Crave Online: This is the ultimate screenwriter story, isn’t it? You wrote a spec script and it got made with big stars and directors.
Gary Whitta: It happens. In this day and age, especially when so many movies are remakes and adaptations and it’s harder than ever to convince the studios to make something original without any pre-existing material, yeah, it’s quite a rare thing.
Crave Online: So how did you do it?
Gary Whitta: I don't know. I’m still trying to figure that out. I had been working in the business. I’d become a screenwriter. I’d sold an earlier movie, small movie, to an independent company and I was jobbing around, kind of in the middle tiers of Hollywood doing assignment work and things like that. I wrote Eli and it got put out into the world. Warner Brothers bought it, the Hughes Brothers became interested. The next thing you know, Denzel’s interested. It just kind of snowballed. It all happened so quickly, I still haven’t really taken inventory of it all.
Crave Online: Still, 10 years is a rough road to pay your dues, right?
Gary Whitta: Oh, but it wasn’t 10 years where I was spending my whole time doing that. After Total Movie, I continued to work. Future brought me back and I went back to the gaming side, worked on Next Generation magazine for a while. I worked on Daily Radar for a while, did some other jobs and then got into writing on the game side. So I was on the gaming side, I wanted to get into the movie side. Gaming’s become more cinematic. That was kind of the stepping stone for me. I did some work for video game companies doing screenwriting for games. That kind of segued into me having more time to do screenwriting. I wrote a bunch of scripts, sold my first thing in 2004 I think. At that point, I felt like I was broken in and I was taking meetings. That was the first year I got to write Screenwriter on my taxes. That’s what I did and I earned a decent living but it was clear that I was still very far from anything like A list. A lot of the jobs that as a geek I might be excited about, “I want to go and pitch on the Batman movie,” stuff like that, they wouldn’t listen to me on those jobs. Then the amazing thing was Eli completely changed that. Having the right script at the right time changes the industry’s perception of you literally overnight and suddenly the phone is ringing and you get to go and pitch on all these jobs that just the previous week were out of your reach, so it’s kind of crazy.
Crave Online: Still, it’s Joel Silver and Warner Brothers, so what changed from your original script?
Gary Whitta: You know, remarkably little. I just saw the film for the first time a couple of weeks ago. You’ve seen the more finished version than me. I only saw the 98% finished version where there were still visual effects to go, but the cut was finished. It was the movie and I was really thrilled with it. Especially someone like me, I’m always going to nitpick a million different things but I can comfortably say that’s the movie I wrote up there on the screen. I honestly got kind of choked up at the end a bit, going, “Oh my God, they made my movie.” You hear so many horror stories in Hollywood about you sell a script, but by the time it gets to the screen, something’s happened to it. It’s unrecognizable. It’s turned into something homogenized and market tested. That never happened here. We were really fortunate that all the people, the family of people that surrounded this film, the Hughes Brothers, Denzel, everyone was someone on board with what this film was. No one ever came and said, “We think there’s a good idea here but we see something different.” They got that this was a movie that they could make. Denzel believed in it from the beginning, was incredibly protective of it and shepherded it through production to make sure that the vision that we shared for the film was the one that wound up on the screen.
Crave Online: You didn’t get any studio interference since it’s more of an intellectual climax, like let’s put in one more shoot out?
Gary Whitta: First of all, I’m very glad to hear you say that. It was all about intellectual stakes, the idea of what if what they were all fighting about was knowledge, was a book, was a belief. It was something intellectual. Seriously, to hear you talk about that as an intellectual climax means that that came across, which is really good. The thing that we set out to do, we always said we want to make a thinking man’s action movie. That actually was something that one of the critics wrote. That came back to me, someone said, “Someone just came out and said it’s a thinking man’s action movie.” I was like, “We did it!” I’m so pleased because that’s exactly what we wanted to do.
Crave Online: Now the Hughes Brothers have said it’s okay to say that the book is the Bible. How did they keep the bible out of the press? Should it be a secret or surprise?
Gary Whitta: I think at this point, certainly there are spoiler elements at the end of the movie that we absolutely want to keep out of it. What the book is, you can tell I’m kind of hedging around even saying it in as many words, but they did a glimpse of it in the trailer. They made a decision that they were going to hint at it if not kind of put it all the way up front. I think the studio’s been very aware that they’re walking kind of a tightrope here where they want people to get a sense of it but they don’t want to feel like that’s what the movie is. I’ve said all along that this is not a religious film. This is not a preachy film. I think anyone can enjoy this and hopefully people will take from this film whatever they bring to it. I think there’s a number of different ways people can respond to this film.
Crave Online: Just saying it’s not religious should give away what we’re talking about.
Gary Whitta: The funny thing is, even though it’s been in the trailer, it’s only a quick shot. You see it’s clearly a cross on the front of the book. You see a couple of shots of pages from Genesis but there are still people online going, “What’s the book? What’s it going to turn out to be?”
Crave Online: Once they start quote it about a half hour in, you’d have to have no culture whatsoever not to get it.
Gary Whitta: Just in the trailer it’s blink and you’ll miss it, there’s a couple of shots. I feel that kind of put the cat out of the bag. They wanted to do it but not in an overt way. I still feel like that was the right way to go and even in the development of the film. It was shown in the very early draft of the script, it was shown very early on what the book was. In that early scene when he’s reading the book in the house, we showed what it was. We made a decision in development, let’s not tip that right away. Let’s have the book be a secret and kind of tease it out. Reveal what it is, then reveal what’s unique about it later in the film. So even just in terms of the experience of watching the film, we didn’t want people to get it right away.
Crave Online: Do you expect it to be controversial to say that this book is so important to society?
Gary Whitta: Yes, that is absolutely what I think people will say. I think any time you go into this area of philosophical thought about faith and spirituality and is there something greater than us and different belief systems, then people are going to pile in. Everyone’s going to have an opinion. That’s why I said I think people will take from this film what they bring to it. Whatever your worldview is, whatever you believe I think will color what you take from the film. And honestly, that’s what Allen and Albert responded to when they first read the script. They were saying this is exciting to us that this is a film that’s about something, that has a message. They don’t even have compatible views on faith. Just as brothers they believe different things, so that didn’t affect what they brought to the film. They don’t feel like they’re pushing any particular “this is what you should think or this is what you should believe” one way or the other. What excited them was they knew that it could be controversial but in a good way.
