Simon Kinberg has come to New York to hammer home a draft of my moon project — my still Untitled Moon Project. I’ve been working on this script for years, with various writers. I’ve written drafts with 30 Ninjas Editor John Gill, I’ve written drafts myself, and I’ve written a draft with my cousin John Hamburg, who’s better known for writing the Meet the Parents franchise. I’ve also worked with Ken Nolan, who wrote the screenplay for Black Hawk Down, and Mark Bowden, who wrote the book on which the Black Hawk Down movie was based. It’s probably clear from the string of writers I’ve had on this project that this is a really ambitious movie. Well, after all of that work and all of those writers, it’s come down to Simon Kinberg and me locked in my office, every day, and I really feel like this is going to be the draft we’re going to make.

This working with Simon is sort of a return to a style of development that I really haven’t done since The Bourne Identity. When I was developing Bourne, I hired this incredibly talented screenwriter, Blake Herron, who wrote one of my favorite scripts, called Ripley Under Ground, based on Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley series. By coincidence, Matt Damon starred in The Talented Mr. Ripley, and it was because of that movie that I never made Blake’s script. I had a different idea of what Ripley’s character would be, and it would’ve been confusing to the audience if I had made the second film. So I did the next best thing and hired Blake to write The Bourne Identity.

We wrote a very faithful adaptation of the book. I was directing commercials at the time and would intentionally take jobs that shot in Europe so he could tag along with me to scout cities, and we ultimately settled on Paris, which is where the book is set. But the script ended up kind of flat. Reading the book is a 10- to 20-hour experience; the movie is a two-hour experience, so if you just take every scene from a book that you like and string them together, without any of the hours of setup for those scenes you love, those scenes just read flat. That’s exactly what we had: a script that contained all of the scenes we loved and none of the spirit of the book. When I showed it to a bunch of screenwriters, I got various responses, including one from a screenwriter who suggested that Jason Bourne discover that he was a robot. (I rejected that idea, and the writer then went on to write up his version of the movie. I don’t know if it ever got made.) I then showed my script to Tony Gilroy, who’d written Dolores Claiborne, which I loved, and Armageddon, which I didn’t, and Tony said, “Your script’s awful, here’s why. I’d love to help you, but this is way too much work. You’ve got to start over from scratch.” He’d never read the book, and that’s what I needed. If you’d read the book, there would inevitably be scenes you just loved, and then you’d do everything in your power to keep those scenes in the script, whether it was good for the movie or not. But Tony was unburdened by all that; he was just objectively looking at the movie. I ultimately convinced Tony to do one week with me — whatever we could do in a week.

Since I am of frugal Eastern European descent, when I negotiate for a week it begins on a Saturday and ends on a Sunday night. So we locked ourselves in an office every day and we riffed out scenes, and by the end of the nine days, we had a 60-page outline that was a re-envisioning of the story. That was the document that I sent to Matt Damon that got him to commit. And that was the movie I made. That process of sitting in a room and breaking scenes with a writer is incredibly grueling, but it was very successful with The Bourne Identity, and I’m hoping to repeat it with Moon.

Related posts on 30ninjas.com:

• Doug Liman Blog: Aiming to Shoot the Moon — A Sample of Our Script Notes
• Doug Liman Blog: Science Fact — On the Moon, You’re Superman
• Doug Liman Blog: Chicken Coop Editing and Stark-Naked Script Meetings
• Doug Liman Blog: Mountains, Cliffs, and CGI — Envisioning the Moon
• Doug Liman Blog: The Time is Now — Previewing Fair Game for a Live Audience
• Doug Liman Blog: Stoned Star? Director Fondling the PA’s?
  In Hollywood, They Call That “Process”