Written Interview: Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio

This one is from the vaults, originally posted 3/28/09. Since Rossio came up this week in a discussion about his idea of “character patterns”, I thought it would be helpful to re-post this as it has links to several E&R interviews and features. Since the duo is just about the most successful writing team in Hwood, it stands to reason to pay attention to their ideas about screenwriting.

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Imagine you’re screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio. And this little ol’ outfit known as Disney asks you to create a movie from a theme park ride: “Pirates of the Caribbean.” As we look back at the enormous success of the Pirates trilogy, it might be tempting to think, “Well, it couldn’t have been all that hard.” But to put things in perspective, at the same time Elliott & Rossio were working on Pirates, Disney also had writers working on another theme park ride: “The Haunted Mansion”. Whereas Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) was praised by critics and fans, and grossed over $305M worldwide, the other movie The Haunted Mansion (2004)… uh, not so much, grossing only $75M.

Which is to say that most screenwriters might have buckled under the odds against making a great movie out of a ride. But Rossio & Elliott are not your average screenwriters. Check out this list of hits they’ve written:

Aladdin

The Mask of Zorro

Shrek

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End

Plus they have one of the best online resources about screenwriting, their website Wordplay.

So here’s an interview with the duo tied to the release of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Here’s an excerpt:

I wanted to ask you about that; it’s usually described as an experience rather than a story. How much of a story were you able to find in the ride when you first started working on Curse of the Black Pearl?

Ted: Well, there actually is a story to the ride. It’s about a crew of pirates who find a treasure and then discover it’s cursed and it turns them into skeletons… It’s told in reverse. You see the end of the story, all the skeletal pirates with the cursed treasure, and then you see their hunt for it. In Disneyland Paris, they’ve actually flipped it, so that it’s in the right order. I can’t believe that the French went linear. It’s just so bizarre (laughs).

Terry: There were many times in the design of Curse of the Black Pearl where we would reach an impasse or get stuck on finding a solution and turn to the ride and get the solution there. Those vignettes are such that they’re captured moments, always in some sort of larger situation. So it doesn’t look like a movie but, in a sense, it really is, because it’s just like freeze-frames from a film.

Read the interview. And here are a few more interviews with Elliott & Rossio:

UGO.com

Box Office Mojo

MJ Simpson

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