The Toughest Scene I Wrote: Kelly Marcel (“Saving Mr. Banks”)

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, Kelly Marcel discusses a key scene which purpose was “finding a way to access Pamela for the audience”.

Loads of scenes come to mind for this, but the one I would say was the most tricky is the scene between Pamela and Ralph where they’re building a little park together on the Disney lot.

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This scene didn’t actually happen until late into writing the script, because Ralph didn’t exist until very, very late in the process. So it was tricky to drop his story line in and to find the places where he would allow us to see her differently.

In that scene, he reveals that he has a child who is handicapped, and I felt like, God, this could become really schmaltzy and heavy-handed and not truthful. So I probably rewrote that scene about twenty times, because every time he spoke and tried to explain his daughter to her, it came out as sort of manipulative, which Ralph isn’t at all. There’s also the fact that Pamela doesn’t really have a reaction to that, because she wouldn’t. Initially, when I first started writing the scene, she did react, and she did have a conversation about it. And it suddenly became incredibly schmaltzy! It was like, Oh God, ugggh.

Gradually, I just took all of her dialogue away from her, and just kept her literally only talking about the park and wanting to go home while this poor man is pouring his soul out.

For the rest of the article, go here.

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