The Toughest Scene I Wrote: Writer-Director Spike Jonze (“Her”)

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, Spike Jonze discusses a key scene where “I had to show their connection, but I also wanted to plant the tension of her aspirations and intellectual growth, which makes her pull away.”

So many tough scenes come to mind for this, but there’s one scene about two thirds of the way into the movie, where they’re sitting on a roof and Samantha says, “I’m writing a piece of music,” and Theodore asks her what the piece of music is about. I must have changed the answer completely about five times — and even within those five ideas, there were so many different versions, so we must have redone that scene about twelve different times.

Some of her answers were way too complicated or intellectual. In the first version, she says that she’s writing about dark matter because she relates to it: If matter is everything in the universe that we can see or observe, dark matter is everything that’s not there, and we know it exists because of the gravitational effects it has on what we can observe. And that was probably the simplest one I’d written!

For the rest of the article, go here.

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