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Excerpts From Our Current Issue...

An Education
BY PETER CLINES

The setting was one facet of the story that caught Hornby's interest. "I think if it had been another '60s swinging, freakout, sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll thing I doubt if I'd have been so interested," he says. "It would've felt stale. But I didn't know so much about that kind of London, a London that was very much post-war. It was quite a gray place, but things were very much on the verge of changing." He chuckles and adds, "You know, Philip Larkin said, 'sexual intercourse began in 1963,' and this is set in 1962, so…"

Hornby started writing An Education in 2004 and completed his first draft in about three-and-a-half months. Never one for outlines, Hornby's approach to screenwriting is the same he uses with novels. "I pretty much dive in for both of them," he says. "For me, the difference in screenplays is it's kind of over before you started. You've got 120 pages and there's not a lot on each page. I don't think it's possible to get to the end of a novel without discovering what it's all about. I think you know that pretty early on and you've got a lot of time to think about it. A screenplay, it seems to me, you can fill up those 120 pages really easily without having copped what it is you want to say."

Like what you just read? Read Peter Clines' entire interview with Nick Hornby in the latest issue of Creative Screenwriting!

Marriage Counselors
BY DANNY MUNSO

Favreau worked with Billingsley for a few months to tailor the script to his needs as a filmmaker. "When a new director comes on, it really becomes his movie," Favreau says. "So that was a process of letting go of that and adjusting the script to fit Peter and Vince's vision more than my own."

Favreau concedes that his original draft was less of a big-budget comedy and had more of an independent film vibe to it. Conversely, Vaughn had been working and excelling in studio comedies the past few years, and Favreau thought Vaughn's sensibilities would work better to incorporate notes from the studio on this particular project. "Vince knew exactly what they were looking for and knew exactly what kind of film he wanted this to be," Favreau says. "I felt it was right that he would be the one to make the final adjustments that had to be made to make it a studio comedy." So a month before shooting was set to begin, Vaughn and Dana Fox (What Happens in Vegas) were brought on board to rewrite the script.

Check out the rest of Danny Munso's Couples Retreat article in the latest issue of Creative Screenwriting!

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