Now that ABC's picked up a new sitcom from them, what better time to check in with (500) Days of Summer screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber? Since the film's release, (500) Days of Summer gone on to be one of the year's biggest indie hits, and though there's been plenty of praise for the script's unique jumps in chronology, there's also been criticism that love interest Summer (Zooey Deschanel) is little more than a cipher. Movieline wanted to get Neustadter and Weber's take on that argument, as well as discuss the film's unlikeliest lost scene, their writing credit on The Pink Panther 2, and the British newspaper that opened a whole new can of worms for the real Summer.
Scott, a few weeks ago you wrote a piece in the Daily Mail where you said you gave the film's script to the ex who inspired Summer, and she didn't realize that you had modeled this character after her. I'm thinking your article probably clued her in?
SCOTT NEUSTADTER: Oh, I think she knew subsequently! It was an interesting situation. I think the Daily Mail might have blown a few things out of proportion. I don't know if you're familiar with them -- you probably aren't -- but "The Daily Mail" implies certain things...[Laughs] My original thing that they had me write for them was a lot less salacious. I wrote a thing that was very much about how this movie was inspired by this situation and whatever else, and they sent it back to me and it was like, "The Ultimate Revenge On His Ex-Girlfriend! How Does She Sleep at Night?" I certainly never, ever said that. I kind of made them tone it down, but it still comes across a little crazier than I actually am.
There have been pieces at The Daily Beast and Jezebel that argue that Summer isn't a fully-realized character, that she's just a generic female love interest who exists only to help Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) self-actualize. What do you make of that critique?
NEUSTADTER: I think that they missed the point! That's exactly right, but that's what we were doing: We set out to tell the story of a guy who was in love with a girl he really didn't know. The whole thing is told from his perspective, so there are gaps in his information. There are things that he should know about her, that he should have been paying attention to, but he just didn't. This isn't a romantic comedy; as we always referred to it, it's a coming-of-age story pretending to be a romantic comedy. In a romantic comedy, you'd want to have a male and female character who are three-dimensional and easy to identify with and everything else. In this case, we very purposefully wanted only one of these characters to be three-dimensional and the other, to be filled with his projection of her. You know the scene in the movie where she's talking about her dream?
Uh-huh.
NEUSTADTER: I don't know if you remember that part, but she's basically opening up to him and telling him about her dream, it's a big moment, and all he can think about is what it means to him. He's not even listening to what she's telling him. You know, Karina [Longworth, who reviewed the film at SpoutBlog], Doree [Shafrir, of The Daily Beast]...I actually know some of those girls! Doree went to college with me, and I emailed her and said "I agree with your article, but that was the point entirely."
I think that we're talking about it in terms of the person telling you the story is Tom, and everything is taking place in his head. Naturally, when he's describing someone, he idealizes, and he's not really talking about the concrete reality of this human being. We were hoping that people would get that all of this is taking place in his head, that it's a projection. It's not really Summer, it's an idea of Summer, portrayed by Zooey.
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.
NEUSTADTER: There were these obstacles that kept people from wanting to buy it. It was a difficult sell for certain big studios, or so it was perceived. A lot of them wanted us to make it a happy ending [for the couple], a lot of them wanted us to make it a Matthew McConaughey vehicle, someone who would sell on the poster...somebody said to us, "We would totally buy this if it wasn't about a relationship." We were really scratching our heads on that one.
Does it freak you out when you've written this very personal script and you finally go out with it and no one will touch it?
NEUSTADTER: I personally was a little freaked out. Those six or seven months [of waiting] were like a haze to me. This script was what we kind of wanted to be known for, I suppose, to be writers of this kind of movie, but what happened was that no one bought it and it kind of sat around and we got hired to be the writers of the sequel to The Pink Panther. I was sort of terrified, because as much as we wanted to be professionals and be working writers, I know how easy it is to get pigeonholed. We really wanted [(500) Days of Summer] to go and represent us as writers, and it wasn't happening.
WEBER: I agree. It was good to be busy, but knowing that the best thing was sitting on the shelf was kind of frustrating.
So you guys got hired for Pink Panther off this sample? I wouldn't have necessarily drawn a straight line between the two.
NEUSTADTER: Really? The first draft of (500) Days had a lot of detective stuff.
WEBER: I also used to be a world-renowned cat burglar.
NEUSTADTER: That's probably a story for another time. Yeah, we had a meeting with an executive at Sony who was like, "Love the script, but I'm not gonna buy it. We have a couple open writing assignments. Actually, we have one, and it's the sequel to The Pink Panther. Would you be interested?" And we said no thank you, and that was that, but at the time, we hadn't really sold anything. Our representatives said, "Don't be a jackass -- come up with something!" And so we did, we came up with an idea and Sony said great and they hired us and greenlit our first draft.
It was the craziest thing ever. We knew they were going to make the movie, and that's really what you want. That's next-level stuff for a writer. Obviously, the finished product is not exactly the script we wrote, as often happens. But it was a really amazing experience for us, and I think very helpful in getting (500) to move forward.
How do the two of you work together as writers? What's the nature of your partnership?
NEUSTADTER: We never ever work in the same room. This is a rare situation where you're getting both of us in the same room, because he lives in New York and I live in California.
So you tend to email scripts back and forth?
NEUSTADTER: Yeah.
WEBER: When we're in the same room, we generally tend to talk about girls, or sports, or girls. Those are the only three things. We're playing cards, we're screwing around...sometimes good comedy comes from that, but generally not a lot of hard work. When we separate and go off and do our own thing, that's when the real work gets done.
NEUSTADTER: Exactly.