THR: Best Adapted Screenplay Nominees

Excerpts from Variety:

The year’s contenders for adapted screenplay attacked an extraordinary range of material: a work of nonfiction; a children’s graphic novel; a stage play; a classic spy thriller; and a modern seriocomedy of manners. Each posed unique challenges these A-level scribes were eager to meet.

Alexander Payne, Jim Rash & Nat Faxon

“The Descendants”

“Overall, from the adaptation through the shooting, I wanted to get the proper sense of the story taking place in Hawaii, amid this bizarre, self-styled upper class,” he says. “It’s not my world at all. I had to learn it through the book and then research, and in a way, the process of adaptation didn’t finish with the words ‘fade out.’ That was just the first 10%. The whole damn process was one of adaptation — adapting myself to that world. Like a documentarian, in a way.”

John Logan

“Hugo”

“Though it’s for a family audience, it deals with harrowing events. All the way along, the important thing to me was to keep the tone austere, to play honestly that orphan’s story, because it’s a tough one. When Marty and I were working. we talked about things like ‘The 400 Blows’ and Dickens’ panoply of orphans trying to make their way through life.”

George Clooney, Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon

“The Ides of March”

“It’s funny, D.C. is not unlike Hollywood, sort of a one-business town. And it’s no different with big business, or a big newspaper, it’s still the hierarchy of power. Jockeying to get more of it and all the shit people pull, it’s similar. That’s why we hoped that the screenplay transcended politics, something that anybody who’s been in any of those worlds could relate to.”

Stan Chervin, story; Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, screenplay

“Moneyball”

Each member of the triumvirate attended to different challenges in the pic’s development, proving that (as the saying goes) many hands can indeed make light work, and make it seamless. First scribe Chervin, seeking “the universal story” to bring broad aud appeal to a baseball g.m.’s journey of personal redemption, phrased it as “the story of a man who discovers that it is far more important to know your value than your price.’ … It enabled me to sell ‘Moneyball’ off a pitch (and) guided me through every draft.”

Zaillian found Michael Lewis’ book “most interesting to adapt,” in that “it covers a lot of ground in terms of the idea, history and practitioners of ‘moneyball’ sabermetrics, allowing room to create a narrative. Especially appealing to me was the tenable debate between tradition and nonconformity, and the inevitable clash.”

As for Sorkin, he says, “Stan and Steve had done a great job cracking the book by the time I was brought in, but I remembered some advice Akiva Goldsman gave me when I did my first adaptation, ‘Charlie Wilson’s War.’ He said, ‘Fall in love with the book and then break up with it.’ “

Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan

“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”

“We would write a scene that was four or five pages, a lot of it dialogue taken from the book, and use that as a starting point. We’d say ‘OK, how can we reimagine this cinematically; how can we boil down these two pages of dialogue into an image? What are the images that can tell the story, instead of two people talking to each other?’ Which is kind of always the role of the screenwriter, really.”

Note: Starting tomorrow an exclusive GITS Q&A with Moneyball screenwriter Stan Chervin.

For more of the Variety article, go here.