Daily Dialogue — January 17, 2010
“How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you’re carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life… you start with the little things. The shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks, then you start adding larger stuff. Clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV… the backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home… I want you to stuff it all into that backpack. Now I want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office… and then you move into the people you trust with your most intimate secrets. Your brothers, your sisters, your children, your parents and finally your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack, feel the weight of that bag. Make no mistake your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks.”
— Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), Up in the Air (2009), screenplay by Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner, based on a novel by Walter Kirn
[This is the only video I could find with the audio of the dialogue. Actually pretty cool what the person who edited it did with all the Disney characters].
The Daily Dialogue theme for the week is philosophy of life suggested by Martin_B, who also suggested Up in the Air.
Trivia: Both screenwriters Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner never met or even knew from each other during writing the screenplay. When the novel was released in 2001, Turner read it and wrote a spec script adaptation which he sold to Dreamworks in 2003. However, Reitman also discovered the book and persuaded his father Ivan Reitman to acquire the film rights. Ivan Reitman then commissioned a screenplay by writers Ted Griffin and Nicholas Griffin who used some elements from Turner’s spec script. Finally, Jason Reitman developed his own screenplay by using some elements from the Griffin script that (unbeknownst to Reitman) originated with Turner. Reitman initially claimed a single screenplay credit for himself but the WGA ruled that he should share his credit with Turner as certain elements of his spec script remained in the film.
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