One thing the three original and three adapted screenplays chosen to be featured on this year’s THR Writers Roundtable have in common is the theme of trauma and grief. In fact, some of the writers (or, in some cases, co-writers) used their screenplays to work through their own pain and heartache.
“I wanted to show the audience that grief never leaves you and you always walk with a limp after it,” Train Dreams co-writer Clint Bentley says about the film he made shortly after losing both of his parents, while Hikari based Shannon Mahina Gorman’s character Mia in Rental Family on experiences she had when she was 7 years old.
Bentley and Hikari sat down with Guillermo del Toro (Frankenstein), Bradley Cooper (Is This Thing On?), Will Tracy (Bugonia) and Noah Oppenheim (A House of Dynamite) on a rainy Friday morning in November to discuss the origins of their Oscar-contending screenplays, why writing dialogue is like “music” and at what point the writer’s hat comes off when they have other duties like directing, producing or operating a camera (Cooper did all of the above on the film he co-wrote with Will Arnett and Mark Chappell).
Some of you have backgrounds in acting, news and even politics. How did you get into screenwriting?
HIKARI For me, it’s always the character. Bradley, you said you research a lot once you start finding a character who you want to tell the story [of], and [I’m] exactly the same. Once I learn about the job, about the people who exist in this world, I dig into what they do and why they do what they do. And that’s how I start building a story.
NOAH OPPENHEIM For me, it’s all about storytelling fueled by curiosity. I love to peel back the curtain on worlds that I don’t know much about and talk to people about their lives. And then the question is, what’s the best way to convey that story? Journalism is a great way to do it, but sometimes fictional storytelling is a more effective way of highlighting issues in the world, especially right now, where people are so polarized that everyone only consumes their own news sources that affirm their preexisting biases. But movies like these can get people from all ends of the political spectrum talking about the same issue at the same time, which is a beautiful thing.
Will, you’ve come a long way from your days at The Onion.
WILL TRACY I always wanted to write movies, but I applied to film school and didn’t get in, so I thought, “Well, there goes that.” After college, I was fired from a few different jobs and then became an intern at The Onion and wheedled my way into them letting me write jokes, and so I wrote jokes and eventually was hired there, and then went from that to a late night comedy show, then to Succession. And then I guess circuitously found my way to the thing that I wanted to do.
GUILLERMO DEL TORO Have you been back to the film school, like, “who is laughing now?”
TRACY I had to do a talk at NYU, which is where I had applied, and I didn’t mention it.
From left: Will Tracy, Clint Bentley, Noah Oppenheim, Bradley Cooper, Hikari and Guillermo del Toro were photographed Nov. 21 at Penske Studios in Los Angeles.
Photographed by Mark Griffin Champion
Guillermo, you had your start in special effects and makeup.
DEL TORO I was a writer before anything else, and for me, this project is a training of 50 years. [People] would say, “Let’s talk about the impressionism.” [I’d say,] “Oh yeah, like Frankenstein.” “Let’s talk about architecture.” “Oh yeah, like Frankenstein.”
TRACY Something like Frankenstein — which is something you always wanted to do — when you finally get the chance to do it, that’s a lot of pressure, right?
DEL TORO I felt no pressure. [Bradley Cooper and I] went together through a beautiful experience [on 2021’s Nightmare Alley], and that’s what allowed me to do this. With that, I learned that, after 50-something, the movie tells you what it wants to be, including the screenplay.
CLINT BENTLEY I was always a writer as well and actually came from trying to write literature first and failing very poorly at that. It started there, and then [I was] writing short films. Then I met Greg Kwedar, whom I’ve been working with for 15 years, and we were just friends who wanted to make a film together. I had no idea how to write a screenplay, and so we just read every great screenplay we could get our hands on. The first film that he directed, Transpecos, that we wrote together, we wrote it over and over and over again, probably like nine page one rewrites. By the time we get to the point where it’s like, oh, okay, we kind of start to understand what you’re doing, but then every time — I don’t know if you guys feel this way — I feel much more confident as a writer, but then at the same time, every time I start a new one it’s like, I’ve never done it before.
Bradley, what about you?
BRADLEY COOPER I’ve always loved the rhythm of conversations, and the thing I love to write most is dialogue. I was fortunate enough as an actor to be on movies where I was able to be around great directors and writers, and they allowed me to be a part of the collaborative process. I was at a point in my career where I just didn’t want to wait around, and I thought, “I’m getting older, and I have all these things I want to do. I just have to do it.” That was for A Star Is Born, and that was the first time I was getting paid to do it, so you actually have to deliver something. I never looked back, quite honestly. But dialogue … it’s infectious. The heroin is the dialogue, I think, in the screenwriting process, where you feel like you’re flying. … There’s nothing like it.
HIKARI Every time when I see your movies, it just always has the rhythm and it just continues and there’s without any break awkward beat or it’s just now it makes sense. It’s beautiful.
DEL TORO It’s music, also. The dialogue has the rhythm of the camera on Train Dreams. And yours, Bradley, is the same. The dialogue is music.
COOPER The pauses are just as much dialogue as the words.
BENTLEY I always find that you’ve written so much and spent so much time on these lines, but then you get in the editing room, and you find you can pull so much away. If you’ve done your job in making the film, then the film starts to say so much more than whatever the lines of these characters are saying. … As a writer, I was very inspired by other writers and all of that, but then as big of an inspiration for me was my uncle or my dad who didn’t have a formal education and yet had very particular ways of talking and saying things that were so deep and interesting, but they didn’t say them in ways that they thought they were being deep.
COOPER (To Bentley) I love that line when you wrote, “Sometimes I forget it happened to me.”
BENTLEY I remember losing a parent and just feeling this very strange feeling. We’ve been talking to each other as humans for 50,000 some odd years and telling each other about the experience of losing people, and then you go through it and you’re like, “I must be the first person to have ever done this.”
“Mary Shelley knew how it feels to be me,” Guillermo del Toro says of his experience of first reading Frankenstein.
Photographed by Mark Griffin Champion
COOPER I have a question for everyone. Do you like to read your scenes out as you’re writing?
DEL TORO Yes.
OPPENHEIM It’s all in my head, for better or worse. I hate the sound of my own voice, and I don’t have anyone else to read it to. We’re not all Bradley Cooper, so it doesn’t sound … if you’re available to come over and read for me, I’d love it. No, talking about those bursts and then those dry spells … when I started doing it, whenever you’d hit those rough patches, I used to panic. It used to ruin my life for days at a time. I couldn’t focus on anything else. I was irritable, not particularly nice to my kids, short with my wife. And now I’ve gotten to the place where I just realized it’s part of it. There are going to be those patches where it’s not working, and you have to surf those waves and you’ll get to the other side at some point or another.
DEL TORO The thing with dialogue for me is — particularly on Frankenstein — since I read the novel at age 11, and then I read it again and again and wrote about it, did introductions to books, I realized that there’s a florid thing with dialogue that was written for a book in 1818 that we needed to preserve. In general, reading out loud once you have achieved a little is really useful because then you start seeing the cracks in the structure.
COOPER So much of the dialogue from Jacob Elordi’s character is breathing. What was that process like?
DEL TORO The way I patterned the dialogue for the Creature was the construction of his intelligence. The first word he needs is only “Victor,” then “Elizabeth.” That’s the world. Then the third word is “friend,” and that’s the world. And then the more he learns concepts, the more pain he gains. If you find a voice, you find the character. We did one trick that was quite brutal. We started with the most heavy dialogue scene in the shoot, the forgiveness scene. That was the first day [Elordi and Oscar Isaac, who plays Victor Frankenstein] worked together because I said, “Well, if we hear the voice, and it sounds articulate, then I’ll deconstruct it in reverse.” But I knew if the Creature just spoke in the middle, it would be too much. So I gave him something that sounded like a roar. “Bring him to me.” Then you start constructing, and then he ends in silence, accepting the grace of the so-and-so dialogue. The beauty with dialogue, and for me as a non-native speaker, it is so beautiful to hear the music.
BENTLEY I think dialogue is always easy and we all love it, but at the same time, I don’t know, I’m always trying to find myself ways to get away from it. Also, you can fail.
DEL TORO Because it can be artificial, it can be theatrical, but it needs to flow for somebody, from my case, to be lost and to be found, that is a lifespan of love and find a way to find the breath on that, especially when she has been just shot in the gut. It is a blessing when you find it and people are in the dialogue, they cannot pay attention to it. It has to be there.
BENTLEY But yours also has a musicality to it but doesn’t feel distant. It still feels very natural from the characters as if we can still connect with it. And I think that’s really hard in a period film.
COOPER Will, you have this scene with the captor, but both parties [played by Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons] are presenting and taking it in, and that’s what I loved about it. You actually flipped it — you have this very intense situation where both people are very articulate about their points of view.
TRACY The problem for me was that it was quite contained. You’re basically in the house the whole time. By necessity, the set pieces are just these big dialogue scenes. So you have to elevate the conversation.
COOPER Because it was different, that’s why I leaned in. You’re like, “I’ve never seen this.”
TRACY They’re playing it straight. It’s how I always try to write. It’s always the key. … The best directors and actors, they know: Play it straight, play the emotional reality and the situation is funny and the comedy can find itself.
DEL TORO That is also true of doing something heavy-handed [like House of Dynamite].
OPPENHEIM The reality is that in our movie, it’s a nightmare. It’s potentially the end of all mankind, but those people are doing their jobs, so they’re not reflecting on the fate of all mankind. They’re picking up the phone and calling the person who the handbook says they’re supposed to. It’s factual. The people who work in that room in Strategic Command, they told us they rehearse that scenario 400 times a year. The general [in our movie] has thought about this every day, twice a day, so for him, it’s another day at the office, and this is what he’s there for. It’s a matter-of-fact nonchalance.
TRACY There’s this really smart focus on the mundane details of their coffee orders and their snacks and all those things that make you realize that “oh yeah, there’s 18 minutes, it’s everything, but it’s coming right after breakfast.”
OPPENHEIM And they never know when it’s going to happen. That’s the thing with what you’re saying, Guillermo, in terms of these scenarios, there’s a temptation to imbue them with a grandiosity. But at the end of the day, for the characters, for the most part, at least in our movie, because time is ticking down and because this is their job that they’ve rehearsed for, they’re running through the motions just like you and I would be doing a day at the office.
HIKARI For Rental Family, the business itself is so bizarre. You’re talking about renting a family member. The actor would come in and pretend to be your dad, sister or brother, and for that experience, every day, every moment is improvisation. And then the actors who are registered to work in this agency, they’re not quite working actors, so they’re kind of using this environment to really be good. So Stephen Blahut and I constantly talked about: How can we make it as organic as possible? Really, the story is told from Brendan Fraser’s character. Finding that balance between him playing the character to really investing as a human being is that fine line between, so those are kind of the dialogues that we were trying to figure out how we say it, how would he say it, and how other people who don’t know what he’s doing are going to react to it. It was great fun. In Japanese culture, there’s a lot of social issues that we try to incorporate into what they go through individually.
“If you’ve done your job in making the film, then the film starts to say so much more than whatever the lines of these characters are saying,” says Train Dreams co-writer and director Clint Bentley.
Photographed by Mark Griffin Champion
I’d love to talk about the origins of your screenplays. Bradley, you, Will Arnett and Mark Chappell wrote a screenplay based on someone’s story that happened 25 years ago, 3,000 miles away.
COOPER The idea was born way before I came on. I was in the middle of shooting a movie, on hiatus, and just asking Will what he’s working on. He started saying that he and Mark were developing a movie about this guy, John Bishop, who I wasn’t aware of. He was a very successful comedian. He sells out the O2 arena in the U.K. Will was saying, “It’s about a guy who goes into a bar one night, doesn’t want to pay the cover, and they say, ‘You can put your name down.’ ” I was like, “And you’re going to play that guy?” He’s like, “Yeah.” We used to live together in Venice, California. We were young actors, and I idolized him. I really looked up to him, and he was always the funniest guy in the room. Him, Zach Galifianakis and Martin Short and Fred Armisen … if they’re in a room, forget it. … And I just couldn’t get it out of my mind. And then I was like, “Do you think that I could maybe direct it?” I hadn’t figured out how to direct something that doesn’t come from me. I don’t know where to put the camera. That idea scares me. So I said, “What if I just take some time to show you something and see what you guys think?” I don’t know if you feel like this, but we tend to write where we are in our lives. The thing is, I’m happy. It was like, “I want to make a hopeful movie.” … And stand-up comedy could be a foil rather than it being the main thing. That’s how it all started.
Writing for stand-up is different than writing comedy.
COOPER Well, I helped myself out. I was like, “Let’s switch it where he is not very good! Let’s have everybody keep telling him how bad he is. And let’s make sure that’s in the trailer.” (Laughs.)
All your films deal with trauma and grief in some way. Hikari, you’ve said that therapy is not very highly accessible in Japan, and that Rental Family is based on your own experience with your father.
HIKARI My mom lied to me about my father’s death: I was told my dad was dead. But when I was 7, I was outside jump roping, and this woman was like, “Do you know where your dad went?” I said, “He’s dead.” She said, “No, he left you for another woman.” I go home and I told my mom what happened and … she just literally pointed at the television and said, “That’s your father,” and he’s a very handsome actor on television with this beautiful smile. I believed her! At this point, everybody in school knows that we think that he’s my father. Somebody said, “No, he’s a half-American. You are full Japanese.” I was like, “Oh, fuck.” I go home and I ask her, and she’s like, “Sorry, I lied. That’s actually him.” And she did exactly the same thing. And at the time she said, “are you happy? Am I giving you enough love?” My answer was, “of course.” And she said, “well, maybe he wasn’t the nicest guy. Maybe it’s better that you don’t know him. And if I’m not giving you enough love, then let me know because I have to work on that.” I never questioned and I was like, “I’m happy.” So that was kind of my inspiration from having that little girl character [played by Shannon Gorman].
Clint and Guillermo, how did writing these films help you navigate your grief?
DEL TORO When I saw the Creature in James Whale’s movie, I said, “That’s me.” Then I read the book and I said, “Mary Shelley knew how it feels to be me,” and I was 11. So the next 50 years, I just pondered and I said, “I’m going to make this movie. … All my life, I thought my dad was the mystery, and then my mom died and I realized she is the mystery, and it hit me. The ending [where the Creature embraces the sunlight as Victor once told him] was key for me because when my dad was kidnapped and kept for 72 days, in the middle of that, I kept seeing the sun come out and I felt really angry. I felt like the cosmos and the sun didn’t care about my pain. And one day I said, “No, it’s my pain that doesn’t care about the cosmos or the sun. So why don’t I just relinquish that and I just accept the grace of things not stopping for your particular story.” When my mom went, it was like somebody scooped and it never came back, scooped a chunk of the universe and tossed it. Those things are in the movie: the experience of working an altruistic thing through imperfect mediums.
TRACY You kept something from the book that you don’t see in a lot of the adaptations, which is that kind of Creature as Observer section where he…
DEL TORO And it starts when he wakes up and the creatures at the foot of the bed, which had never been rendered on film. There’s a lot of the book that is there that had never been rendered that way. But you have to do it without making it reverence but love, which is very different.
BENTLEY Did you find your perspective on Victor changed over the years?
DEL TORO Completely. Well, the three versions of the book changed dramatically for me. The one I like the most is 1818 and the manuscript because you actually see Percy arguing with Mary in the margins about adjectives of adverses or this and that. But the more she was not disciplined, the more interesting it was. So your view of Victor, for me, it has to be experienced by the audience. You start and he is saintly. I give him a halo in the back and you say, oh, he’s Jesus.” … My perspective was, can two entirely opposite points of view reconcile, and grace and forgiveness happens so fast. I think we all want to be forgiven and we all want to forgive no matter how much you need. So that was the thing: Can I make Victor that way. Imperfect. Because at 61, you say I’m the protagonist and the antagonist of my own story. And so that changed only after 50. I’m glad it didn’t happen before.
BENTLEY I had lost both my parents in quick succession in ways that were surprising in their own ways and just felt like you get blindsided by life, and then you start thinking about the injustice of it. And [Denis Johnson’s] book came along, and I read it and there felt like such a bed there to talk about things. I wanted to show the long tail of grief and the fact that you have this moment in time where you can’t move and you have this feeling of, “How are people just going on with their lives out there when my life seems to be over?” I also had my first child right around the same time; holding those two things in my hand at the same time and just wanting to show the audience that grief never leaves you, and you always walk with a limp after it. Any of us who have gone through that know that. And yet there are so many more beautiful things that will come in life and so much more joy, and it will always be tinged with whatever you’ve gone through.
DEL TORO The structure, though, is remarkably different from the book. You made it more linear as opposed to starting with the most shocking act.
BENTLEY The book is very stream of consciousness and it’s just kind of all over the place. And he dies on page 86 and there’s still 30 more pages to go, and then it comes back around. And what I hoped we could do is, I wanted to find a structure that could work for the film without losing the wooliness of the story and the wooliness of life where it feels, I think, episodic at times and people come in and drift out of our lives, and then yet looking back, you start to put the pieces together and it all kind of starts to make sense, but as you’re living it, you’re just kind of going through it.
“You’re talking about renting a family member,” says Hikari of the premise for Rental Family. So, she adds, the challenge was: “How can we make it as organic as possible?”
Photographed by Mark Griffin Champion
DEL TORO Here’s a question for the table. When people talk about the writer’s block. How do you deal with something like that writing?
TRACY Usually I’m frozen by what seems like the infinite number of possibilities. It’s sort of like I’m stuck at a point and I feel like there’s eight or 10 branching paths. I could see why I could go that way, that way, that way. And boy, if I make the wrong choice, then I’m going to get a month down the road or 30 pages down the road and realize, oh, I should have taken path A. So that’s usually the issue for me, is I’m not sure which way is the right way. It’s not like I have no idea where to go. It’s sort of, which is the right idea.
BENTLEY Do you try different things?
TRACY Sometimes, yeah. And obviously the more you do it, the more experienced you are, you learn, you have a sense of which way might be the right path, but then you can even second guess that by saying, well, am I taking the path I always usually take?
DEL TORO Do you ever gone nonlinear or do you go straight through?
OPPENHEIM I am a very linear thinker. Particularly on a movie like this, not all movies, but a movie like House of Dynamite, it is sort of a math equation and a puzzle on some level in order to keep that tension. It’s the same 18 minutes told from three different perspectives. So background dialogue or a fleeting moment that you barely recognize in the first telling becomes central in the second and third. So in order to keep all of that clockwork running properly, I just felt for me, I had to have it all kind of laid out in some way and then just build it brick by brick by brick.
DEL TORO When you’re stuck, how do you get out? Or do you just brave it?
OPPENHEIM I surf through it. I just kind of let myself marinate in the discomfort and I find that if I’m taking a walk or doing something else, something clicks and then I dive back in. But this one in particular felt like I was building a machine and I needed to make sure each piece was in place before I moved on.
BENTLEY And then, do you go back once you’ve got the draft?
OPPENHEIM Yes, there was a lot of cross-referencing. It was perfect the first time. It was a lot of, never looked back, just nailed on the first try [laughs]. No, of course there was a lot of going back and then massaging because then you want to make sure, again, it’s all in service of story. So this moment needs to happen in a different place, but that’s a ripple then through the other three or even backwards ripples that happened when you got to the end. So I think when you’re trying to do this kind of structure, it becomes harder to just let the creativity flow free and you have to have a little bit of a design in mind.
TRACY But so much of writing right does happen on the walk to the grocery store or walking the dog. For me, it’s everything. It’s very hard to describe this to partners and family, that I’m writing right now. I’m working. It doesn’t look like it.
BENTLEY Bradley, what about you? How much do you stick to the script? Because not only this film, but all your films feel so, so natural and loose in a good way.
COOPER It’s funny, I was thinking, what’s the difference? Is it writer’s block or am I just procrastinating? That’s the dilemma I always have. I could say writer’s block, not really. I think I’m just really procrastinating. I think it’s avoiding it rather than I’m stuck. I’m trying as hard as I can. … This one was the most enjoyable because I learned this from [Leonard] Bernstein actually. He used to lay prone on his couch. That’s where he would compose and then he would get up and then write, but he wouldn’t sit there at the piano. … So I absorb the grace of that on this one and boy is that more enjoyable. So when I actually am writing, it’s different. It’s much faster. But I guess what I would say is if I’ve worked diligently and just ferociously on the script and had many avenues that found no exit, then I’m able to go and allow improvisation to happen. I learned this from David O’Russell, and I operated on this movie and it’s all in the forties, so I’m right there. So I always find you want the actors to feel as comfortable and as safe and you’ll say dialogue for them to say or tell them to talk about something or go over there, whatever it needs to, as long as you know exactly what you want.
HIKARI One thing I noticed about, I mean all the movies that you direct, but the music in Is This Thing On?, the way you had it was so unique, but it’s just so organic. It felt so New York, the jazz…
COOPER It’s great you said that because I think that’s how I can answer the question. I hate just two people improvising. I hate shooting it, that’s for sure [laughs]. It’s just like, what are we doing here? What was all those years of writing? I remember Todd Phillips said it. He is like, “I’ve written [this], so you think what you’re going to come up with right now is better?” [Everyone laughs.]
“We tend to write where we are in our lives. The thing is, I’m happy,” says Bradley Cooper of making Is This Thing On? “I want to make a hopeful movie.”
Photographed by Mark Griffin Champion
DEL TORO Noah, I have a question for you that is anecdotal, because having done a movie with Idris [Elba], and I love Idris, but he said to me the first day we met, “I want you to know I don’t learn the lines.” And his method is when in doubt, squint. He’s a great squinter, but his lines were so precise. Did he do that on House?
OPPENHEIM He did learn his lines on this movie. It was nothing personal! No, he was great. I mean he definitely learned the script as it was, but he also brought much of himself to it at the same time. So there was of course some improvisation around the margins of it. I mean, that scene where it’s just him and another guy in a helicopter for most of that with the weight of the world on his shoulders.
DEL TORO Amazing, rare lines. It was so powerful, so horrifying.
OPPENHEIM I wish I could take [credit]. It’s all from the research. I talked to a guy who had been the military attache to a president and that’s how they talk about it.
DEL TORO And the saddest, most terrifying thing after seeing the movie is that Iris Elba is not the president.
OPPENHEIM Well, yeah, I mean, it was really important for us on that note, to have a president that was neither a bumbling jackass or this sort of heroic president of most movies. He’s not Jed Barlet from West Wing either. He’s not going to save the day. He’s just a regular guy.
BENTLEY Which is the brilliant thing about the whole script is nobody has all the information and these are all the experts and all of them are like, I don’t know what to do.
OPPENHEIM It’s funny you talking about the personal motivation for these scripts. I worked in a big media organization and early on when I was running NBC News, we had reporters all over the world and war zones, [which was] a lot of responsibility. And somebody pulled me aside and said, “I have really bad news for you. There is no room full of adults on another floor that has all the answers to these problems.” The reality of it is, I’ve always just been of these institutions that we look at and we think that somebody must know what they’re doing. And the reality of it is is that a lot of them are hardworking, well-intentioned, great people, but they’re just people.
For a lot of you, writing wasn’t your only job on your films. Some of you were camera operators, actors, directors, too. At what point does the writing process stop?
DEL TORO When the Blu-ray comes out.
BENTLEY I agree with that, actually. I feel like it’s all writing all the way through. Even in the edit, you’re still rewriting the thing and in some ways writing your way back to the initial idea after trying so many things, but it’s all writing all the way through.
DEL TORO One of my favorite lines came in the editing room when the Creature picks up Mia from the bed and carries her down the stairs. I felt, she must say,” take me with you,” which is something I remember dreaming about my dad when I was a kid. I dreamed that he went away on a train and I ran, and they said, this is the train of the dead. I was very young and I would say, “take me with you,” and jumped on the train, and I thought, she needs that line for this to be an opera.
We’re going to close with some rapid fire questions. First, where do you guys write?
COOPER The sofa. It’s the laptop, so wherever I am with it.
BENTLEY Yeah, anywhere.
TRACY Same thing. Either in bed, on the sofa, on a desk upstairs.
DEL TORO Never on the desk! I have five. Never!
HIKARI I like bed. I can’t do desk.
OPPENHEIM I sit on my desk.
DEL TORO The answer would be Bed, Bath and Beyond.
“You’re basically in the house the whole time,” says Will Tracy of Bugonia. “So you have to elevate the conversation.”
Photographed by Mark Griffin Champion
On what do you write? Anyone write on old school typewriter?
DEL TORO No, no one is above 70 here.
COOPER Once, I did download Final Draft on my phone. I have done that.
HIKARI Actually, I do do dialogue sometimes on my phone.
Do you need complete silence when you’re writing.
COOPER Hell no!
DEL TORO No.
OPPENHEIM I need total silence.
HIKARI I need silence.
COOPER I can’t do it in silence! I listen to Pat McAfee’s show on ESPN. It’s on for four hours. I just have it on the iPad on low. It just happened organically and then I needed it every day.
TRACY Always music for me. And then, because working in serious television, I had to get used to writing in the back of crew transpo.
BENTLEY I can’t write with music. I feel like it influences it too much. But silence, no silence. It doesn’t matter.
DEL TORO I do it like in high school where you did a mix tape for a girl. I do a mix tape for the screen. Yeah, a playlist. And I just have it on repeat.
What 2025 script, other than your own or the ones represented here, have impressed you the most and why?
TRACY I technically worked on the film as a producer, but not really. But my friend Ari Aster’s script for Eddington, I think he did a really brave tricky thing, which when COVID happened, I felt like every other writer I knew was like, no one wants to write a goddamn COVID script and no one was going to pitch one. It felt sort of lame, or even hack to really dive into a movie about those months and that kind of early COVID period. And he, I think, did a very brave thing. He’s like, no, I’m doing it. I’m doing an epic, almost three hour, you’re literally in spring of 2020 COVID movie. I’m going to go right into that feeling and all that stuff. And he was kind of the first one out the pontoon boat to do that.
COOPER One Battle After Another. I really loved it and I just loved how it just didn’t mark the time that progressed. You just figure it out as everything’s going on.
DEL TORO And talk about impeccable dialogue. To me, No Other Choice because when you know Donald Westlake’s [his novel The Ax on which the movie is based] writing, the way he mixes the horrible with the humors and things happen at the same time, and I’ve been a fan of his novels forever and the way they tackled that, it was flawless for me and incredibly bold.
BENTLEY Sentimental Value is amazing.
HIKARI Bugonia! I’m not naturally a writer. I just put my ideas put together and then see where a story takes me. But I have so much respect for all the writers… I would love to be like you guys someday,
OPPENHEIM Everyone at this table, and I thought Train Dreams was spectacular. I say Sinners too, just because I just love anyone taking big swings on original.
DEL TORO Also, Weapons did some beautiful trickery that is basically Magnolia in the way he breaks the story and even the character or something. But the way [Zach Cregger] broke it… linearly, that story doesn’t quite work. But if you break it like that, the appetite for an answer becomes so urgent. I think that’s one of the things that I value the most in screenwriting is structure, because it should be invisible, but it’s so precise and the big decisions are done there. So I thought Weapons made a couple of big decisions that paid off with emotion.
“The people who work in Strategic Command, they rehearse that scenario 400 times a year,” says Noah Oppenheim of a nuclear crisis as depicted in A House of Dynamite. “It’s a matter-of-fact nonchalance.”
Photographed by Mark Griffin Champion
If you could have written one other script that became a film in any year in history, which one would you have liked to have written?
OPPENHEIM Dr. Strangelove.
TRACY I think a Graham Green script for the Third Man. It’s a great example. It sort of has a sort of thriller genre, mystery element to it, but then it seems to be grappling with the state of the world and post-war world and it’s just really atmospheric and great dialogue and yeah, I love it.
DEL TORO I would go with Frankenheimer’s The Train. Walter Bernstein was one of the writers who was a great structuralist. And I love the idea of taking a genre that works, like a genre movie that delivers what the genre movie is, and it still has weight of theme and character. That, to me, is a perfect movie. But it starts on the perfect thread.
COOPER Beverly Hills Cop. That’s comedy, everybody. And also it’s a straight up drama in the beginning. And then, bam!
DEL TORO Can I choose Midnight Run?
BENTLEY It’s a more recent one, but The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Speaking of structure, all the kind of echoes through that film that Eric Roth did is phenomenal.
HIKARI I’m a huge Yorgos Lanthimos fan. The Favorite was one of my favorite movies of all time. And also, I love Park Chan-Wook too. I can’t pick because there’s so many. …
TRACY Beverly Hills Cop 2?
HIKARI And Terminator 1.
This story first appeared in a January stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
