The Toughest Scene I Wrote: “The Skeleton Twins”

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, Craig Johnson and Mark Heyman, who co-wrote The Skeleton Twins, discuss a pivotal scene between the two adult siblings played by Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader:

Craig Johnson: Toward the end of the movie, there’s a moment where everything comes to a head for our main characters and they have a big blowout fight in the backyard, where a number of things go down. Everything that they’ve kept bottled up comes spilling out, and for me, the trick to writing that kind of fight is finding that balance between dialogue that sounds natural and dramatic without tipping over into melodrama.

Mark Heyman: They’re having a pissing contest over which one of them is more fucked-up, and there’s also a need in that scene to have Maggie say something so incredibly cruel that it fully breaks them apart and prompts Milo to take off in the next scene. That was challenging: What’s that thing that would cut so deep that it would just end the conversation? What might you say in the heat of an argument that you’d immediately regret?

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