May 20
How did you manage not to be pigeonholed, to go from The Longest Yard to Leatherface to an X-Men prequel?
I think writers pigeonhole themselves, in a way. There's a comfort level and that's what I want to avoid. It's the old axiom of "if it's comfortable, don't do it." There are genres I'm definitely more comfortable in than others. Thrillers, action, those are more of my comfort zone.
The comedies are the harder thing to write. They're so much about pacing and other things. That's why I want to force myself to do those things. I think your skills start to erode when you work in that comfort zone. There are some writers out there, you read their stuff and it's always the same tone and they're good at it, but I think that would be the most boring thing in the world after a while.
What's your philosophy in writing remakes?
I think the reason some of these remakes work, like The Longest Yard (hopefully), is because they're simple stories. You have to be beholden and reverent to that, yet at some level, you have to toss it out. We knew there was a huge cult following for The Longest Yard. You have to be reverent of that but at the same time you can't be constricted by it.
For The Longest Yard, it was one of the easiest updates imaginable. Adam [Sandler] loved the original, so we wanted it to stay very true to it, but there are also organic things that had to be updated. The nature of prison has changed so much that we had to acknowledge that, otherwise we would have gotten killed. It's tricky because there are those lines of dialogue that are so engrained in the 1974 original that we had to acknowledge them, but we really tried to put a fresh spin on it. That was the trick.
It's not dissimilar in adapting books. I always joke that the best books to adapt are the [unread] ones. The last thing I'd want to do is adapt a book like The Horse Whisperer, where everybody knows the beats and is waiting for them. There's a certain freedom in adapting a flawed book in that you know people aren't going to be looking for those things so you can take the core premise and be creative with it.
And how does making a prequel compare to an adaptation?
With a prequel, there's certainly more freedom. There's more license that comes with it. And it's more fun to work with the elements that people know, be it Leatherface or Magneto, and finding the beats in there. It's a tricky nuance in realizing what's been said, for instance, in the last two X-Men movies that you have to acknowledge because there are those hardcore fans that are going to call you on it if you don't.
You're sort of writing gospel. These are huge cult hits and you're coming up with their bibles.
It's interesting. With Magneto, the first thing I did was go back and read every comic book with a reference to him in it. What you find is that there's some really smart stuff there. There's some stuff you can take and some things that you respectfully reject because you have to ask: Is it going to play cinematically? It's a negotiation of sorts because you don't want to get all the X-Men fans abuzz about how you didn't pay respect to the core origin, but you also have to make it accessible to those who don't know who Magneto is. Even if you haven't seen an X-Men movie, good drama is good drama.
SwordOfMorningSuper Moderator
