is two guys collaborating to write on writing and collaboration.
Thursday
Apr 16, 2009
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Twister: How Tony Gilroy surprises jaded moviegoers — Martin
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Great New Yorker profile by D. T. Max on screenwriter and director Tony Gilroy, that gives a glimpse into his process and feelings on screenwriting.
Gilroy writes in spurts. “Dolores Claiborne” and “Duplicity” were each written in about twelve weeks. “He feels fucked up and blocked and crazy for a long time,” [Steven] Schiff says. “He tortures himself. Then, as it’s coalescing, he sits down to outline, and when he’s outlining he insists on doing it very, very fast — the whole movie he sketches out in, like, four days. I’m sure that during those four days his wife doesn’t see him and no one talks to him. And the reason he does that, he says, is it’s a movie and it has to move fast. ‘I have to write fast. I have to think fast. My fingers have to move fast.’ ”
It goes into some depth about the ideas of reversals, and how they are changing audience expectations.
Gilroy believes that the writer and the moviegoing public are engaged in a cognitive arms race. As the audience grows savvier, the screenwriter has to invent new reversals — madder music and stronger wine. Perhaps the most famous reversal in film was written by William Goldman, originally in his 1974 novel “Marathon Man,” then honed for the movie version. Laurence Olivier, a sadistic Nazi dentist, is drilling into Dustin Hoffman’s mouth, trying to force him to disclose the location of a stash of diamonds. “Is it safe?” he keeps asking. Suddenly, William Devane sweeps in to rescue him and spirits Hoffman away. In the subsequent car ride, Devane starts asking questions; he wants to know where the diamonds are. After a few minutes, Hoffman’s eyes grow wide: Devane and Olivier are in league! “Thirty years ago, when Bill Goldman wrote it, the reversal in ‘Marathon Man’ was fresh,” Gilroy says. “But it must have been used now four thousand times.”
