Five Minutes With Bill Broyles

Bill Broyles is best known for writing big movies about small ideas. Movies like Castaway, where a FedEx employee is simply stranded and tries to survive on a desert island. Or Apollo 13 that is visually (and financially) striking, but at its heart, there is a simple story. Maybe that’s what makes a film in space seem so relatable.

Broyles began writing as a journalist after fighting in the Viet Nam war. After his first project, China Beach– a critically acclaimed TV series focussing on the women of the Viet Nam- Broyles broke into Hollywood. Now he writes movies, having recently worked on Jarhead, Planet of the Apes, and The Polar Express. I interviewed him online from across the pond.

Apollo 13, Broyles’ most critically successful films to date

Harry Shukman: How did you make the transition from journalist to scriptwriter? 

Bill Broyles: Being a journalist teaches you to poke your nose in other people’s business. You’ve got to have a curiosity about how things really are and what’s going on in the world. It’s amazing how amazed movie people can be about stories from the real world. In Hollywood, you learn quickly that you are telling a story with pictures – it’s much harder than it looks.

My first project, China Beach, was based on my Vietnam experience, except I decided to focus on women in the war instead of men. Writing those first scripts, my main job was taking out dialogue and learning to tell the story by what the characters did, not what they said. The ability to ground behaviour in what would really happen, in observation from real life, is the advantage I had. A lot of screenwriters only know what they’ve seen in other movies.

HS: How does the process of script idea to screen happen? 

BB: You don’t want to know. Castaway took me six years and over 100 drafts. Maybe I’m just not that smart, but it took me years to figure out what the story really was and how to tell it. Even with a simple structure, like Apollo 13, it took years to assemble all the pieces and figure out how best to tell the story. A screenplay has a specific form. If a sonnet doesn’t have three quatrains and a couplet, it isn’t a sonnet. If a screenplay doesn’t have a beginning, middle and end, and do that in under 125 pages, it’s not a screenplay.

To get a movie made a script has to convince a production company to risk its money, a director to risk more than a year of their life, and actors to risk their reputations.

The worst movies are usually the ones where the deal drives the movie: they’ve got hot actors, or a comic book tie-in, and they figure that they’ll fix the script as they go. I love working with directors like Bob Zemeckis and Sam Mendes who won’t do a thing until they understand the script inside out.

HS: Are you under any pressure to write a script that studios think will appeal on a universal level but is further away from the idea that you had in mind? 

BB: A movie is a collaboration, so along the way a lot of people want to have creative input. In a way writing film scripts is like raising children: you have to love them with all your heart and put everything you have into them, and then at some point you have to let them go. There is often pressure to make the scripts movie star cast-able, but I want to keep the vision mine as long as I can, but sometimes the best (or worst!) scenes emerge from conflict.

HS: What projects are in the pipeline? 

BB: I love the Odysseus project. I’ve stolen from the Odyssey many times – Castaway and Apollo 13 should have given Homer a co-writer credit – but no one has ever done the real thing, right, with the power and potential of modern film technology. I’ve also done an adaptation of the novel The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, which Tom Hanks is co-producing and wants to act in. It’s more fun for me these days to write my own scripts than do scripts for hire. But if you’ve got a good one, you know where to find me.