The Toughest Scene I Wrote: John Ridley (“12 Years a Slave”)

Once again, Vulture does screenwriters a solid:

In this series, Vulture has been speaking to the screenwriters behind 2013′s most acclaimed movies about the scenes they found most difficult to crack. What pivotal sequences underwent the biggest transformations on their way from script to screen?

In this article, John Ridley discusses a key scene in 12 Years a Slave featuring Mistress Shaw “where I had to walk a tightrope”.

You’re looking at a scene that runs about two and a half pages that has to encompass so many things: plot points, new character, emotional turns. To me, it was kind of like running a very tight one-act play.

Solomon’s writing in the memoir is so elevated and the language that he uses is so evocative and specific that there were many places in the script where I could take his dialogue and just transpose that, but then there were some scenes in the film that were referenced in the memoir that were not really excavated at all. The scene with Mistress Shaw was one of those scenes: It was only about a line or two lines in the memoir, where he talks about having to go fetch Patsey and describes Mistress Shaw. So writing this scene was a complete anthropological piece, and I was very concerned in places that people would see me in it, that they would feel like this was someone in 2013 writing it and not Solomon. This was a place where the dialogue could easily sound imprecise or anachronistic, and I wanted to approach this with an invisible hand.

For the rest of the article, go here. Let’s hope Vulture continues this series next year (they also did it in 2013) as it helps to elevate the role of the screenwriter in the eyes of the public to a place it should be: front and center.

Comment Archive