various newspapers of all the characters. It was spectacular what he had drawn up and everything from wherever they. The Times Picayune, I think, was the New Orleans newspaper, or if they had moved. Like a man killed by, hit by lightning seven times.
David [62:00 - 62:00]: Right.
Eric [62:00 - 62:07]: That kind of thing. It is kind of great. So you have these whole lives that you feel like you have now experienced.
David [62:08 - 62:18]: When you are teaching the writers workshop, what do you feel like the writers do not get that you really need to impart on people?
Eric [62:18 - 63:03]: I think part of it is somebody's ability to just tell a story and try to encourage you to join it and benefit every. I was thinking of a script that I did not like, one of the writers had, and I think it made you feel like you are not going to be part of this. It pushes you away. If you can get people to come in and be a party to it, they do not have to like it. You want them to love it, obviously, you want them to be charmed by it and moved and all those things. But you have to make it so that I think that is why I say they feel like they are home.
David [63:03 - 63:08]: Well, here. I am just looking at this now. You can see there is a lot of prose here.
Eric [63:08 - 63:13]: Yes, that is too much. They would never let that happen again. How many pages is that script?
David [63:13 - 63:15]: Well, this is just one page.
Eric [63:15 - 63:18]: No, I am just saying, how many pages is the whole script? Oh, yes.
David [63:18 - 63:23]: Let us see. This is 260-something pages. It says cherry revision.
Eric [63:23 - 63:41]: So maybe this is a compilation, that is all. Yes, so you are going to have half scenes. There is no way in hell 266 is, you know, it is a minute a page. So 60 into 260 is a four and a half hour movie or something. That is not happening.
David [63:41 - 63:42]: No, that is a compilation.
Eric [63:42 - 63:44]: No, that is a compilation of stuff.
David [63:46 - 63:48]: How did you improve your ability to write dialogue?
Eric [63:48 - 64:46]: I do not know if I ever was good or bad at it. I just write what I think I want them to say. The director will change a lot of it. The most impactful one for me was on the movie The Insider. I had written like a page and a half monologue that I thought was pretty good. Pacino called me that morning before he was going to shoot it. He said, "I can do this with one look". I said, "Really?". I said, "Let's call Michael Mann. See what Michael says". Michael said, "Let's shoot it both ways". In the movie, it is one look. So he did not need all the words. Sometimes I am trying to find ways to describe things, and maybe I go overboard or something. Or maybe an actor can take it and make it their own way of speaking. As long as they are able to impart what you are trying to say, I do not have any big feeling about it.
David [64:46 - 64:50]: What are the things that you are thinking about, the axioms, the principles, as you are writing dialogue?
Eric [64:50 - 65:11]: I think you have to carry the scene. You want to present issues in the scene that they are trying to work out, or they are romancing about, or whatever, so that it becomes valuable. You do not want to just kill time, what they call "shoe leather".
David [65:11 - 65:12]: Why is it called that?
Eric [65:12 - 66:07]: Because it is just wasting time walking around. You want to have something. It does not have to be a gigantic revelation, but you also want to move the story along. If you have a character say, "Will you marry me?" all of a sudden, you are into something that could be way larger than what you had anticipated. This thing I am writing, the woman he is in love with is the daughter of his rival, like Romeo and Juliet, in a way. It is dangerous. As they get closer and closer, it becomes more fraught. Eventually the father says, "You are dead to me". So eventually he may even kill her. So anyway, it becomes just more dramatic, I hope.
David [66:08 - 66:15]: Your stories are simple. I can just hear that, and I can see it. There is a discipline to simplicity, I think.
Eric [66:16 - 66:44]: Yes, I wish I had more of it, in a way. Some people can write simply and with such sparse prose and sparse language, but it says the same things with so many fewer words than I use. I am less sophisticated using language as I wish I was. That is just how some people are. I am mixed about Jonathan in some of his works, but.
David [66:44 - 66:45]: Saffron?
Eric [66:45 - 67:10]: No, him I know quite well. We did Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close. He is a good writer, very good. I was thinking more of, who wrote Crossroads and Connections? Jonathan, what the hell is his name? It is ridiculous, but he probably writes the best sentences. I do not know if he spends time looking up words because he uses words I have never heard of, but they seem to come naturally to him. Jonathan Franzen.
David [67:10 - 67:11]: Jonathan Franzen, yes.
Eric [67:11 - 67:47]: It is natural to him. When you read his, you gush because you go, "Oh, my God, how do you write this sentence?". Then here comes another one. They are unbelievable. The big deal with a writer is that you have to put one word in front of another, and you hope you are putting the right words in the right way. That is the best lesson you could get. Those who are good at it are simple, like Hemingway. Those writers just come by it second nature. I do not know what makes it bubble up inside of them.
David [67:49 - 67:53]: What is it about rewriting that feels laborious to you?
Eric [67:54 - 68:09]: You have had the adventure of trying to create something new, so now you are just trying to improve what you have already written, which is fine, but it does not feel so adventurous, and it is a little more like work.
David [68:09 - 68:15]: I think that is revealing that you just said the adventure of creating something new. I think that tells me a lot about how you write.
Eric [68:16 - 68:56]: Yes, I think it is true. I think I have lived my life that way. I have had a lot of children. I have had more than one wife and things, and I think it is a great adventure. Sometimes I have not behaved the way I should have, but I have learned what I have learned and decided not to take lessons from what I have learned and all that. That is with writing too. Trying to create something that people will say, "Wow, this is really". It might be too big, might be too expensive, might be all sorts of things, but they will never say they are not interesting or a good story.
David [68:57 - 69:03]: I do not know why I had the, maybe it is because we are in Santa Monica, I just had the image of someone who is just like surfing a giant wave, and you are kind of like, "I do not".
Eric [69:03 - 69:04]: I am going to go.
David [69:04 - 69:25]: You kind of come back up, and you are just on this wave, and the entire time you are like, "We are just going to stay on this wave". I know that if I can stay up, the whole thing is going to go. But the fact that you are calling it the adventure of trying to figure out something new, I think just says so much about what it is that you are going for and the kind of unfolding. But then you do also know what your destination is because you start with that end in mind.
Eric [69:25 - 71:06]: Yes. I am helped along by, as I said, I do a lot of adaptations. I know what the material is unless I am creating something. A lot of the things I have written are strict adaptations to some extent, even though I play with them in major ways, or they are almost all original writing. Benjamin Button was just a bad short story that Scott Sugar wrote because he needed some money for Collier's magazine. But what it was, obviously I did not come up with, was the idea of aging backward, which is profound. Yes, it is profound.
The closest I came to that in my own writing was I had someone else write it, and we will see if it ever gets made. I had someone write it about 10, 15 years ago. I woke up and I said to my wife, "I had this idea. What if I died? You woke up and you found I am dead, and you happen to like me, and you are grieving, and you are with a priest or a rabbi or somebody who could give you some consolation". And you say, and he says to you, or she says to you, "What could I do to make your grief feel easier to you?". She says, "I would like to spend just one more day with him". So I had a thing written about a 24-hour bit where it comes true that this guy who was dead all of a sudden came back to life, and they had 24 hours left to live. And what was their relationship, and what did they get to solve, and what did they get to? It is pretty great.
David [71:06 - 71:07]: That is beautiful.
Eric [71:07 - 71:26]: Yes, it was really beautiful. As the time compressed, as you near the last hour, and she knows that he does not know it, and things that she wants to accomplish in those moments, it is pretty beautiful. I do not think it is as profound as aging backward, but there is something to it that I think was quite touching.
David [71:26 - 71:31]: When you win your Oscar, at the very end, you say, "I may not be the smartest man around".
Eric [71:31 - 71:33]: "But I know what love is. I sure do. Thank you".
David [71:33 - 71:38]:Forrest Gump says, "I am not a smart man, but I know what love is".
Eric [71:38 - 72:02]: Yes, I did that because of that. I did know, I do know what love is for me. As I say, I have a lot of children, so I know that when they love me and I love them, and I have many, many people in my life, so I am surrounded by love as best as possible. He was saying it quite differently because he is saying that he is not intelligent, but that he knows.
David [72:03 - 72:28]: I think that is what we see in a lot of your movies, that feeling of love. I mean, to go to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It is losing your father. My goodness. It is like a sense of just aching grief and separation, and you really feel the pain of that. There is something about the way that your movies.
Eric [72:28 - 73:10]: I think it was Elvis Mitchell, you know, he was a New York Times film critic. He does for NPR, he has radio interviews with a lot of film people. He is a friend, and when I, he said, "Your movies are all about loneliness". Yes, I think it is true. They are about when you really think about us as people being. I am not sure I am that lonely, but I do not like being alone. I am not great with that. But loneliness is probably a driving force. It might be a driving force for my career.
David [73:11 - 73:51]: What was wild is after I finished a rewatch of Button, and after I finished it last week, I wept about things in my own life. I had not wept in so long. I mean, I cried out to God. It just fully. I was on my bed, and I practically had to wash the pillowcase because I. You made me feel certain pains that I have had around loneliness and sadness and feelings of emptiness in my life. Something about that movie just brought it up, and I just wept. I wept. Crying.
Eric [73:51 - 73:52]: Was it cathartic?
David [73:52 - 74:12]: Well, that is the thing, when you are just weeping, and you are completely out of yourself, afterwards, it is really nice. There is something about the shedding of tears that is a kind of catharsis. What is strange is it feels really good to cry that much because there is no resistance.
Eric [74:12 - 74:20]: Yes. Once you can do that, it is important, I think. Wow, wow. I am glad that it affected you that way.
David [74:20 - 74:21]: Yes.
Eric [74:21 - 74:22]: Love that.
David [74:22 - 74:28]: What is wild is that first the movie affected me, and then it influenced, it showed me something about my own life.
Eric [74:28 - 74:39]: Yes. That is nice. Maybe there is some truth to it. Maybe I hit on the truth. I do not know. But hit on a truth to you anyway. I am sure there are other people who say it is ridiculous.
David [74:40 - 74:46]: I just cannot even imagine what you experience writing these movies emotionally.
Eric [74:46 - 75:45]: I am moved by them, and a lot comes out of my own life. Things that are painful to me, or how I can experience them. It is a lot. I was at a panel discussion at the Writers Guild, and I think I had been nominated for a Writer's Guild Award. Anyway, that was who the people were. The moderator started by saying, "I want to be Eric Roth". I said, "Okay, well, you have had to have had cancer three times". "You have to have been divorced a few times." "You have to have had some other tragedies and children things". After a while, it was laughable. Everybody was laughing because everybody has their own stuff. You may want to be successful in some way, which I am, but it is not. I am still me.
David [75:46 - 75:52]: Do you feel like going through those things makes the grief, the suffering, so much more real in your films?
Eric [75:53 - 78:20]: I do not know if. I cannot speak to that. We have this thing I am doing with Ben Affleck, which is really interesting. He calls me, he says, "I want to do a Mank Room". I said, "What are you talking about?". He says, "You know that movie Mank you wrote?". Actually, David Fincher's father. We helped it out anyhow, and I was a producer on it. I said, "Yes, that is how they did writers' rooms". That is how they did movies in the 30s and 40s, whatever. They would bring in great writers, and they paid. Overpaid everybody, and they would sit around in the studio and say, "We want a movie about a vampire". So they would figure out a vampire movie. They would go away and write anyway.
He says, "Yes, that is what I want to do". "I want you to find me, if you are willing to do this, find me, like, four or five writers, and you be Yoda, and let us put together a room". "And I am probably going to pay just basically minimum". Which made my ability to get all the writers I would have maybe liked, even though I ended up with great writers, they were all TV writers because they had not, you know, they were. They were pretty successful, like showrunners. So we had a room of four, and I think we got maybe three really good scripts, four, which was great. Now he wanted to do it again. So now we have eight more writers, and I am like Yoda to them. I like doing that, but everybody is different. So you learn from everybody else.
On Fridays, every week, for the duration of our first room, anyway, we had a salon. Fincher came in, and Michael Mann, and David O. Russell, and Bradley Cooper, and Rob Reiner. It was spectacular. But there were no cameras, no nothing. Just them talking to the writers and some guests we had. But the thing that was most consistent about everybody was authenticity. They wanted authentic. You can be in the most unauthentic Marvel movie, and they wanted that to be authentic within that realm. So that was the key thing for everybody. Whether that is true or not, I do not know.
David [78:20 - 78:33]: What is it about collaborations that you have really been drawn to? I mean, you have collaborated with the most insane group of people. Spielberg, Fincher. You are talking about Bradley Cooper. We have talked about.
Eric [78:35 - 78:36]: No, it is insane.
David [78:36 - 78:37]: Michael Mann.
Eric [78:37 - 79:15]: I think I learned. I am not stupid. I learned that directors, for me, were the key to getting movies made. So I linked up with directors having them like my material. So I was a leg up on that. I wrote a movie for Kurosawa called Rhapsody in August. I have worked with the best actors and best directors in my. For the 60 years I have been at it. There are a bunch of people I wish I had worked with. Each one is different. It is a marriage, though. You have to be willing to get married.
David [79:16 - 79:17]: What did you learn from Spielberg?
Eric [79:18 - 80:04]: Some things I will not say, but I will say he has an incredible sense of entertainment. Also, being able to portray things that are childlike in some ways. The entertainment value of his work is incredible. He can do what I call Rube Goldberg. He can do a maze of things. I think his Saving Private Ryan had a thing where someone got shot on the thermos, and blood was dripping, and something else. I do not know. He can do that. In other words, something. He can reach for a box of cereal, and 12 other things happen.
David [80:04 - 80:04]: Right.
Eric [80:05 - 81:20]: He is very talented that way. He is very quiet. He is a lonely sort of man, in a way. A nice man. But he lives in his own world to some extent. Everybody is different. Some are more generous, some are less generous. It is a marriage. You have to find a way to negotiate because as strong as you may feel about something, eventually, it is the director who is going to make a decision. So I like to find what I say is like the third rail or the third way where we then both can agree on what we would like it to look like. That does not always happen. Sometimes I am disappointed, and sometimes I am thrilled. So I continue to work with directors as much as I can. I will work with Denis Villeneuve again. Yes, yes. I will work with Marty again, I hope. We are just getting pretty old, both of us, so we will see. I like to. There are a few new directors I like maybe to work with. But they are all there.
David [81:20 - 81:23]: You said to me in the kitchen, "I always enjoy the writing. I always enjoy".
Eric [81:23 - 81:26]: I love the writing. I enjoy it.
David [81:26 - 81:29]: Is that because of the topics that you choose? Is it part of it?
Eric [81:29 - 81:34]: Yes. I go into worlds that I love, love trying to negotiate.
David [81:34 - 81:40]: What do you do? Do you just wait for the pitch, wait for the pitch, and then you kind of find the fat pitch and you just go for it, or?
Eric [81:41 - 82:06]: I have an idea of what I want to write, what is the gold in the thing. It is true what you said, though. I, going back to page one, I know the first time I go and write it, it is not right. What is the story I am telling? Why is it going this way? Why is it stopping? How can I do this better? Then all these details start filling in, and I say, "I like this".
David [82:06 - 82:07]: Okay, tell me more about the details.
Eric [82:07 - 83:25]: The details just pop up when you are doing, like, 1860 Sicily. Then you start reading about, well, they were fighting for citrus. Who was going to control the citrus crop? The winner was eventually this one family. I love this detail: as a sign of their victory, they put a lemon on top of their gate. It was a high, tall gate, but a lemon on top, and that made them the victims.
I had a scene where, in this thing, I have a scene where our hero, I am not sure he is so hero, but the lead in the movie wants vengeance on a rival don. He comes sneaking into an opera. While the opera is going, I have him slit his throat. The guy whose throat he is slitting is a guy who cast himself as a singer. So he is doing a baritone with the opera singer. That was pretty good.
David [83:25 - 83:33]: Wait, so how in the world, with like 1860s Italy, I would not even know how to think through character? I mean, I guess you can read a lot, but there is.
Eric [83:33 - 84:34]: I read some, but also I just envision. Well, let us say it is an amphitheater. So it was outdoors. I did it because they had outdoor amphitheaters. It is supposed to be a small kind of town. He sneaks behind this guy, this kind of rotund guy who is full of himself and unscrupulous. He probably deserves to get killed if you believe in that stuff. I have him cut his throat. What I did then was, because that was not enough for me, I have that the opera singer is the only person who saw him cut his throat. So he has this for the rest of our movie, and he becomes a slightly instrumental character because the whole group of them came to New Orleans for various reasons. They brought all these Sicilians to New Orleans, and that is where the Mafia started in America. But this guy knows that he cut this guy's throat, and he has that on him in a certain way.
David [84:35 - 84:49]: How deliberate are you about cultivating inspiration? I mean, we have talked a lot about, mentioned Proust. You read a lot of novels, you watch a lot of movies. There are thousands of references you can pull from. Is that something that is deliberate, or is that sort of a?
Eric [84:49 - 85:32]: That is deliberate. But it is also. I like to even quote things because I am just so moved by them. So I like to use them. Like that Lillian Hellman thing I said to you. I think I have used that in a couple of scripts, but because I love it less. It is so textual and everything else. I have quoted other things or used them where I will give credit. I do not plagiarize them, I will say. So, I just think it makes a richer reading experience for the reader. Because most people now just read the dialogue. They avoid the rest of it.
David [85:32 - 85:34]: The reader. So as you are trying to shop the phone.
Eric [85:34 - 85:51]: Yes. You have that also. So you have to. Do you have to make a script for a reader for somebody to say, "Oh, boy, I see this"? "I can see why I would want to make it"? Aside from whatever their judgment is about the commerciality of it, with expenses, and how long is it going to be? All those things. Earlier you.
David [85:51 - 85:56]: Were talking about things standing the test of time. How do you think about making something perennial?
Eric [85:57 - 86:08]: I do not know. I think certain things, like, I think Forrest Gump survived and continues because I think parents show it to their 11-year-olds.
David [86:08 - 86:09]: That is what happened to me.
Eric [86:09 - 86:16]: Yes. So their 11-year-olds love it, and you censor out the little bit of sexuality in it. Or just say. I actually.
David [86:16 - 86:26]: I did not realize until I was preparing for this that Forrest Gump's mom had sex with the principal. So I learned that this morning. I was like, "I have seen that movie like five times".
Eric [86:26 - 86:27]: I know. Yes.
David [86:27 - 86:29]: Somehow Bob and I laugh.
Eric [86:30 - 87:25]: "We can do something for you, Mrs. Gump". I had no idea. Anyway, I think that is why that is persistent. Benjamin Button, we will see. I think maybe the loveliness of it will make it persist, but I do not think you can know. Certain things last, and certain things do not. I could tell you that I think Star is Born is really lasting, and it has outlasted movies like the movie that won Best Picture, Green Book. I defy anybody to have the same feeling about. They may like Green Book or whatever, they like it. But I think Star Is Born, though, because the music and Lady Gaga and all that makes it still feel very fresh. I do not know. I am not sure about Dune, whether it will last the same way. I do not know Dune 1 and 2? I do not know.
David [87:25 - 87:26]: Did you write Dune 2?
Eric [87:26 - 87:32]: No. No, I told him I had other worlds to conquer, which was funny, I thought.
David [87:33 - 87:39]: How do you think about the premise? Are you looking for that a lot? Because that is what you found with Benjamin Button. We have been talking about character.
Eric [87:41 - 88:49]: I think the premise comes along with the, when you are adapting something. There is something in it that I am about. I am going to do a Sydney Sweeney movie. Oh, wow. Yes. She found this wonderful short story called "I Pretended to be a Missing Girl". So the premise is a down-and-out 20-year-old sleeps around and uses drugs or alcohol and sees on a motel lobby a poster for a missing girl amongst other posters. The girl kind of looks like her, and she says, "I think I will go scam this family and get some money from them and get the hell out of there". So she goes to the family and knows enough about the girl and learns enough about her to where the parents want her back so bad that they are convinced it is her. She is going in to meet her younger brother, who is like 9 years old, and the younger brother says, "Run, run as fast as you can". It is spectacular what happens.
David [88:49 - 88:53]: So when you hear a premise like that, what is your thought? Is it like that?
Eric [88:53 - 88:53]: I love this.
David [88:53 - 88:56]: Is it juicy? Is it that you can do something?
Eric [88:56 - 89:40]: Yes, it is juicy. It makes me, it also, I was interested in doing something that I could get made rather quickly as I am getting. I am 80 years old, so I am running out of time here. So I thought with her being a big movie star, and this kind of idea which I think I could build on, I already said, well, it should not be just this girl's missing photograph there. It should be hers too. So in other words, we know that she is a missing person, and have her. Then maybe I will. Probably. That is probably how I will start the movie, and they will have her go park out in front of her home, and you will see her mother and father, and she will eventually leave.
David [89:41 - 89:45]: Now, as you think about themes for that movie based on what you said.
Eric [89:45 - 90:23]: I am not sure what that is yet because I do not know. That may just be a potboiler. Some things are just Hitchcock movies or something. So I am not sure. I will probably find something in it. I know I want the villain, which is the father, because he actually has his daughter in the basement. But I want him to be so evil. But he is intelligently evil, like Silence of the Lambs. So he is a great kind of. You have this dynamic between these two people. I know that. That is what I know so far.
David [90:23 - 90:31]: Is your writing. You are still writing on that program that gives you no access to the Internet? That was invented by the Egyptians, right?
Eric [90:32 - 91:09]: Yes, it is a DOS program. The worst part about it is it runs out of memory at like 40 pages or something. 40 pages, yes. So at least you have got an act written. You better print it out, or it is going to go away. Because once all of a sudden, it will say "too much memory" or something, or "overloaded memory," and it will make pages disappear. So you do not want to get there. I am just superstitious. I should probably learn how to use Final Draft and call it a day.
David [91:09 - 91:11]: Then what do you do? You print, and you just?
Eric [91:11 - 91:14]: I print it, and then my assistant retypes it.
David [91:14 - 91:15]: Based on your edits.
Eric [91:16 - 92:06]: Yes. I have edits. Then we will edit together, and I will keep going through it till I am going to turn it in, and she will retype it because I do. My movie program is the bulk of the writing. But I will also. Because when you are a writer, I say most, or 24 hours a day, it is on your mind. So I will put an email. I will write a scene in email or in text and just on a scrap paper or something. So it is always evolving in some way, you hope, or you think of something. "Oh, my God, I have to put that in". I realized they had left out something in the script. It was a little tiny thing, but I had to run back, and I wrote myself a note so I did not forget it.
David [92:06 - 92:11]: How much of what you write comes out of your own life, conversations that you have?
Eric [92:12 - 92:46]: Not that much, I do not think. It depends, probably, on the milieu. If it is something that is more. I wrote a not very successful movie called Lucky You, which is about a poker player. I know a lot about gambling. So I could put a lot of stuff I knew in there, but that was because of the subject matter. I also had a television show called Luck with David Milch, and that is about horse racing, which I know a lot about. So I could put all sorts of.
David [92:46 - 92:50]: Do you feel like you learn more from the successes or the failures?
Eric [92:51 - 94:09]: I do not know. I think it is a different question you would have to ask a different writer. Because I have had so many movies made. A lot of things were not successful, that it becomes, I do not want to say less important, but not as important in a certain way. The writing is equally important to me, or maybe even more important, that I can create something that is new and different, explores areas and all that that I love about it. If it does not work, then I probably missed something, which is fine. I do not have the same ego that way in it now. I just love to do the work without questioning what is going to happen with it, even though I still care. It is meaningless to have a screenplay that is not going to be filmed. It is just going to go in a drawer. So I do not know. That is a great question. What you learn from when you made mistakes. I am not sure. If you do not try to start attributing those mistakes to others, it is a good, cheap way out. To a director or the actors did not do it right, or they did not cast the right people. I do not know.
David [94:09 - 94:22]: Do you feel like the market for movie popularity, the Oscars, is efficient? What I mean by that is, if you were to take your most popular movies, how much does that correlate with what you feel are the best movies?
Eric [94:24 - 94:25]: My movies?
David [94:25 - 94:25]: Yes.
Eric [94:26 - 94:36]: I think each year is different as to what I would say is a movie maybe I would have rather written. Something that is not in my.
David [94:37 - 94:48]: But do you feel like the movies that you are known for, that are the most popular, are those your best movies, or do you feel like there are these other movies that either did not get picked up, they did not do well, where you were like, "Dang, that was a darn good script"?
Eric [94:49 - 95:13]: I have a few of those. I have a pretty ridiculous batting average for getting movies made. So I do not have that many scripts that have not been made. So I cannot hearken back to that. I am batting pretty high. It has gone a little less as they make fewer and fewer movies. So it is harder to get to me.
David [95:13 - 95:21]: I love the line from Button. They are at the funeral. "She taught me to play the piano and what it meant to miss somebody". Very much your line.
Eric [95:21 - 95:43]: Yes, that is. I like that line. I think one of the lines I remember from that movie, and I do not remember exactly what he said, was when the tugboat captain is dying, he says, "You can rail at God," and something like that. He says when it comes to the end, you have to make peace, basically. That one I like.
David [95:44 - 95:44]: Thanks for doing this.
Eric [95:45 - 95:49]: Thanks for doing it. Good. Thank you. Lovely question. It is a really good job.
David [95:49 - 95:50]: Thank you.
Eric [95:50 - 95:51]: Yes. This is better than the normal one.
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