The Toughest Scene I Wrote: “Foxcatcher”

Once again, Vulture does screenwriters a solid:

Over the next few weeks, Vulture will speak to the screenwriters behind 2014’s most acclaimed movies about the scenes they found most difficult to crack. Which pivotal sequences underwent the biggest transformations on their way from script to screen?

In this article, E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman, co-writers of the script for the movie Foxcatcher, discuss a scene each of them wrote. First, Frye:

When I came onto the project, Bennett had all this material: a hundred hours of interviews with wrestlers, photographs, public-domain documents, police reports, all kinds of stuff. The question was really, where do we start in this story, since we kind of knew where we wanted to end it? Bennett told me about a scene he wanted to do where Mark is talking in front of a bunch of schoolkids, and we talked about that for a long time. In his head, he knew what he wanted and what he didn’t want, so coming into the movie as I was, that was the first thing I had to tackle.

It became the hardest thing I had to do because I had to really discover who Mark was as a person first, and I had to hear his voice. That took me … oh my God, so many drafts, and so much time to pull that together in a way I needed to in order to move on and write the rest of the script.

Next, Futterman:

There were a lot of iterations of the scene where Dave tells du Pont that Mark will need to be paid even after he leaves Foxcatcher, and I think Max had written an iteration of it as well. It was important to set up the ending, which kind of tumbles out from that scene. Importantly, Dave is being pulled in two directions: He’s trying really hard to deal diplomatically with du Pont while also protecting his brother. The real problem in the scene is that du Pont and Mark are the ones who have a problem with each other, but they don’t speak — they have proxies doing it for them, Dave and Stan Beck.

For the rest of the article, go here. Kudos to Vulture for this annual series which puts the spotlight on screenwriters.