Writing the Action Movie: How “Amazing” is Spiderman 2?

An Interview with Jacob Krueger and George Strayton

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Setting aside whether you loved or hated The Amazing Spiderman 2, discover what you can learn from the script. Note: includes spoilers!

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

 

Jacob Krueger: I’m Jacob Krueger and this is the Write Your Screenplay podcast. I’m here with a special guest today this is George Strayton. George teaches our Action Movie Writing class here at the studio and really has a tremendous background in the action movie world. He’s worked with Sam Raimi, he’s worked with Bob Orci and Alex Kurtzman, the writers on Spiderman. And he has a Sundance Award Winning Film coming out: Alive Inside. That’s pretty exciting.

George Strayton: Yeah, I’m excited. I was shocked and surprised to win the award, as much as I believed in the film. You never know what’s going to happen. It opens on July 18th in 40 Theaters across the country.

Jacob Krueger: So let’s talk about The Amazing Spiderman 2. As you know the purpose of this podcast is to look at all kinds of movies. Movies that work, movies that don’t work. And rather than discussing them in a thumbs up, thumbs down way, we talk about what writers can learn from these movies no matter how wonderful or how flawed. Setting aside whether you love or hate the new Spiderman film, let’s just talk a moment about what you believe writers can learn from this movie.

George Strayton: These movies are just really hard to make, and that’s why it’s so important to get that draft correct. Because from the point you turn in that script, there are 400 people involved in making the movie. And you need everyone– the studio execs, the actors, the director, the visual effects people, the stunt people, the choreographers, the editors, whoever’s doing the score– everyone has to be on the same page about the movie you’re making. As opposed to a small independent film where there are 4 people and you can just sit in a room and talk about things and make changes really quickly in post, as a writer of these films, trying to get that script as close to the movie you’re trying to make as possible is the only thing you can do.

Usually you’re not involved in much after that. It’s changing a little bit over time as more people start to criss-cross between television and film, like Alex and Bob, JJ Abrams, Damon Lindelof, Joss Wheden, people who made a name for themselves in both arenas. But really it’s the directors who are in charge. Once you go into production or even pre-production the director is taking over.

So you really have to do the best possible job in getting across exactly what you want in a clear but readable way. You can’t take a page to explain what the OsCorp building looks like, and you can’t just say “it’s a cool looking building.” You have to come up with some one line description that gives whoever the designer or storyboard artist or director is going to be exactly what you’re seeing–you need to try to get that in there so everyone can build off of that. Because the less you give them, the more chaotic it’s going to turn out.

For example, I did a film for Paramount called Dragonlance. It was an animated film, I was a writer. Kiefer Southerland and Lucy Lawless were the stars, and I got to be there for the recording of the actors and obviously that happens before the animation is done. And I noticed when I saw the final film—everything the actors did was great. They were fantastic, they had ideas, they worked with the script in the way it was written, if they had questions they asked them,