Interview: Rajiv Joseph and Scott Rothman (“Draft Day”) — Part 2

Rajiv Joseph and Scott Rothman wrote the script Draft Day which landed at the top of the 2012 Black List. Subsequently Lionsgate produced the movie starring Kevin Costner, Jennifer Garner and Dennis Leary, and directed by Ivan Reitman.

In March, 2013, I interviewed Rajiv and Scott while they were in Cleveland during the film’s production, and I’m happy to share that wide-ranging conversation this week as Draft Day opens in theaters nationwide this Friday, April 11.

Today in Part 2, Rajiv and Scott talk about some of key narrative elements they focused on in writing Draft Day and why the location of the story shifted from Buffalo to Cleveland:

Scott M: Let’s talk about your script Draft Day. It not only made the 2012 Black List, but received the most number of recommendations. Here’s a log line that accompanied it with the Black List:

“On the day of the NFL Draft, Bills General Manager Sonny Weaver has the opportunity to save football in Buffalo when he trades for the number one pick. He must quickly decide what he’s willing to sacrifice in pursuit of perfection as the lines between his personal and professional life become blurred.”

Rajiv: One thing which I’m not sure you know. We’re in Cleveland now, and we changed it from the Bills to the Browns.

Scott M: Ah, OK, great.

Scott R: Yeah, which worked out great, but that was something that came about for budgetary reasons that we…it was just cheaper to film here. But we always…it’s a very easy transplanting of the two. Buffalo and Cleveland are, in a way, sister cities and sister franchises.

Rajiv: For me, I’m from Cleveland, and so this is my favorite team, and so that’s been a huge shift by coincidence to be back in my hometown shooting a movie about my favorite football team.

Scott M: Well, that’s a wonderful bit of synergy then.

Rajiv: Yeah, the whole thing feels that way.

Scott M: Thinking about the concept of your movie, I was reminded of an anecdote I heard where years ago, executives from ESPN approached Pete Rozelle, the NFL commissioner, and said, “We’d like to broadcast the draft.” And he said, “Why would anyone want to do that?”

[laughter]

Scott R: We just attended the draft for three days, which was amazing. We befriended this guy Frank Supovitz, who’s actually responsible for turning the lights back on at the Super Bowl this year, and he’s in charge of all the NFL events. He was like the nicest guy in the world, and he took me for this tour behind the scenes of Radio City. I asked him like…it was on the eve of the draft, and I asked him, “You must be excited. You’re hosting this party for three days.” He said, “The way we look at it is like it’s a business meeting. It’s just a televised business meeting,” which is in essence what it really is, so it’s amazing that it’s turned into this huge party.

Scott M: Riffing off that in terms of what you all did, you’re taking essentially what is a business transaction and turning it into a movie. So my first question for you is what was it about that idea that led you both to think, “Hey, this could be a movie?”

Rajiv: The cool story that we have to tell about that is that it all started when I was having dinner with this friend of mine that I taught with at NYU, and she’s this poet, and she had no interest at all in sports, and especially in football, but she said to me out of the blue that she enjoyed watching the NFL draft. I was like, “Why? Like I’m a huge football fan, and I’ve never watched the draft. Why would you as someone who doesn’t even like the sport be into it?” She’s like, “Well, I don’t know. There’s these interesting characters and a ticking clock and really high stakes,” and an alarm bell went off in my head, and I was like, “Jesus, that’s the basic tenets of drama.” I called up Scott, or next time I saw Scott I was like, “Hey, what do you think of this?” Then we started like…it was like instantaneous, within the next 20 minutes I would say, he and I were just talking about all the ways we could write this movie. The first thing that set us off was that it should all take place in one day, and there was a ticking clock on these things.

As football fans we just had an enormous amount of ideas that started ringing for us, and also characters that we would base these…or actual players that we based our characters on and it just instantly became this labor of love.

Scott M: Isn’t that amazing to have that one moment of inspiration and then it the creative energy just takes off, right?

Rajiv: Exactly.

Scott R: Yeah, at first the football stuff went in the draft. We had that stuff really early. Like I saw the story almost immediately, or we did, just where the act breaks would be, and then with football lives we knew where the drama laid? The fun part and the challenge of it, that turns into the fun part, was finding the right character to put in that situation and how we see bonds…apart from the stress of the football stuff and the draft, what was going on in this character’s personal life that could really rev things up a few notches.

Scott M: Yeah, you really put the pressure on your protagonist, Sonny. He’s the GM of the Cleveland Browns, the son of a beloved former coach of the team whose name is Sonny Weaver, Sr. So they share the same name which puts pressure on the son. What’s more, it turns out Sonny Jr., acting as general manager, had at some point actually fired the father. Add to that, the father has just recently died. What was your instinct here? To create a sort of ghost figure in the father, looming over Sonny Jr.? How did that evolve?

Rajiv: We always knew the protagonist was definitely going to be the general manager of a team, and part of that came from that idea that we feel that general managers are in a way like new sorts of sports heroes in this country in part because of fantasy football, which has become so widespread. But also in that same vein guys like me and Scott we know that we’re never going to be professional athletes, but we believe that we could do a better job than the GMs of any of our teams.

Scott R: Incorrectly, we feel that.

Rajiv: Incorrectly. I think a lot of guys say, “Well, these idiots, why did they make that trade? I could be doing a better job than them.” Like GMs have become a new like both hero and villain in sports. We started thinking about all the things that we could pile onto this guy to make this day fascinating, because the main goals that we set for ourselves in this movie is that we needed to make a story that would appeal to both football fans and non‑football fans.

Scott M: One of my favorite parts of dialogue in the whole story setup is early on in Act One where Sonny goes to get gas in his car, and he sees this woman across the way, and she sorts of flirts with him, and then she says, “If you fuck this draft up, you fuck the team up, and then you fuck the city up. If you and Molina take this team to LA, me and my cousin, Donald, will torch your house to the ground. You hear me? Me and Donald will light your house on fire and burn it to the ground.” This story is not just about football. This is about civic spirit in an industrial city that has taken its lumps economically, and that raises the stakes.

Scott R: Yeah. In a lot of ways I think we always knew it what would be good for the stakes to have this factor of the team leaving. It wasn’t just one man’s stakes, it was the stakes of a city. Then as we wrote and as we rewrote, it became a happy accident that Buffalo, and now Cleveland, became really a character in the movie, that we could use that at all times as a backdrop. Football teams mean a lot to a city and mean a lot to a fan base, and cities derive a lot of their own character and swagger, and they define themselves a lot by these franchises, especially these smaller market cities like Buffalo or Cleveland. Rajiv had lived through the Browns leaving Cleveland and knew how that decimates a fan base and all the terrible feelings that come with that. We knew we had that to work with. But, that became very important tracking the arc of the fans, and realizing that the decisions that Sonny was making didn’t just have that effect on him and the team, that it had this much, much larger effect on the city.

Scott M: You have a wonderful little subplot on that stuff, where you’ve got some of the fans showing up in the parking lot to celebrate the team getting the number one draft pick. Then Sonny’s mom with the ashes of the father, going out onto the field. So these constant reminders to Sonny there is this civic issue going on adding more pressure on him.

Rajiv: He’s from the town, too, so it’s not like just some guy, some GM came in from out town and is going to do this. He’s one of those people. He knows that it’s not just that he fails that the team leaves, and he can go back to his way of life. He’s from this area. His mom lives in Cleveland now, and he’s going to have to live with that. It’s very personal for him.

Here is a behind the scenes look at the movie Draft Day:

Tomorrow in Part 3, Rajiv and Scott discuss the appeal of telling a compressed time frame story and a real-life parallel to the choice facing the Protagonist of Draft Day.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Rajiv is repped by Gersh and Kaplan / Perrone.

Scott is repped by CAA and Kaplan / Perrone.

Twitter: @scottmrothman, @RajivAJoseph, @DraftDayMovie.

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