I mean, I did Chain Reaction, for example, and it had twleve writers. John Wells came in for a weekend, for example, to do a polish on one scene ...Usually if a film has more than one writer, for my money, you know it's going to go down the tubes.
I mean, I love Andy Davis enormously. He's a wonderful man, and I enjoyed working with him. But there was no script. They had one, but they kept throwing it away. And I said, "Well, there must be a script for Tommy Lee Jones" because Tommy Lee Jones was going to do it, but he didn't. And they said, "Oh, there's a Tommy Lee Jones script, but that isn't going to be your script."
A gross example of that was, having improvised all kinds of dialogue for weeks on end, finally Morgan Freeman had had enough of it. Morgan and I are walking at the base of the Chicago River, right under this tunnel, four hundred feet down, where the source of the river bubbles up. And there was this elevator that goes up four hundred feet. So Andy Davis says, "You're coming along, you get off your little golf carts, and then you walk briskly to the elevator and you get in and the elevator goes up and we hear, 'bang, bang, bang!" The gun shots. So I thought, this shot is just going to involve silence, tension... And Andy suddenly says, "I'm going to need some dialogue." And Morgan... I think it was his last day, and he'd had it. He'd been very good all along. And he looked at me, holding this cigar which he used in the shot, and he said, "I ain't gonna say a thing."
So Andy turns to me with this smile and goes, "Brian?"... So I went away and I wrote this long speech about how we're getting too old for all this, which isn't even in the movie, and we do this scene, and Morgan's not saying anything, and I'm thinking "Once we get into the elevator I'll be fine." However, I keep talking, because they [the camera crew] get into the elevator with me. And it's this four hundred foot elevator and it's going up very slowly. So I've actually run out of things to say. So I start singing "On Top of Old Smokey." Which isn't even in the film; if it had been in the film it would have been rather bizarrely wonderful. Morgan and I about to have a shoot out, and I'm using this song to cover my anxiety.
We get to the top, and I'm still singing, and Andy interrupts, saying, "Keep going, keep going. That's in the public domain. Start singing 'Amazing Grace.' So I sing "Amazing Grace" which isn't in the movie either. |