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, and if they had other ideas we could talk about them and in some cases we used them. So that was all great.

But when I saw the finished film, I realized that in the scenes where I really wrote out what happened in the action sequences, when what I wrote was specific like… I’m just going to make something up… “He fires the bow! We’re with the arrow as it flies through the air, pierces a shield and enters the chest of an orc…” that was what I got. On the other hand, if I said “a massive battle ensues” and I just gave generics like “we see a group of orcs come down and wipe out a group of heroes” the final product came out as generic as it sounds, because I wasn’t giving the director anything to work from.

And I think that’s the key as an action movie writer. You have to be specific with every moment. It may be completely changed when the film is shot, but you’ve established the tone and that’s the responsibility of the writer. After that you really lose the ability to affect what’s going on. Maybe you’re a producer and that’s great, but oftentimes you’re the producer and it doesn’t mean anything. So you have to have as much on the page as you can get there and then hope, not that they follow everything that you do, but that they get what you’re going for… and if they have something better, great. It’s still going to work. If you leave it just open and vague, you’re leaving both yourself and the film exposed to things that don’t fit: whether it’s tone, theme, consistent character….

As I see it, writing an action movie is harder than writing a drama. I have to write a drama first and then add in an action movie. It has to be built on that. Or a comedy and an action movie—like if it’s Beverly Hills Cop or something like that. You have to make it work as a drama or a comedy, and then you have to make it work as an action movie on top of it. So you’re doing a lot of work as the writer and you have to understand how to do both, so you have as much on the physical page as you can before you’re kicked off and your baby is out there and someone else is taking care of it.

Jacob Krueger: Let me ask you one question, this is probably less of a Spiderman question and probably more of a question for young writers and emerging writers who want to break into action movie writing. Obviously it would be very nice if someone knocked on your door and you’re a brand new writer and said “we’re doing The Amazing Spiderman 3. What do you think? Do you want to be part of it?” But obviously that’s not the way that that happens. And young writers don’t have the resources to go out there and option one of those property movies.

So in a way that’s a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing in that you don’t have a studio saying “we need this chase sequence for the video game, we need this set piece, we need this toy, we need this for the theme park ride,” you don’t have to deal with that. But on the other hand, what are producers looking for from emerging writers? Because I think sometimes it’s hard. A young writer goes to see The Amazing Spider Man 2 and thinks it doesn’t actually have to be that good.

It doesn’t have to be that pitchable. There’s not really a pitchable hook in Spiderman 2. The main character doesn’t really want anything for most of the movie. You don’t really have the traditional structure. Things are uneven tonally. And I think it’s easy for young writers to think “I just have to make a couple of fun chase sequences and cool looking stuff and magically I’m going to have the kind of career that Bob and JJ and Simon Kinberg and Damon Lindelof and all the top guys have.”

George Strayton: I totally understand why they would think that. A few things emerging writers need to understand:

First, it’s really difficult to know what got on the screen versus what was on the page. I know for a fact that these guys work. They spend a lot of time on these scripts. They have a lot of people to please. And oftentimes those people have contradictory wants. So it’s about how to navigate those waters. There’s a lot going on. Especially when 175 to 200 million in production plus another 75 million in marketing is riding on it. So it’s difficult in that world to make those movies. So while you may see a film and come away and not like it, that doesn’t mean the writer didn’t do an amazing job. It doesn’t mean the writer’s not good. This guy could be fantastic. You might have been blown away. So it’s hard to say. And sometimes it’s the writer’s fault. That happens. And sometimes things don’t work for reasons people don’t know.

On the other hand, when you’re coming at it as an emerging writer and you’re creating your own original action film you have a lot more freedom. Let’s say you’re working on a movie like Inception. That’s an original movie. It’s not based on an open writing assignment, which is what it’s called normally when you’re brought into the studio to write the next franchise movie. So you have your own original idea, and what they’re looking for depends on the producer of course.

Some producers are looking for what I like to call the “Liam Neeson Movies,” which have been really popular and expanding and Kevin Costner is doing them now… these 35 million dollar movies that play well all across the world because they’re primarily action. They’re very simple storylines in which your loved one has been captured in some way and you’ve got to rescue them. A producer looks at a movie like that and thinks “That’s got a hook. I can pitch it. It doesn’t cost a lot of money initially. I can get a good actor, I can shoot it quickly.” There’s not a lot of pressure riding on it. There’s not a whole franchise resting on it. When the first Taken movie came out no one was thinking “This is a whole franchise! We can’t mess the first one up.” There’s not so much pressure on the film.

So as a writer who’s doing your own thing, there should be no pressure. You shouldn’t feel any pressure. You shouldn’t feel like you’re trying to build a franchise. Don’t do that to yourself. If you’ve got a great idea for the second movie—use it in the first movie! Don’t save anything. There may not be a second movie if the first movie’s not good enough! If you have any great idea—and it works in the first movie—put it all in the first movie.

Jacob Krueger: That’s a really great point, especially when we think about Spiderman. Think about how much stronger this movie might have been if Gwen had died at the end of Act 1 and we had to watch him deal with it.

George Strayton: Yeah, what’s interesting to me is that Bob and Alex and Jeff Pinkner got involved on Amazing Spiderman 2. They didn’t work on the first one. And they were hired to write a trilogy: Spiderman 2, 3 and 4. So I think for them this is Act 1. I didn’t get to speak to them about this. But just knowing them, I’d guess that they’re looking at that as a bigger picture, and thinking that’s the end of Act 1 for them. And now we’re going to see Spiderman in “Number 2” going to more of an Empire Strikes Back, dark kind of thing.

Jacob Krueger: When you’re a big writer like these guys, you can do that. You can get away with saying, “you know what I’ve got plenty of time.” You can see this in “Game of Thrones” too. “No problem, we’ve got plenty of time… people are gonna come back… we can set it up in this movie… we’ll do with it next installment.” But when you’re a young writer you don’t have that option. You’ve got to nail it in this movie.

George Strayton: That’s true. you’ve got to nail it in the movie. And here’s what people are looking for:

They don’t want anything longer than 110 pages. That is your maximum. Do not hand in anything more than 110. If you can be between 100 and 105 that’s perfect. Because the first reaction of your script is going to be “I only have to read 105 pages.” So already they’re happy. Because they have so much to read. No one’s trying to be a jerk. They just have so much to get through they only have so much time. So it’s writing a script that fits into that amount of space.

Also, you’ve got to have something really cool that’s action related every 10 pages. So for a 100 page script, you need 10 things. All 10 of them don’t have to be fight sequences. You don’t need a fist fight and then a sword fight. It could be some kind of fist fight, then a chase sequence, then an infiltration sequence… I think one of the most famous is Tom Cruise in the first Mission Impossible when he’s on the wires. That’s a great intense action sequence, but nobody’s fighting anybody. That’s just part of what makes an action movie. When we have 10 of those, that’s enough time so when the readers are reading and just starting to feel like “this is kind of slow” then all of sudden you hit them: “OH! All right! Here we go…what’s happening here?” If you make each of those really awesome, they’re going to love you. Because they’re going to know you can write great action.
As you probably see, a lot of what sells film are the trailers. And what you see in those trailers are the action moments. So that’s what they’re looking for: give me what’s a unique action thing I’ve never seen before. So there should a focus on that primarily. But that’s not to take away anything from having a good story. We don’t care about the action if we don’t care about the characters. So don’t ignore the characters, is my second piece of advice. Make sure the action we’re seeing is a physicalization of the emotional journey that these characters are on.

Wherever you are in the script, you shouldn’t be able to mix and match your action sequences. You shouldn’t be able to take action sequence number 3 and make it number 7. That shouldn’t work because those specific action moments should have a tone and a quality about them that evokes in a visceral way, in a visual way, in an auditory way and in every other way what that character is going through emotionally. So the moment where Gwen gets killed in Spiderman 2—it’s dark and they shoot it dark. That action sequence is probably the darkest action sequence in the entire film, because they know they’re leading up to that.

So have great action moments, but don’t make them random. Make sure they come out of character. Because you have to keep those people entertained in between those 10 pages. But then when you get to the action sequences they really need to be engaged because they want to know what’s going to happen to these characters. And by the way, each action sequence should have a different kind of completion, like the way you teach any kind of writing. The scenes or sequences should end with some kind of completion whether they succeeded, failed or something else takes over. So that’s another way to vary them. If sometimes they fail. If they never fail we always think they’re going to win. So it’s boring.

Jacob Krueger: I think that’s one of the biggest problems with Spiderman 2. You have a villain who can channel frickin’ electricity! You have a villain who can disappear into the power grid! And the worst thing that happens to Spiderman is that one of his cobweb things get fried. This is one of those standard principals in drama as well as in action, which is whatever the worst thing that can happen is, it damn well better happen.

George Strayton: I thought the same thing and then I remembered there was this moment. I just think it’s glossed over.

Jacob Krueger: Another example of where the writer might not have hit it hard enough.

George Strayton: Somebody somewhere didn’t hit it hard enough. Whether it was the cut that was wrong– if you go two frames too long you can ruin it. I saw an interview with the guys who wrote “Game of Thrones” and they were saying sometimes it’s a matter of 4 frames—cutting it earlier or later by 4 frames can make all the difference. And by the way there are 24 frames per second so that’s not very long.

So with regards to that particular moment you’re talking about in Spiderman. That is a symptom of what the bigger picture is. And it’s there but it’s so glossed over the idea is that he can’t defeat Electro by himself. And here was the physicalized symptom. That his web slinger, which he’s been using in different ways throughout the entire movie—and I think they did a great job inventing different ways to use the web slinger—this was the only physicalized symptom that was supposed to show that he cannot defeat Electro. But there was some moment, where it was tried to be made clear that Spiderman can’t defeat Electro alone. And that is why later when he tries to leave Gwen behind and then she shows up and because she works for OsCorp and clearly is a genius when it comes to electronic things, she is the only one who can help him defeat elector because he can’t do it on his own.

Jacob Krueger: I agree with you that thematically it is laid in there, and it’s laid in there with dialogue. But the truth of the matter is for all his trouble with the web slinger, Spiderman does subdue Electro in that first sequence, the first time they face off in Times Square– I mean that is a really beautiful scene. There are some incredible visuals there—and he does subdue Electro. That’s how they’re able to take him. I think it’s one of those examples of: sometimes the character has to lose. And I don’t think that happens to Spiderman, until he loses Gwen.

George Strayton: I think you needed the same thing to happen within the Electro storyline. I thought with Harry it was there, because they have a pre-established relationship. So you didn’t need to do as much.

Jacob Krueger: Like you were saying, even though these are action movies it’s really about the hot relationships. And that’s why Max/Electro is such a challenging character. Because prior to becoming Electro, Max only has one interaction with Spiderman. He has a nice interaction with Gwen…

George Strayton: He does actually. That was my favorite moment with Max.

Jacob Krueger: With one more beat, if there was a moment between Electro and Gwen for example, then you’d really have a structure for Max’s story, and for Gwen’s story, and for how all these different tones line up together.

George Strayton: That’s true, and having seen things happen before in other big action movies, that scene could have existed in the script.

Jacob Krueger: They’re certainly setting it up.

George Strayton: And these guys are really good at following up on things. They’re very conscious of what they’re doing and they’ve been doing this for a long time and they’re really good at it and literally you talk to them and they can spin a story for you in a few seconds. Their minds work so quickly in storytelling language. Which makes me believe it was there somehow. I know for example with Transformers the first assembly came in and it was 3 hours long and the studio was like “we can’t.” There’s a business side of this where we have to have a certain number of showings a day. I the movies 3 hours we can’t have the same number of showings.

Jacob Krueger: This is one of the reasons it has to be 105 pages.

George Strayton: Yes, exactly. Transformers 1 ended up being about 2:15 I believe, so 45 minutes was cut out. And unfortunately a lot of what was lost was not the action but the character stuff. So that’s why I feel, because there were those two moments, I wouldn’t be surprised when the script is available and we can look at it it, if there might have been another moment there. Because it was set up so perfectly for that. But for everything that goes into these projects, if I was an emerging writer or even if I’m doing a script like Spiderman, then I still do have complete control over what people are reading.

As a writer who is getting these open writing assignments I don’t have complete control over what people are seeing. But when I’m sitting in my own house and working on my own script and just sending it to people to read, I have complete control. I have control over what it looks like on the page–which is important by the way– giant chunks of black, paragraphs with no breaks are a bad idea. They just skip that page. It’s not gonna be read. I don’t care if you have the coolest action sequence ever, they’re just going to skip that page. So you have complete control over all that. And take advantage of it! Because when you are successful you’re not going to have that luxury.

So this is the time you’re going to need to take to get on the page exactly what you’re seeing. You need to visualize the film and have those moments in there. And because it’s an action movie, especially because it’s an action movie, try to make them visual. Anything that is really important to the plot or the character, which by the way should be the same thing: make it visual.

Jacob Krueger: You know, I have a seminar coming up on Frozen, and it’s interesting thinking about musicals in this context, because in a way action movies are built a lot like musicals. You have the book, which is the dialogue and that action that happens between the characters, and then you have the musical sequences. I worked on a project with Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg, who composed Les Miserables, and when you’re working on a musical what you do is you write the script and then the composer and the lyricist come in and say “oh, this is the most awesome thing you’ve got, we’re turning this into a musical number.”

So from an organic writing perspective it’s the idea: take the most powerful dramatic sequence in your action movie and turn that into an action sequence. If this is the moment he loses his girlfriend, make it the sequence when the Green Goblin destroys her. If this is the moment he asks the girl out… let him do it when he’s jumping out of a helicopter or something. The idea is that the most powerful elements need to be handled inside the action, but the action is really just the conveyance for the character’s journey.

George Strayton: There’s a really good example of that in a film. I went to Columbia University for my MFA in film and one of the teachers who was an alumnus and came back and taught a master class was Simon Kinberg, who wrote Mr. and Mrs Smith. And it was about the realities of making these big movies with two giant stars, a movie that took two years to shoot, a lot of reshooting etc. to make the movie everyone saw.

When he first had the idea for the film it was about going through a divorce: just about what is that like. There are five stages, and he was looking at all five and how they played out. And in one of them, he did this great action sequence where you didn’t even know it was going to be an action sequence. It’s at a restaurant. Brad Pitt goes to meet Angelina Jolie and they sit at a table. All these people are around, older folks. It’s an upscale place. And then Angelina Jolie moves her leg, and you notice there is a gun, and then they end up dancing, and basically they might shoot each other.

Then there’s another great scene, where they wind up having sex and they’re beating the crap out of each other but it’s about the relationship. What’s going on is just a physicalization of what’s happening between those two people.

Jacob Krueger: You have this class coming up Writing the Action Movie. Talk a little bit about that what happens in that class. How is that class structured? What are students going to learn?.

George Strayton: It’s a four session class, and we’re going to cover a bunch of things. And we are going to spend a little time at the end talking about the business side, because I think it’s important. It’s one of those parts of the film business where there’s not a lot of room for mistakes. There’s a lot of money riding on these films so in order to get your shot you’ve really got to be good. They’ve got to read your spec and be like “this guy gets it… he’s gonna turn in something great… I’m not going to lose my job because I hired this guy to write a script for a giant franchise movie.” So we’ll spend some time talking about what the reader expects and how to write for a reader. Most of what we’re going to talk about his how do you get action on the page, which is surprisingly difficult.

When I first started writing action movies, I would watch a Bond movie or whatever it was, and I would try to emulate it without having read the script. My action sequences always tended to be 7-10 pages. The same length that I thought I was seeing in the film was what I was writing, the same number of action beats took me 10 pages to write. It was 5 minutes in the film, and it was 10 pages in my script.

So what I started to do was to hunt down every script I could get my hands on, and find out how did they write this in such a short amount of pages but convey what was actually going on in a specific way. Before doing that, my first impulse was, I’ll write this in just a generic way. “There’s an action sequence and here are some of the highlights: she jumps over from one building to another, they run across more rooftops…” I tried to cheat it, and then what I realized that’s not how it was done. When I started reading all these scripts, especially with people like Tony Gilroy who wrote the Jason Bourne Films. It’s all there on the page. And you’ve got to get it there, but you only have 4 or 5 pages. So how the hell do you do that? And not only that, but how do you write it so people understand what they’re going to see in the film. And also how do you come up with cool unique action sequences. Nobody wants to see something they’ve seen a million times before. And long gone are the days when you can write The French Connection and for the coolest action sequence in the movie just write the words “the coolest car chase we’ve ever seen on film”. That’s the line! One line and it’s 5 minutes of amazing, great, cool stuff. But you can’t do that any more. That’s not happening . Don’t do that please. We’re going to go through and talk about how to come up with really cool action. There’s a lot of different ways to think about it, and to brainstorm and to figure out what works on film and get it on the page. And then what we’re going to talk about, to bring it all full circle, is related to what we’ve been talking about here, which is a tone.

So there’s something in all these movies, which I’ve heard called different things, I’ve heard it called mood cue. Jessica Hinds, one of the teachers here at the Studio calls it “priming the audience.” Basically what you’re doing is establishing the mood so the action works in the way you want it to. So it doesn’t come off as silly when you mean it to be serious.

I’ll give an example from Raiders of the Lost Arc, because I think that’s a film that most people have seen, especially people who want to write action. And these are the kinds of things we’ll talk about. Early in the film they’re in the Amazonian jungle and they’re hunting for this idol. They have these Quechua porters with them, and at one point in that sequence, they arrive at this idol. They cut away the vines, they see the stone idol, and suddenly bats fly out of it. Just boom! Bats fly out of it. And people get scared. The characters get scared for a moment—not Indy of course—we actually haven’t seen Indy’s face yet . But the characters that are there at that moment get freaked out and some of them run away. Does that push the story forward? No. Is there anything we needed to know for something that happens later? No. Did the bats come back and attack Indy on the way out ? No. You can make all these cases for taking that out of the movie because it seems like it’s not doing anything. But it is doing something. And what it’s doing is setting up the suspense. And putting you on the edge of your seat.

It’s the same thing in a horror movie where they throw the cat out at you. You know the cat leaps out at you… “oh it was just a cat, thank goodness!” But your heart is racing. And that’s where we want you. And you’ve got to do that on the page. You don’t have visual. You don’t have auditory. You only have the words on the page. So we’re really going to delve into that: how do we create the movie on the page in exactly the way that the audience is going to experience it at a movie theater.

So when the first reader, who’s going to be 23-25 and just out of film school, they’re going to see it in they’re mind’s eye. You’re not leaving it up to them to “direct” the movie, to “act” the movie, to “invent” the specific moments of those action sequences. You’re going to give them exactly what the movie is, so they can see that this is awesome! It’s all here right on the page. This person knows what they’re doing. We should hire this person. And even if we don’t want to make this particular script we should hire this person to write one of our other scripts. Because they totally know what they’re doing. So we’re really going to specifically focus on how to create those action moments in a way that’s going to work on the page for people reading it that you want to impress.

Jacob Krueger: It sounds like it would even be a good class for a drama writer

George Strayton: I was thinking about that earlier today. You can have great action moments in a drama. For example one of my favorite movies is American Beauty. We know from the beginning Lester is going to get killed. He tells you at the beginning “I am going to die.” We already know he’s going to die, so how do you make the sequence at the end there suspenseful or interesting? Don’t forget—you don’t know who’s’ going to kill him. There’s actually a question of who is going to murder him. We don’t know, and that’s really great storytelling. Is it going to be his wife? His daughter? We don’t know. The way that Alan Ball structured that script, he put in there very specifically the moments we’re going to see that make us wonder and really worry despite knowing he’s going to get killed. We’re on the edge of our seats: is it going to happen now? Is it now? Who is going to do it?

No one is going to say that American Beauty is an action movie. But you can find a plethora of dramas that depend upon this kind of action. Or comedies. Comedies have action pieces all the time. Think about The Hangover movies. There are action moments going on all over the place. Not traditional action moments like a Christopher Nolan movie or a Michael Bay movie or Tony Gilroy movie, but they’re there.

So how do you get that on the page? Especially in that kind of movie? The audience, the reading audience, is expecting to read a drama or expecting to read a comedy. So you really have to get in there, get your action in, make it part of the film, and then get out! The only way to do that, is to really know how to write action in a poetic but efficient way. So it’s very clear but it only took a few lines to get it in there. You’re in and out, you’ve had the impact you wanted, and now we’ve moved on. Actually in almost all films you can probably find these kind of action moments. Because action is suspense. Action all of the different emotions that you want to have in any kind of film.

Jacob Krueger: That Action Movie Writing class starts on June 11th. And then you’ll have a Level 2 version of that class on July 30th. And if you want to read more about that class you can go to Writeyourscreenplay.com/action.