Written Interview: Evan Daugherty [“Snow White and the Huntsman”]

From /Film:

For anyone out there reading, writing and making movies with your eyes set on Hollywood, Evan Daugherty‘s story of how he wrote and got Snow White and the Huntsman made is an inspiration. Years before studio began salivating over big action fairy tale films, Daugherty had the idea to take the Snow White tale and make it more action-packed via a small supporting character, The Huntsman. His script, originally written in a college dorm room, sat on a hard drive for years until Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland made a billion dollars and SWATH quickly became one of the hottest scripts in town.

Also, for anyone who struggles with collaboration, criticism and change, Daugherty’s story is even more enlightening. Since its first draft, Snow White and the Huntsman has gone though some radical changes. Multiple structures, tones, different characters living, dying, etc. In our interview with the screenwriter, he took us through the entire time line and detailed who changed what, when, how casting forced script changes and much more.

Some excerpts:

/Film: I was reading a little bit about the conception of this film and I was hoping you could fill in some of the blanks. At the earliest point in the process I read said that you were writing it in your NYU college dorm?

Daugherty: That’s right. Yeah, I wrote it back in undergrad film school at NYU. I was on the production track, so you learn about all aspects of filmmaking and one of them was craft and format and structure of screenwriting. I didn’t write SNOW WHITE for any class, but I got bitten by the screenwriting bug and wrote a couple of scripts in my spare time instead of going to keg parties or something. I was just in my dorm inside my own head exploring fantasy worlds and you know, somehow, I think it was probably the third script I wrote and somehow this crazy idea came to me to tell the Snow White story in a more action adventure way with this small character from the fairytale and built him up into a bigger character, the huntsman character. And yeah I wrote the first draft pretty quickly and it was the first thing I actually thought was really cool that I had done and that was the genesis. It took a long time for anyone else to pay attention to it, but that was the genesis of it.

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/Film: Was there anything that you really fought for that you either won or lost that you wanted to keep from that? Or an idea that you had that you could think of or talk about?

Daugherty: I don’t know about fought for, but one of the interesting processes over the course of the movie through pre-production was the casting of the huntsman. In my original draft another slight difference was the idea that the huntsman was primarily a mentor figure with some hints of an unrequited love relationship with Snow White. As an example, like the original pitch I would give for this movie back in the old days when I first wrote it was. “It’s Snow White meets Luc Besson’s The Professional” where it’s like the huntsman is like the Jean Reno hitman character teaching Snow White to be this strong warrior and fighter. So he was much more of a mentor in the original and the process of the script evolving and then the casting, they started thinking about older casting for the huntsman character, like Viggo Mortenson, Johnny Depp, guys like that, which would have been more that mentor figure. But when Chris Hemsworth became available and it was right after Thor and he was so good in Thor. I thought Thor was really over the top and crazy, but really fun and I thought he was really good in it. There was no way you could cast Chris Hemsworth and not turn up the volume on the love story between the huntsman and Snow White. So now it’s much more of a 50/50 between huntsman as a mentor and huntsman as a potential love interest and that was a big change, which to be honest I was a little resistant too, but knowing a huge portion of movie goers go to see… I mean it’s just a classic element of any story, a compelling romance or a compelling love story or the hint of a compelling love story. I have since been won over by that, but I was a little resistant to that at first.

See, if only you had bypassed keg parties in college to stay inside your dorm room and write spec scripts, look where it might have gotten you!

The second item is informative as that is one of the realities of filmmaking. You may have written what you think is the perfect screenplay, then casting happens and boom — the character you wrote as a Mentor now becomes an Attractor. Time for rewrites!

For more of the interview, go Comment Archive