In my last post I outlined my writing process on The Bourne Identity and how I convinced Simon Kinberg to do something similar by committing to one week of writing the script for Moon, which I’m aiming to make my next movie. Ever since I used that process with Tony Gilroy on Bourne, I’ve become a huge fan of working in Microsoft Word and not in Final Draft (the conventional screenwriting software) and forgetting all about the formalities of script writing, because otherwise you can get so caught up in making it look like a movie that you can lose some of the creative energy that a script needs. While books come in a million different shapes, movies tend to come in a cookie-cutter shape — they are all supposed to look the same. It constricts creative thinking.

Simon and I have developed a language, and it’s not really meant for anyone else to read. Only the two of us in the room breaking the scenes can really know who’s saying what line, so the scene outlines I’m including below might not make complete sense in their current form, but I thought you might be interested. Simon’s a brilliant screenwriter, and he hand-writes his scripts on paper and then edits them in the computer. But before that, we’ll break the scenes: We’ll act out the dialogue; he’ll say a line, and I’ll respond. Or he’ll say, “Well, I don’t know if the character would really say that at that moment,” and he’ll suggest a different line, and we’ll talk about what is the scene really about, what are we trying to get across, what are we going to learn, how is the character going to be different, and what’s the growth? Then we riff out more lines. The downside is that you can end up with a script that’s all witty dialogue and pizzazz with no substance, but Simon has the discipline to stop us and ask: Is this supporting our character? How does this work? Simon and I are both pretty funny and can easily riff a two-page scene, but he’s very good at checking us, sometimes discarding lines of dialogue that we love and coming up with new ones that better suit the character or the tone. These few lines in the scene outlines below are examples of what we’ve written. This is not cleaned up, but we will soon have a draft that other people can look at and fully understand:

Looks out over lip of hill
Flashing in distance
He moves for it
As he gets lower temp drops — getting colder
Shorter and shorter hops
He falls — struggles to get up
Passes dead body — frozen over
Grabs guidance thing — ice in his helmet, skin blue
Barely hold thing in his hand, can’t flex
He collapses — temp gauge has hit 250.
He lays there, on his knees? Falls backwards — looking up at earth
Sound of breathing — ice forming everywhere
Earth reflected — Earth looks huge over him
Through the frost — it’s all distorted — prismatic — halo and/or rays.

—–

APOLLO
RJ is taping himself up — and Roman is staring
We’re gonna need some hoses — grab some hoses
Roman is trying to warm his hand up
Grab those hoses
Roman fucking with ALSEP — there’s a power source in here — trying to short it out and get some heat
Dude — that’s fucking nuclear
I don’t think you understand what I’m dealing with
Roman we’re all cold, we’re all tired, we’re all hungry, we’re all dealing with same thing
Yeah I do — you’re a billionaire who’s used to sherpas carrying your shit up the mountain. But I’m not one of your donkeys so lift one of those hoses and carry your own weight for once
I can’t — starts to take his glove off
Roman, what are you doing — they are freaking out
He gets it off — see his hand is totally frozen —
Roman — see. See. That’s what I’m dealing with. It’s frozen, Cole, it’s useless.
I lost my hand. Lost my goddamn hand.

Related posts on 30ninjas.com:

• Doug Liman Blog: Chicken Coop Editing and Stark-Naked Script Meetings
• Doug Liman Blog: Science Fact — On the Moon, You’re Superman
• Doug Liman Blog: Moon Crash Party at Dawn — Descent Into Darkness With a Roomful of Astrophysicists
• Doug Liman Blog: Photos of Feeding America, Matt Damon Shoot
• Doug Liman Blog: Moon VFX Shot by Shot, and When the “I’m an Artiste” Argument Gets Jettisoned
• Doug Liman Blog: Mountains, Cliffs, and CGI — Envisioning the Moon