By Philip Brown.
Pulitzer Prize winner, Tony award winner, provocateur, family values promoter, and master of fried chicken perversion, Tracy Letts has been many things throughout his career, but above all else he is one of the finest writers of his generation. Raised in the unexpectedly wholesome town of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Letts began his writing career as a divisive playwright in Chicago where he was member of Steppenwolf Theatre. He helped launch Michael Shannon through his incendiary plays Bug and Killer Joe, which went on to be performed throughout the world with controversy following every performance. Then he slid out of shock value with Man From Nebraska in 2004 before winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his 3.5 hour masterpiece of perverse family values, August: Osage County. Along the way he also built up an impressive side career as an actor on stage and screen, including the recent award-winning revival of Who&#8217;s Afraid Of Virginia Wolf? and a much-lauded supporting role on Homeland.
Letts has begun to slide into the film industry over the last decade by a adapting three of his own plays into feature films. First came two brilliant collaborations with director William Friedkin in Bug and Killer Joe, which masterfully expanded the claustrophobic stage productions into gut-punch genre cinema with a brain. Now, his most beloved play August: Osage County hits screens courtesy of director John Wells, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Ewan McGregor, Chris Cooper, Juliette Lewis, Benedict Cumberbatch, and the Oscar-pumping-powers of The Weinstein Company. With the film in the midst of an awards run, Creative Screenwriting Magazine recent got the chance to chat with the incomparable Tracy Letts about the challenges of adapting his own work for the screen, the origins of August Osage County, his ongoing relationship with William Friedkin, his interest in expanding into original screenwriting, and, of course, his relationship with the good people at KFC.
Why is it important for you to adapt your plays into screenplays?
<div id="attachment_6757" style="width: 203px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Tracy_Letts200.jpg"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-6757" class="size-medium wp-image-6757" alt="Tracy Letts" src="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Tracy_Letts200-193x300.jpg" width="193" height="300" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Tracy_Letts200-193x300.jpg 193w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Tracy_Letts200-96x150.jpg 96w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Tracy_Letts200-112x175.jpg 112w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Tracy_Letts200.jpg 200w" sizes="(max-width: 193px) 100vw, 193px" /></a>Tracy Letts</div>
Well, I guess it’s important for me because I like the idea that the movies have a reach that the theater doesn’t have. My first love is the theater, but I recognize—especially being from a small town in Oklahoma—that a lot of people can’t to the theater and certainly can’t get to great theater. In many parts of this country, theater-going just isn’t part of the culture. However, you’re hard-pressed to find anywhere in the country that doesn’t have access to movies. So that accessibility is really important to me and I like the idea that there will be a kid in some small town somewhere who will get a chance to see August: Osage County who wouldn’t have gotten a chance to see the play. Then hopefully it will speak to them in some way, move them in some way, and provoke something in them. And in terms of why I want to be the one to do the adaptation, I love movies and I do think there’s a balancing act that goes on that goes on between trying to create a film and at the same time trying to preserve the thing that made the play want to be a film in the first place. So I just try to walk that line and I think I’m the one who will pay more attention to both of those things than some screenwriter brought in from the outside.
Was there any extra trepidation in adapting August: Osage County since it’s rooted in personal history and also because of the incredible acclaim you received for it?
Well, I don’t know. Sure, of course there must be some part of me that wants to honor those things in the film that I felt that the play already honored. I want to stay true to my original impulses. But at the same time there’s also a bit of carpentry going on and that carpentry needs to be dispassionate. So, it’s probably a mix. I don’t think that the pressures I felt on this one were any special pressures.
It’s a tricky thing to adapt from stage to screen properly, but you’ve managed to do it quite well three times now. Do you have any ground rules or benchmark film adaptations that you look at for how to do that form of adaptation?
No, I don’t think so. I can’t think of what the thing would be that I consider to be the template for doing it. I think it’s different for each piece. All three of the ones that I’ve done have been very different in their own way. The job is the same, but the piece itself will dictate what needs to be done. For instance, with August: Osage County because it’s so spread out in terms of the number of characters, I made a decision early on that the central conflicts had to stay central and as a result I would have to lose some depth in some of the secondary and tertiary conflicts in the characters along the side. So I was going to have to lose some depth to bear down on the central conflict between Barbra and her mother. That’s one way in which you take a three-hour piece and turn it into a two-hour piece. But, the central concerns were different concerns in Bug and Killer Joe. So, I don’t know that there is a template. I think that each piece is different.
What was the most difficult part of adapting August: Osage County for the screen? Length concerns?
I wouldn’t say it was ever a length issue. For me, it was just a matter of sacrificing some depth out in the margins of the piece. I needed to do that and in fact fought for some of those things as I was losing them. I never considered those things fat when I was writing the play. They were important things. But, there’s a reason for the phrase is “cut to chase.” That phrase originates from the movies. Because movies engage an audience differently, they rarely have the patience that we were allowed in the theater. Audiences watch theater differently. They’re leaning forward. Their ears are tuned differently. They have to listen to a lot of language. They pick and choose where their eyes focus on the stage. In the movies, you sit back and you eat popcorn and let it wash over you. It comes to you and you receive it. So, the expectation of action in the dramatic sense is quite different when you’re watching a movie.
Do you consider your three movies to be cinematic in translation or would you have written them differently if they were a movie from conception?
You know, now they look so different to me than the plays. You kind of turn a corner where you go, “Oh fuck, the film is just entirely different from the play.” Even though there’s a lot of the same language and the story is told the same way, the truth is the experience of watching the film is so much different than they experience of watching the play. I just consider them to be separate things now. That was true of Killer Joe and I just had the same experience with August. I just watched it a couple of days ago at the premiere in the New York and it was the first time that I felt that division. I sat and watched the movie and accepted it as a film and something separate from the play. You’re always going to have the experience of seeing the play if somebody does it, but seeing the film is just a separate experience entirely.
How involved do you get to be in your films beyond the script? Are you able to sit in on casting discussions or anything like that?
Well, how involved you get to be has a lot to do with who you are involved with. Killer Joe and Bug I did with William Friedkin and he is very collaborative with the writer. Probably more to the point, Billy’s not answering to a lot of other interests. Billy’s in a place in his career where everyone understands that they’re making a William Friedkin movie. It’s his way or the highway and that’s it. So, it’s not like I had a lot of hoops to jump through on Killer Joe and Bug. I was dealing with Billy always, from first moment to last and he’s very collaborative. August: Osage County was a different deal. I have to say that [director] John Wells was just as cooperative and collaborative, but there were a lot of other interests to be sure. There was Harvey Weinstein, there was George Clooney, there was Meryl Streep, there was Julia Roberts. There were a lot of people who have made a lot of great movies and have opinions about the work. It’s not that everything goes through a committee or that everything was a fight, there were just a lot of opinions that needed to be listened to. So it was a very different thing to serve on this film than it was on the first two.
I always enjoy the dark humor of your work, but often get into arguments with friends over how much of the writing is supposed to be taken as funny. Have you ever run into difficulties with directors or actors who just don’t see the humor in the scripts because of the emotional intensity?
Well, it hasn’t really been a problem. I do think it’s a really important ingredient to my work. I know with both Killer Joe and Bug people would read them and say, “Oh that’s so disturbing and violent and vile, I can’t possibly do that.” And then the first time they heard it out loud, they went, “Oooooh! I didn’t get how funny it was. I couldn’t see that on the page.” I know that Matthew McConaughey definitely had that experience the first time he read Killer Joe. He said he threw it away. He thought it was garbage and vile and wanted to take a shower afterwards. But he had a friend in the business who said, “I think you missed it. Go back and read it again, it’s actually funny.” And Matthew said, “Funny?!” He didn’t realize that any of it was funny at first and then changed his mind after rereading it. I’ve personally never really run into any particular troubles with that though. By and large the people who work on my scripts embrace the humor. Yeah, the humor’s dark, but I think it’s what makes it all work. If that weren’t there, it would be hitting someone over the head with a chair and I’m not interested in that.
<div id="attachment_6761" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/killer-joe-Killer_joe_004_rgb.jpeg"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-6761" class="size-full wp-image-6761" alt="Killer Joe" src="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/killer-joe-Killer_joe_004_rgb.jpeg" width="600" height="321" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/killer-joe-Killer_joe_004_rgb.jpeg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/killer-joe-Killer_joe_004_rgb-150x80.jpeg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/killer-joe-Killer_joe_004_rgb-300x160.jpeg 300w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/killer-joe-Killer_joe_004_rgb-500x267.jpeg 500w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /></a>Matthew McConaughey as Killer Joe</div>
What is it about stories of perverse family values that interests you so much, because certainly those themes are central to both your most recent films Killer Joe and August: Osage County? I particularly got a laugh out of the fact that August was released in time for Christmas.
You know, I love a family drama. The family unit is always going to be ripe material for drama and comedy because we all have personal associations with it. None of us can escape our family. So it’s what accounts for people seeing August: Osage County and saying, “you’ve been spying on my mother” and that sort of thing. It’s because people want to relate to what they’re watching and family is always relatable. As far as my own personal interest…who knows what I’m working out there because I certainly have a very loving family. But you know, we’ve all got family histories and darkness in our family. Nobody gets out of this alive. (Laughs) So that’s part of my interest in it. And yeah, the Christmas release is great fun. I hope people gather up the family and go to see August: Osage County together. I think they’ll get a kick out of it.
Are you pleased that August: Osage County is finally getting released a film after Killer Joe and Bug? I ask simply because while I adore those two movies, they were based on writing you did many years ago as a younger man and the films stirred up old controversies that you wouldn’t necessarily be interested in provoking now. Whereas this film is more in tune with your current sensibilities.
Well, I think that’s true. Some people think that they’re with their plays their whole lives. I’m not one of those guys. Once a play is published and up on a shelf, I’m done with it. I would get sick of working on them year in and year out. So to go back to those and reopen them and see what I was going through back then was a strange experience. August was different of course because although there was a break, the play was still very present for me when we worked on the film. But you know, I think I’m done with taking my plays and turning them into movies. I don’t think that I’ve got any other plays that are particularly right for film adaptations. I think from now on, I’ll be doing an adaptation of someone else’s work or something original for film, which I’m very interested in doing. I like the idea that I might be able to explore something from the ground up as a piece of screenwriting. I’ve done some of that in the past and none of it’s been produced unfortunately, but I’m interested in trying my hand at that a little bit because I love movies and I’m interested in the art of screenwriting. It’s definitely an art form unto itself. The craft isn’t entirely different from playwriting, but it does require a slightly different mindset.
I was curious about that. What had your written before for film? Works for hire? Original projects?
Both of those things. I did an adaptation of a true crime story a few years back that they chose not to pursue. I’ve done a few jobs on assignment and a few jobs on my own and they just haven’t materialized yet. Hey, the movie business is tough. I think if I had just been a screenwriter, I’d still be waiting around for my first script to be produced. I think it’s only because of my success as a playwright that I’ve been able to get some movies made.
What were the other original films you wrote?
Oh you know…they were early efforts before I ever turned my attention to playwriting. They weren’t very good and aren’t worth talking about. (Laughs)
<a href="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/august-osage-county3.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6758" alt="August: Osage County" src="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/august-osage-county3.jpg" width="600" height="262" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/august-osage-county3.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/august-osage-county3-150x65.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/august-osage-county3-300x131.jpg 300w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/august-osage-county3-500x218.jpg 500w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /></a>
Was William Friedkin ever discussed as a possible director for August: Osage County? I enjoyed what John Wells did with the film, but you and Friedkin worked so well together before I was curious if he was ever in the discussion.
No he wasn’t. I don’t really know why that is. The Weinstein Company had the rights to the film and they hired John. I don’t really know why he wasn’t considered, you’d have to ask them. Certainly I enjoyed my collaborations with Bill and would love to have worked with Bill on this. But, I think Billy would say himself that August really wasn’t in his wheelhouse. It’s just not to Bill’s taste. I know he liked the film when he saw it, but it’s not really his thing as a filmmaker. So I don’t know why they didn’t go to him, but I’m not surprised that he didn’t direct it.
Have you two ever talked about doing an original project together?
Yeah, Billy and I have been kicking that around for a couple of years now because we’d like to work together again, but like I said I have no plays left that I would hand over for film adaptation. So we’ve talked about maybe doing a Western together. Bill Friedkin’s never made a Western and I think he should, so I’d like to help make that happen.
Have you ever written for yourself as an actor or have any interest in doing that?
No. I’ve never had any interest in that, which is weird because I like to do both so much. But I just don’t think I would be as good at either job if I was doing both at the same time. Orson Welles isn’t walking through the door any time soon and guys like that a very rare. I think something about doing both would make me very self-conscious. You know, they’re both hard. They’re both really hard in their own way, so to split your focus…my hat’s off to anyone who can do that. But for me, I’d prefer to keep them separate.
Finally, I have to ask: have you ever been contacted by KFC about Killer Joe?
When we were in London with Killer Joe they did in fact threaten a lawsuit. They were giving us free chicken from a store around the corner every night. But when they found out about the way the chicken was being used they threatened a lawsuit, which was such great publicity for us. It was in all of the London tabloids and the ticket sales went way up, so they immediately dropped it and I’ve never heard from them again.

Adapting August: Osage County from Stage to Screen

by Phil Brown
Heavily praised even before release, Gravity is sure to be one of the most widely discussed films of 2013. Audiences will feel woozy from the groundbreaking visuals and yet the film is not merely a work of pure spectacle. Though the story might be deliberately simple, Gravity was conceived around unique writing challenges. The film is about two astronauts (played by George Clooney and Sandra Bullock), who are sent hurtling into space in the first few minutes and spend the remaining 90 struggling to return to earth in real time. The film’s tech might be incredibly elaborate but the script is deliberately minimalistic, routed less in conventional dramatic structures than moment to moment thrills and elemental themes of overcoming adversity and rebirth. Pulling the script together required both a strict adherence to the most base themes in drama and a willful abandon towards the typical paths used to get there.
The concept came from Jonas Cuaron, son of Alphonso Cuaron (Y Tu Mama Tambien, Children Of Men, Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban) who co-wrote and directed film. Jonas grew up around his father’s various filmmaking endeavors and eventually joined the industry himself by writing/directing the Spanish language feature Year Of The Nail. The origin of Gravity began in a smaller, yet equally minimalist film about two immigrants sneaking across the US/Mexican border that Jonas will direct next year. When speaking about his interest in stripping down film narrative with his father, a new project emerged that would maintain that writing purity within a production as ambitious as Hollywood has ever produced. Creative Screenwriting recently got a chance to chat with Jonas Cuaron about Gravity, deviling the origins, themes, production, and challenges behind the utterly unique blockbuster about to stun audiences in theaters nationwide.
<div id="attachment_5862" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5862" class="size-full wp-image-5862" alt="Jonas Cuaron, Screenwriting of Gravity" src="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Jonas-Cuaron.jpg" width="600" height="345" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Jonas-Cuaron.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Jonas-Cuaron-150x86.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Jonas-Cuaron-300x172.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />Jonas Cuaron, Screenwriting of Gravity</div>
PHIL BROWN: I gather the idea for Gravity came from you, so I was wondering if you could discuss the initial impetus behind the project?
JONAS CUARON: Well, it started after I showed my father another script that I’m about to direct. The stories are very different, but that script ignited a conversation between us about the possibility of doing a type of cinema where you have the audience stuck on the edge of their seat for 90 minutes with a thrilling rollercoaster ride, while also engaging them on an emotional and philosophical level. Our conversation was about whether or not it even was possible to make a film that felt like a rollercoaster without excluding the other stuff. It makes it more challenging to write because you have to be very precise about where you transmit those themes.
BROWN: Was it such a minimalistic drama from the beginning?
CUARON: Yes, part of that concept was to strip down to the bare minimum with only two characters. The theory was that if we could make a very archetypical experience, the ride aspect could engage the audience in a more emotional way. We wanted the rollercoaster not just to be about thrills, but also emotions in a way that makes watching it almost cathartic.
<div id="attachment_5863" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5863" class="size-full wp-image-5863" alt="Gravity: Lost in Space" src="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Gravity-Lost-In-Space.jpg" width="600" height="231" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Gravity-Lost-In-Space.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Gravity-Lost-In-Space-150x57.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Gravity-Lost-In-Space-300x115.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />Gravity: Lost in Space</div>
BROWN: Did you have any other concepts for how to create that experience outside of this “lost in space” setting or was that central to the idea from the start?
CUARON: Well, first it was that concept. Then we started talking about what themes and emotions we wanted to explore. We were in London at the time because I had written another script for my Dad that he had cast, scouted locations for, and was about to start shooting. But that project collapsed. Then for many reasons and more for my Dad than I, it was a moment of many types of personal adversity. So we started talking about exploring the idea of talking thematically about adversity. How adversities are part of life and how by overcoming adversity, one can have some sort of rebirth. Not literal rebirth, but more the sense of acquiring new knowledge and growing. So, obviously everyone in life has adversities and that’s relatable, but we thought it would be interesting to explore that theme through augmented adversity. Then the audience could connect and project their own more down to earth adversity onto that. So, we started talking about scenarios that would work and quickly the image of an astronaut spinning and drifting into the black emptiness of space came to us.
BROWN: It strikes me as being very difficult to construct and structure a narrative that unfolds almost entirely in real time. How did you approach that?
CUARON: From the first draft the title was Gravity: A Space Adventure In 3D. We knew from the first moment we wanted it to be in 3D to be as immersive as possible. That was the reason for the real time as well. We wanted the audience to feel like a third astronaut in the scenario. The camera was an avatar for a third astronaut accompanying Ryan. So writing that was very challenging. We had to make it a very specific action-by-action script for many reasons. One was technical because the production would require such crazy technology that the script had to be very specific. There was no room for improvising on set. But also because we knew there would be very little dialogue, so all of the action and imagery had to transmit the dramatic progression of the story. So we had to be line-by-line specific about every moment of action in the film. The script also had to be a very clear map of how the emotional journey progresses. So that set down the harmony. Then I was very blessed with George and Sandra’s involvement. We very specifically mapped all the harmonies and then the actors came in and joined the screenwriting collaboration. They helped us map out the melody and I think they did an incredible job. It’s an emotional ride told entirely through one character and that’s a little bit terrifying because it could have easily not worked. I think George and Sandra brought so much both in terms of the writing and also what they brought to the screen. If the audience doesn’t emotionally invest in those characters then the whole thing doesn’t work and they made it work.
<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-5864" alt="Jonas and Alphonso Cuaron" src="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Jonas+Cuaron.jpg" width="600" height="400" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Jonas+Cuaron.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Jonas+Cuaron-150x100.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Jonas+Cuaron-300x200.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />BROWN: What was the collaboration like between you and Alfonso while working out the screenplay?
CUARON: It was a very fast process. We had been working on that other movie that fell apart and then we talked about the possibility of doing this in one long all-nighter of ping-ponging and throwing out ideas and looking things up on the internet. In that first night we got a very clear map of what the whole story would be. Then after that I was traveling and we were apart. So it became a skype relationship where we would discuss each scene. I could watch out my window as it went from night till morning and then watch on the sky go from morning to night behind my father on the screen (Laughs). It was a very close collaboration and a very good one. On the one hand, we’re family so we understand each other very well and don’t spend much time arguing. We already know what both like and don’t like. But on the other hand, the relationship was very much one of two writers and we worked very well together. The first draft was written in a month. I always say it was a very peculiar thing because we both understood each other enough that we never wasted time and got to the heart of things very easily.
BROWN: So he never pulled the Dad card?
CUARON: (Laughs) No, no, not at all. The only reason to collaborate is to be challenged. The best moments in Gravity are the moments that we disagreed on, because that disagreement always led to a discussion where we discovered a third, better option that neither of us could have come up with on our own. That’s the only reason to collaborate, otherwise you might as well write alone. If he had pulled the patriarchal card, that would have killed the project.
BROWN: How much research did you do into the science of the film? It seemed very realistic to me, but I can’t pretend to be an expert on the subject.
CUARON: When we came up with the idea of doing the story in space, we knew we wanted it to be very, very realistic. It was supposed to almost feel like an IMAX documentary gone wrong. (Laughs) So during the first draft we did a lot of research to try and understand the principles of space exploration as much as we could. Then after we wrote that draft, we met with some astronauts and had to change a couple of sequences because they said, “Are you out of your mind? That would never happen.” Talking to astronauts and physicists was great because the hardest part as a writer was to grasp the concept of zero gravity because it’s completely non-intuitive. If you throw a ball, it can travel forward for an infinite amount of time because there’s no resistance to stop it, but also the force of throwing that ball can push you backwards. Little things like that took a while to nail down.
<div id="attachment_5865" style="width: 977px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5865" class="size-full wp-image-5865" alt="On the set of Gravity" src="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Gravity-On-Set.jpg" width="967" height="494" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Gravity-On-Set.jpg 967w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Gravity-On-Set-150x76.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Gravity-On-Set-300x153.jpg 300w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Gravity-On-Set-370x190.jpg 370w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Gravity-On-Set-270x138.jpg 270w" sizes="(max-width: 967px) 100vw, 967px" />On the set of Gravity</div>
BROWN: Did you get to spend much time on set or did things have to be so locked down for the production that there was no room to ever make script adjustments?
CUARON: It was very locked down. There was no room to change the choreography. But since the emotional ride was so important, I would come by occasionally to work with Sandra and George to find the best way to communicate the emotions. We always had a specific map of the journey, but through working with Sandra we really nailed down the particular moments. The problem with a movie like Gravity as a writer is that there are very few moments where you get to describe the characters and find ways to make the audience connect with them emotionally. It’s very hard because you have to be concise with your words and fine tune constantly. So I was always pissing Sandra off by showing up after a long day of work to make her sit down and try out a new monologue. (Laughs)
BROWN: Could you tell me a little bit about the film you wrote that inspired this project and that you plan to direct this year? I gather it’s about two immigrants struggling to illegally cross a border or something like that?
CUARON: Yeah, that’s not the most precise synopsis. That’s the one that came out. I don’t like to talk about synopsis until later. But what that movie does have that inspired Gravity is that it only has two characters in the desert in the situation where it’s a non-stop nail-biter, but in that journey there’s also an emotional ride and many themes being juggled. For me Gravity was a great experience because early next year I’ll start shooting that film with Gael Garcia Bernal. But when I started writing that film, it was sort of a hypothesis to see if you could make a film that could be all those things. So Gravity was like my guinea pig.
BROWN: That’s a big guinea pig.
CUARON: (Laughs) Yeah, exactly. But it’s nice to finally go into the project now having made Gravity and knowing that idea works. I’m very pleased by the audience response so far because they really engage with it not just as a ride viscerally, but also with the deeper emotions and the themes. We did all these things while writing like describing how she floats into the airlock and assumes a fetal position to experience a rebirth. And it’s really nice to see that the audience is picking up on all those subtle things as we intended. As a writer sometimes you think you’ll put it on paper, but the audience will never get it.
<div id="attachment_5866" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5866" class="size-full wp-image-5866" alt="2001 A Space Odyssey" src="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/2001-A-Space-Odyssey.jpg" width="600" height="240" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/2001-A-Space-Odyssey.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/2001-A-Space-Odyssey-150x60.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/2001-A-Space-Odyssey-300x120.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />2001 A Space Odyssey</div>
BROWN: I have to ask, even though they are very different movies, was 2001: A Space Odyssey something that you and Alfonso discussed while writing? Even just in terms of the representation of space or that terrifying moment where the astronaut tumbles into space?
CUARON: Well, I love 2001. But ironically whenever we talked about movies, none of them took place in space. Everything we talked about in terms of influence were movies that were stripped down experiences. So it was more movies like Spielberg’s Duel or A Man Escaped by Robert Bresson, or Runaway Train. All of them happened on earth, but what they all have in common is a very simple narrative where all the elements become very expressive. Like A Man Escaped is almost a silent experience, but suddenly the walls of the prison become a metaphor for something bigger. In Duel, the truck isn’t just a truck, it becomes a metaphor for everything that oppresses the main character. As a kid, that movie meant a lot to me because that truck became a metaphor for bullies to me.  So that’s more the type of film that we talked about while writing.

Adapting August: Osage County from Stage to Screen

Writing Gravity

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