(500) Days of Summer Screenwriters on Controversy, Pink Panther Sequels, and Girls
There are a lot of gaps in Tom's head, and it's a nonlinear movie. Was keeping the actual timeline important to you, or did you invent it as you went along?
NEUSTADTER: Well, I think that since it's based on a real relationship, we ended up sitting down and making a list of all the moments in a relationship that are interesting or exciting that would really give a sense of the relationship and make it feel like a real thing in the real world. We had a list of them, but I think we initially bracketed it as the phase at the beginning of the relationship: the first kiss, the first time you meet, the first thing you do together. Then there's the middle period: when you meet the family, the first time you go to her apartment, things like that. And then there's the horrible down-the-mountain stuff, and there certainly was a lot of that.
MICHAEL WEBER: [to Neustadter] If you remember at the beginning, before there was even a title, we even called it "An Anatomy of a Relationship." We really looked at it that way before we started moving the pieces around.
NEUSTADTER: Yeah, we always knew we would do it non-chronologically because we wanted it to be a memory story. So we did have a sense that we would play with it.
So how different was that first draft compared to what eventually made it on the screen?
NEUSTADTER: Well, there were probably twelve drafts before there was a first draft. At one point, there were probably 200 pages in the first draft, and we just threw everything in there. It was like the kitchen sink of ideas. There was even a ninja battle at one point.
WEBER: There was a ninja battle. True story.
NEUSTADTER: The first draft that we finished...until, in real-life, [the inspiration for Summer] got engaged, we didn't totally know where we were going, I don't think. Once that happened, we kind of hit upon the theme we wanted to tell and it all made sense. The finished product is only about two or three scenes different from that first draft, which is pretty amazing.
And how long ago did you write that first draft?
NEUSTADTER: We finished that for the first time in 2004, right, Weber?
WEBER: Yeah, I think 2004, and then we put it away for a little bit. It was a little bit of a personal thing, so we didn't show it to anybody for a while.
NEUSTADTER: When we did show it to people, it was probably 2005, and I think...
WEBER: No one wanted it at first! We tried to sell it, and no one wanted it for a while. It sat around for nearly a year, I think, until maybe 2006 when Searchlight bought it. In the beginning, no one really knew what to make of it, and I heard a lot of weird criticism of the actual script when we first tried to sell it.
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[...] with a sensitive script by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (500 Days of Summer), Ponsoldt follows his Off the Black and Smashed with another insightful study [...]
[...] with a sensitive script by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (500 Days of Summer), Ponsoldt follows his Off the Black and Smashed with another insightful study [...]
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