The Toughest Scene I Wrote: Nicolas Giacobone and Alexander Dinelaris (“Birdman”)

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, Nicolas Giacobone and Alexander Dinelaris, who co-wrote the screenplay for Birdman along with Armando Bo and the film’s director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, go into great depth discussing the most troublesome scene in the script:

We would have to say that one of the most — if not the most — difficult [scenes] to tackle was the “motel-room scene.” It was a scene that was supposed to belong to a short story that inspired a play that is being performed in a film. (Don’t bother to read that again, just go with us here.)

The motel-room scene is complicated for many reasons. Firstly, it was challenging to write a scene that was meant to come from the Raymond Carver short story, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. We had to respect the tone, the period, and the psychological state of the characters as originally invented by Carver. But that’s not all. Because this scene in the play is supposed to have been written by Riggan himself, we had to embrace Riggan’s mediocrity as a writer. We had to put ourselves in Riggan’s shoes, in his mind, in his terrible wig, and write it. The motel-room scene had to be good enough to belong to a Raymond Carver story and a Broadway play, and mediocre enough to appear as written by our hero, Riggan Thomson. No easy feat, that.

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