Halina Reijn ('Babygirl'), James Mangold ('A Complete Unknown'), Jason Reitman ('Saturday Night'), Jesse Eisenberg ('A Real Pain'), Justin Kuritzkes ('Challengers' and 'Queer') and Payal Kapadia ('All We Imagine as Light') join The Hollywood Reporter for our Writer Roundtable. During the conversation, the writers share a scene that they found particularly daunting and the moment they cracked it.
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00:00It's funny, I feel that's not very personal, those things were kind of like details along
00:05the way and along the process.
00:06The things that are really personal in the movie to me are like me talking about basically
00:10just the, I don't know, discomfort, struggles I've had in male relationships, basically
00:16in friend relationships.
00:17In this case, it's a cousin, but it can be a friend and just feeling completely envious
00:22of somebody whose life, you know, is materially and unsustainably much worse than yours.
00:28But just this deep feeling of envy and shame about being this self-conscious, you know,
00:36this self-conscious constantly questioning anxious person.
00:39And Kieran for me is kind of like the, you know, he's like my id, he's like my shadow,
00:44this guy who is so comfortable with himself, even to the point where he's comfortable talking
00:48about his own grief in a way that feels more earthy and rich than the way I talk about
00:52my own grief.
00:53And at the same time, I know that he has this unsustainable life and I just can't reconcile
00:58these two things, this great person and this person who's been hollowed out.
01:02And so that stuff is really personal and, you know, for me, I'm sitting there in the
01:05library writing it and I'm like, you know, crying over writing it and then I'm acting
01:09and it just feels like this almost like cathartic thing of all the stuff I've been feeling about
01:13certain things that I haven't been able to articulate, but that I can through when I'm
01:17writing because it feels like there's this bit of a separation.
01:19And then acting for me has always been this really cathartic thing.
01:22And so for me to get to kind of like bring that to fruition through performing it felt
01:27really cathartic, but ultimately completely unhelpful.
01:30You know, I'm still stuck in those feelings, but maybe in some ways it's good to exercise
01:35it.
01:36That's interesting.
01:37And it's a beautiful scene.
01:38It really is.
01:39Right.
01:41Payal, what for you was the scene?
01:43There's a scene which is like a kind of a magic realism in the film, which is going
01:48from a very realistic documentary kind of film to something that becomes almost dreamlike
01:53towards the end.
01:55And it was an important scene for me because it was the one I wrote first, which is odd
02:00for this movie when you see it.
02:02So it was kind of like for me, the way I write is that I have, I write random scenes which
02:07have nothing to do with each other, but just based on these characters and somewhere try
02:11to connect the dots.
02:13I still haven't gotten over the three act structure problems that I have, I'm struggling.
02:17I'm with you.
02:20That shit's hard.
02:21It's hard.
02:22So this is like the connecting dots that I like to do.
02:24And I enjoy that very much.
02:26It's like, and there's so many scenes that you write that don't make it to the film.
02:29And they just like the juice of it all.
02:32And it's so fun.
02:33But this scene I had from the start, which was, you know, where she where she sort of
02:37imagines her husband.
02:40And it was really important to me that because it's a story about a woman who is in a relationship,
02:45an arranged marriage with a guy who's vanished from her life.
02:49But that relationship is seen as something that is acceptable by society.
02:54And she really kind of looks down on her roommate who is having an affair with the person who,
02:59you know, the society would never accept because of a difference in identity and religion.
03:04And you know, she's like, this is not legitimate.
03:06This is not the right way to be.
03:08And so for me, this disappearing husband didn't really have to come back to tell her anything.
03:15She needed to sort of purge this morality out of her life.
03:19And in that sense, I connected a lot with Baby Girl because, you know, our codes of
03:25morality and sexuality and desire in different countries are different for women, but it's
03:30still the same fundamental struggle.
03:33And she needed to kind of, you know, see the light in a world where it was all dark for
03:39her.
03:40And that's also where the title comes from.
03:41And for me, the scene was difficult to do because it kind of is this.
03:44It could go either way.
03:45It could completely, you know, because it slips into a kind of a fantasy world in a
03:51very realistic film.
03:53So I was very afraid of how to pull this off.
03:56And I relied a lot on sound design to do it, a kind of an internal sound design.
04:01And I enjoy that very much because cinema gives you those palettes in your, I mean,
04:06the colors in your palette and one of them is sound.
04:09And I think, yeah, for me, it was a tough scene to do it.
04:15The result was magical.
04:16I thought it was absolutely magical, that's so poetic and beautiful and very clear also
04:21in that sense.
04:22Of course.
04:23Very well done.
04:24Yeah.
04:25Justin, from either of yours, was there one that was particularly daunting?
04:29Yeah, the ending of Challengers, you know, because I was pretty militant throughout the
04:38entire process of making the movie that we were never going to, this is a spoiler, but
04:43yeah, that we were never going to declare a winner of the match.
04:47Because for me, by the time they arrive at that final scene, all their cards are out
04:53on the table and they're having the most open and honest conversation of their lives all
04:58together and they're having it through tennis.
05:00And they're all really playing tennis again for the first time in years, you know, Tashi
05:04included.
05:05And so for me, the match doesn't matter anymore.
05:08You know, the score doesn't matter.
05:10And I felt like declaring a winner would cheapen that.
05:15But of course, because it's a movie at the scale that it was made, there's pressure from
05:19various points to, you know, this is a sports movie.
05:22We have to know who wins.
05:23If we don't say who wins, people are going to leave and give it a bad cinema score or
05:29something, you know.
05:32And that pressure was real and I respected it and I got where it was coming from.
05:38But I was, you know, really convinced that that was not the path.
05:43So in pre-production, I was finding ways to keep the fundamental truth of what I was going
05:51for in that ending while also figuring out a way to make it emotionally and sort of viscerally
05:58more satisfying and feel like something had been resolved.
06:03And that's when it sort of dawned on me one day in the production office that within tennis,
06:09there was an answer, which was that in tennis, sometimes the game itself actually brings
06:15the players closer together when there's a volley at the net.
06:18And that had not been in the script yet.
06:21This thing of them literally coming closer and closer together.
06:25And you know, if you think about tennis in relationship to boxing, you know, those being
06:32the two sort of gladiatorial sports where it's one on one, boxing is all about touching
06:37another person and tennis is all about not touching another person, which is why tennis
06:42is a game of repression, you know.
06:45And so it felt all of a sudden like that could be a way to have our cake and eat it, too,
06:52with the ending where finally they touch in the game.
06:55That's great.
06:57And a huge cinema score.
06:58Yes.
06:59Most importantly.
07:01And a cinema score went through.
07:05I am now the president of Paris.
07:09Helena, the scene for you?
07:12For me, there's a scene in my movie where they, where Harris Dickinson, who plays Samuel,
07:18her intern, and Nicole Kidman, who plays Romy, really have their first long meeting.
07:23And it's in, I call it the cheap hotel room.
07:26And the challenge of that whole scene is that for me, they go through a whole marriage within,
07:31let's say, 12 hours.
07:32And so they had to, you know, be able to play all those different things.
07:34And we build it.
07:35It was a build set.
07:36And I wanted nobody in there except my DP, Jasper Wolff, who's a genius, and them.
07:40And we put microphones everywhere so that they could be completely alone.
07:45There's a lot of intimacy in that scene, but it's also technically just very hard to do
07:48because what I was looking for is a tone where they kind of go in and out of their performance
07:52that sexuality sometimes is because they're trying out their dynamic.
07:56So I wanted him to give her an assignment and then at the same time be like, oh, sorry.
07:59I'm so sorry.
08:00Am I allowed to say this?
08:01And that tone, I was like, how am I going to write that on the page so that an actor
08:05can read that and actually understands what, because that's quite hard.
08:09So I spent a long time writing it out so that hopefully the actors would understand.
08:14And then when we were doing it, it was the final day and I was incredibly nervous, but
08:18they did such an amazing job and we prepared it very, very intensely.
08:22So they knew all the choreography and they were just amazing.
08:25So that in the moment it could be electrifying and they could even invent new stuff.
08:30So yeah, they're just amazing performers, but I was very nervous.
08:32Jason?
08:33I think it's really important to my writing process, which is at some point in life as
08:39a writer, you feel something.
08:41You feel something and it's really complicated.
08:44It's something that gives you joy, but heartbreak and loneliness and sadness.
08:49And it's like tasting something you've never tasted before.
08:51And as a writer, you go, how am I going to get an audience to feel that one day?
08:55And I think the technique that you build over the course of being a storyteller is figure
08:59out a way to get an audience to feel something really complex.
09:02And that's at the end of the day, really all we're after.
09:07On SNL, there was this thing that I had experienced not only when I was on the floor of Saturday
09:13Night Live, what it felt like right before it went to air, which even as an audience
09:19member, you're scared.
09:20There's no good reason to be scared, but you are.
09:27But I'd also felt it doing the high school play or like a summer camp musical.
09:34And it was how is the audience going to really understand not only that feeling, but how
09:37this whole group coalesces.
09:40And on our film, on Saturday Night, it's strange.
09:43It's not a movie with 90 scenes.
09:44It's a movie with one 90-minute scene.
09:47The entire thing connects from the moment you meet Lauren all the way to the very end
09:49until someone says, live from New York on Saturday night.
09:52And we knew we were going to meet all these characters.
09:55And it became a question of having, oddly, two scripts.
09:57We have the script that is the script, the producible script, which is 100 pages that
10:02we actually numbered backwards.
10:04The first page was page 100, and then it went 99, 98, 97, all the way to the last page.
10:11But then there was a second document that had everything else.
10:14Because we were going to be tracking 30 main characters, 80 speaking roles.
10:21We had days where our production mixer, Steve Morrow, had up to 58 mics going simultaneously.
10:26So many that he had to bring a second mixing board just to mix everything simultaneously.
10:30For us, the only way to actually get to know these characters and feel what it's like
10:35to really be there is for it to sound like you are really there.
10:38And that meant everyone needed dialogue.
10:40Not just the people in the foreground, but there needed to be layers of dialogue as you
10:43moved through rooms so that you were tracking individual storylines, even when you didn't
10:47think you were tracking them.
10:49And so the solution became, one, in our script, it's constant dual dialogue.
10:56That's when you have character dialogue left and right.
10:58And it's not because they're talking over each other.
11:00It's because these are simultaneous scenes that are happening, even though you were maybe
11:03hearing one versus the other.
11:05But then also having an additional document that had the storyline of every other character.
11:10Because in our film, we have to know not only where every person is at any given time, where
11:15every prop is at any given time, where every set piece, where the llama is.
11:19We need to know where everything is in the building so that every time someone walks
11:23through a hallway, up a stairway, or get into an elevator, we can keep track of five different
11:27storylines simultaneously.
11:28That's great.
11:29So great.
11:30Yeah.
11:31Kim.
11:32Thanks, Jesse.
11:33I don't know a scene, but the breakthrough I had or the kind of moment I felt as a writer
11:39I had figured something out was very early starting it, which was Jay Cox had written
11:46a script already that had some great moments in it.
11:49But as I said, was kind of, and I think Jay had handcuffs on, he was avoiding kind of
11:54the stuff between the music.
11:58But in going after that stuff, I also realized that I didn't want to do, you know, a long
12:05time ago, I co-wrote this movie called Girl Interrupted.
12:09And there's this one scene where Angelina Jolie's character comes up to Winona Ryder
12:12and goes, did you, talking about the therapy of the institution, she goes, did you cough
12:16up your secret?
12:17And Winona's character's like, what secret?
12:18And she goes, the one that you cough up and confess and then they let you fucking out.
12:23And it's essentially my own reference to what I think of as the ordinary people or goodwill
12:28hunting structure of movies where you have someone harboring and burying and there's
12:33nothing wrong with it.
12:34It's classic.
12:35I did it and walked the line essentially.
12:37But you have this thing where, and then suddenly somewhere in the third act, it comes out and
12:42then they're, due to modern psychoanalytical theory, they're essentially healed or passed
12:48through to a new, and that I knew I couldn't do that for this movie to Bob Dylan, that
12:55there was nothing he was going to vomit in the third act that was going to suddenly make
12:59you go.
13:00So it was in a way similar to what he was just talking about in terms of Saturday Night
13:06is that I realized, and I thought of my old mentor's movie Amadeus, Peter Schafer's script
13:13and play, and how meticulously it's a movie about genius in which you don't penetrate
13:20the genius nearly as much as you understand Salieri, his wife, the king, and everyone
13:25else in the wake they leave on others, which in its own way allows you to understand this
13:31other character, but you are not, you suddenly don't have to fulfill this other kind of Freudian
13:41scene that's such a staple, and a wonderful one that I enjoy of cinema, but that I knew
13:45wouldn't work in this particular script.
13:48There's one other thing I could say about the quote you used before about movies need
13:52to, a script's job is to sell or to get made.
13:56I didn't mean that in a cynical way.
13:59I meant it in the sense that I was speaking to film students, and very often when you
14:06read young screenwriters' scripts, including my own, they are extremely aggressive in terms
14:13of trying to make sure you see the whole fucking movie, and oftentimes they're told not to
14:21do this because it will offend the director, which is not the reason not to do it.
14:25The reason not to do it is because it's fucking boring to read, and that a great, if we're
14:32talking about someone a screenwriter could take away, there was a great piece of advice
14:36I once received, which is to write a script like you're in a theater watching the movie,
14:41and speaking to a blind person who couldn't see it, and if you took too long to describe
14:48what was going on, you'd get way fucking behind, so you'd go, there's a lot of clouds in a
14:52little house, and that's all you say.
14:53You don't go, it's a cupboard house with a peeling paint on the outside, and a few little
14:57nipples are arriving, and you'd lose the fucking movie, and then you just get out, you know,
15:02a small house in a field, and you try and write that way, and it gives you a sense of
15:07the impatience of your reader, who will stop reading after ten pages, of not, you bring
15:14all your intention, bring all the detail you see, but you can render that with less words,
15:22and make the reading, because it isn't just a list of ingredients, it isn't just a list
15:27of dialogue, it is something that's gonna have to win an actor, it's gonna have to win
15:31a studio, it's gonna have to win a crew, a DP, other people, they're gonna have to decide
15:35to do your movie and not someone else's, so that you can't ignore that the document is
15:40not only a dramatic thing, but a persuasive argument for the existence of the dramatic
15:47thing at the same time, and that's what I meant.