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Screenwriter Supreme: The David Peoples Interview by Sky Tallone
At the San Francisco International Film Festival in May, David Peoples was honored for his literary and cinematic accomplishments. photo: S. Tallone
Screenwriting can be a scary. You write and write and write, and even if you write something great, you have to get someone to look at it and get money behind it and get it made. Most writers are lucky if they can get one film made, and even luckier if it was made well by a good director working with gifted actors.
And then there are writers like David Webb Peoples, who have had multiple masterpieces made by some of the best directors, and performed by some of the greatest actors. David and his wife Janet Peoples, also a talented writer as well as producer, have been working together on projects since early in David’s career.
He started out as a documentarian and an activist, and he and Janet collaborated on documentaries like "How We Stopped the War" (1969), "Who Are the DeBolts? (And Where Did They Get 19 Kids?)" (1977) and the Oscar-nominated "The Day After Trinity" (1981), about the creation and testing of the first atomic bomb.
David’s work has always offered some insight on the human condition, and often brings up human issues which are usually avoided in mainstream film. He doesn’t use senseless action and violence to pump up a script or black and white heroes and villains to make the story simpler for the audience.
He uses his complex characters, their relatable conflicts and deep-rooted flaws, in order to raise the tension in a story. He creates bad guys whom we often sympathize with and even understand. He writes stories that stay with us long after we leave the theater. Indeed, he has written some of the most distinctive scripts in the history of film, and worked with some of the greatest directors alive.
He reinvented the Western with "Unforgiven" (1992), which won many awards, and for which he received an Academy nomination. He and Janet wrote ‘Twelve Monkeys’ (1995), one of the most original and insightful stories to make it to the big screen. He also worked on the film noir-style masterpiece that raised the bar for the science fiction genre ever since: "Blade Runner" (1982).
At the San Francisco International Film Festival, David was honored for his literary accomplishments and interviewed by his long-time good friend and talented screenwriter, James Dalessandro. After the interview, the audience got to watch ‘Unforgiven’ on the big screen.
Peoples was interviewed by his old friend, screenwriter James Dalessandro. photo: S. Tallone
Dalessandro is best known for his novel "1906' about the San Francisco earthquake which was sold as a feature screenplay to Pixar. He also made ‘The Damnedest, Finest Ruins’ [2006], a fantastic documentary on the subject and wrote the feature ‘Citizen Jane’ [2009] for the Hallmark channel. He has been friends with David for over twenty years.
James Dalessandro: 'Unforgiven' is one of the great masterpieces of all time. He [David] believes that having Clint Eastwood was the only way they could get the movie made, but I believe that the real star of 'Unforgiven' is David Webb Peoples. You could say that he wrote the best film in two genres. The best sci-fi film I’ve ever seen is 'Blade Runner', and possibly the best and most literate Western was 'Unforgiven.
Next to every great man is a fantastic woman. The co-writer of '12 Monkeys' is his wife, and a truly great writer, Janet Peoples. They met in a mental institution, which helped them prepare for their career together in Hollywood.
When did you get the disease to be a writer? Do you remember a specific moment, or was it more of a gradual descent into hell?
David Peoples: It was kind of a circuitous thing as a kid. I thought writing novels and stuff was a great thing, and I’d sit there typing, and—it never came out like Dostoevsky, but subsequently, I started seeing some of those great movies. 'Seventh Seal', the Fellini pictures and stuff—and [my] books were shit, right?
Writing was shit. It was all about images.
I came out to San Francisco, and I was very lucky. I volunteered at KQED. At that time—this is 1962—they were into the cutting-edge in documentary films, doing the cinema vérité stuff. They were great.
And I went on to work as an editor, cutting news and all sorts of things, and I had nothing but disdain for the written word—the writers who wrote the news and everything. It was all images and sound—that’s what I was into. Subsequently, I got a job editing a picture, and the script—it seemed to me—was pretty awful.
But low and behold, the picture was coming out sort of the way it was written. And I thought: I can write better than this. So instead of trying to write my Dostoevsky, it was like trying to write at a level maybe I could handle. I started writing screenplays. I just wanted to make films or something like that but I fell in love with the process of writing.
I came to like the screenplays, and who cares if they’re a movie or not? I read some stuff by William Goldman, and he was able to evoke a movie on a page—that excited me beyond belief.
Old friends, filmmaker Phil Kaufman, Peoples and Dalessandro decompress at a bar in Japantown. photo: S. Tallone
In other words, you give [your screenplay] to somebody, and if they actually see the movie you’ve written, you’ve done it right. So I started writing, and I liked the writing, and I didn’t really care that much if it was a movie or not.
I have always been fascinated by 'Unforgiven,' just where the idea came from. Essentially, you put all the Westerns ever made on one side. The good guy and the bad guy, the white hat and the black hat, and violence is cool. And then along comes 'Unforgiven,' which just turns everything upside-down. I personally think that if you pick the greatest scenes from American movies in the last fifty years, the 'Duck of Death' scene dead in the middle of [ 'Unforgiven'] has to be one of them.
Could you just tell us—I’ve been friends with him for twenty years and have never gotten this story out of him in it’s entirety—where did the idea come from?
Number one, I’ve always liked what I guess you would call revisionist Westerns. I liked the [Howard] Hawks Westerns but I wasn’t crazy about John Ford and the big vistas and all of that stuff. And I wasn’t too crazy about much of the gun fighting and everything.
A perfect example is 'The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid' [1972], actually by a San Francisco guy, Phil Kaufman—one of the great film directors of all time! That’s a picture that would make me want to write Westerns. Those were about people in there—wonderful! And they were entertaining people, and it’s an exciting story, and it was terrific.
That alone didn’t help me write the Western but I had it in my background. I started writing the script, I wasn’t willing to have anybody killed in a script because I was so used to the Hollywood picture where people kill people and then go have breakfast or something...
It’s great in a James Bond movie or something but it’s absolutely absurd that there is no consequence. And I guess I should’ve noticed 'The Godfather' in a different way than I did, but it wasn’t until I saw 'Taxi Driver' that it suddenly gave me permission to address violence as part of the human condition, as opposed to some sort of process for solving problems. Scorsese and Paul Shrader brought that into view
At the same time, I happened to read a novel called 'The Shootist' by Glendon Swarthout. Now put aside for the moment that Glendon Swarthout’s son wrote a screenplay of 'The Shootist' and Don Segel made a picture [in 1976] with Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne and Lauren Bacall, a very pleasant, charming Western.
But it didn’t have the dark vision that the novel by Glendon Swarthout had. When you see Ron Howard playing The Kid in the movie, that ain’t The Kid that was in the book. The Kid in the book was a nightmare. 'The Shootist' got me into that place. It was about a man who was sick and dying. So that influenced me...
I was very inspired by 'The Shootist', and 'Taxi Driver', and especially by Travis Bickle when he says, ‘I want to be a person like other people.’ So there was that, but recently, I was asked to do an interview for some Fox re-releases of Westerns, because I wrote a Western, right?
And two of the Westerns were not things I had seen. If I saw them, I saw them as a kid and they meant nothing. But one was 'The Gunfighter' [1950], and I hadn’t seen it since 1950 or ʻ51 when I was ten years old. I remembered I loved that movie—wow.
So I said, 'Well look, I haven’t seen the film in over fifty years, so listen, get me a copy, and I’d be happy to do an interview.' I look at the film, and it blew my mind how much of 'Unforgiven' is in it. So at ten years old, I was starting [the project].
Is there some little nugget about the 'Duck of Death' scene? In one scene, David manages to destroy the myth of the old Western. Where did that come from?
Sometimes you get lucky—you never know if you’re into it right. Sometimes with characters, they say stuff that astonishes you, and you can never explain why they said it. I mean that would be true with a line toward the end, where Little Bill says, 'I don’t deserve this, I was building a house.'
I don’t know why he said it, but he did. But interestingly about that scene, and this is something writers will understand. I tried to take that scene out so many times. Because when you read a script, you’ll read it, and it’s just unbelievable shit. And you’re so embarrassed, you feel bad about it.
But then, next time you pick it up, maybe three weeks later or something, you’re picking up this piece of shit and you’re so depressed, and you start to read it. 'Holy shit, this is good!' You’ve taken different baggage into it, right?
But then the next time, you pick it up like 'I’m going to read this work of this genius Dave Peoples,' and it’s awful. 'Unforgiven' wasn’t happening, and I was very aware that that scene that you’re talking about; it’s a long talking scene.
So if you’re not actually imagining an actor—I don’t know how you could ever imagine an actor as good as Gene Hackman—but I did imagine somebody saying it in my better moments, and it sounded good.
But in other moments, I’d read it and it was just a bunch of words. And I’m thinking, ‘This is slowing it down, this isn’t working.’ I tried to fix it and shorten it and take it out and every damned thing, and the script just kept getting worse. And since nobody was paying me, I didn’t have to make it worse; so I didn’t.
The 'Blade Runner' story is quite amazing. Tell us the 'Blade Runner' story.
I’d actually finally had a tiny bit of success, and Tony Scott, Ridley Scott’s brother, who still hadn’t made his first feature, wanted to do a script I had written, 'My Dog’s on Fire'. That was a huge break for me, and I was excited that I was working on it with Tony.
All of a sudden, he introduced me to his brother. The picture was under way, they were doing pre-production. And the next thing I knew, I went home, and Ridley’s producer Michael Deely called up and said they wanted to talk to me about writing 'Blade Runner'.
And I went down there, and they put me in this suite and left me with a script. I read the script and I thought it was so terrific. And it broke my heart, because what are you going to do with this? And they said, 'Well what do you think of the script?'
And I said, 'Geez, it’s so good, I can’t see what I could do to make it better.' I hated saying that. It would’ve been nice to say, ‘Oh, I can fix this and I can make it a lot better, if you pay me a lotta money, ya know.'
But I couldn’t say that to him, it wasn’t true. And ironically, they looked very pleased, because it was their baby. And Michael said, 'Don’t you worry, Ridley has a few ideas.' That turned out to be the understatement of the century.
So I spent a period of time accommodating Ridley with his ideas. And sometimes he’d send me off to write some idea and I’d do it and rush over and hand him the pages, and he wouldn’t even read them because he had new ideas instead.
So it was an experience and a wild ride, and I think I made some really good contributions to the movie, and I did what a production rewriter is supposed to do. I did what the director wanted. But often very reluctantly, and sometimes even semi-argumentatively but I did what I was supposed to and some of it turned out good.
But the reason that movie is great is because Philip K. Dick and Hampton Fancher, the first writer who optioned the material, and Ridley Scott, had a vision. But I can’t take credit for that vision. I can claim credit for doing some good writing on it but that is them.
Twelve Monkeys'! Where did that come from? I mean, I know you guys don’t do drugs.
First, let me give you a little background. For many years, I was David Peoples the writer. I stacked up all the screenplays I wrote, some have been made, some haven’t, some have been better than others and all that.
And Janet Peoples, at the same time, was writing her stack of screenplays and so on. And we were hardworking writers, but we were never at the same stage in a screenplay. I’d finish one and she’d just be burrowing into one and wouldn’t be a bit interested in going to a movie or anything like that, and visa-versa.
So we suddenly decided, in the '90s, 'Okay, well maybe it would be better if we wrote together.' But we’re both very opinionated and strong-minded and we realized that it would not be possible for Janet to work with me on my original, or for me to work with Janet on her original. It would be like World War III.
So we said, 'Okay, we’ll work on projects that a third party brings us that don’t belong to David and don’t belong to Janet.' And that way we could only have World War II instead of World War II.
Somebody urged us to do a remake of 'La Jetée' [1962, by Chris Marker]. We had somehow missed ‘La Jetée’ [when it first came out] although we knew of its reputation and everything. So we looked at it and said; in the first place, 'You don’t remake this.' And in the second place, if there was gonna be a Hollywood remake, James Cameron has already done it in 'Terminator' and done it ten times as well as we’ll ever do it, so we said, 'Forget it.'
But the producer was persistent, and we have a policy in the way that we think about something. 'Well, if our kids were kidnapped and he was holding them for ransom so we had to do it; what would we try?'
So we started to think, and we began to imagine two things. We imagined a world of animals with no people left. That was such a wonderful image to us, because one of the things that was negative to us about ‘La Jetée’ was that it was post-Holocaust, and we’d seen that too many times. We borrowed from ‘La Jetée’ to be sure.
So we suddenly had a world that was not post-Holocaust but there was nothing but animals. And that was interesting. But at the same time, we somehow—I don’t know how we arrived at it—but we suddenly thought, ‘You know, you go down the street and you see somebody who thinks the world is coming to and end or something like that, and they’re telling you that this is gonna happen.'
Well, they look pretty silly and you don’t believe 'em, but, by gosh, they believe it. And from their point of view, they’re telling you about a reality that you don’t see. And so somehow we said, ‘Wait a minute. There’s this guy from the future, but is he really from the future, or is he nuts?'
So we started thinking about that and we got the idea that, what if this guy, what if this nutty guy gets persuaded that he’s nuts and not from the future, but at the same time his psychiatrist is converted from thinking he’s nuts to her believing that he’s come from the future.
So we started working on it, and gradually, it became what it became. Perhaps flawed, but nevertheless the best we could do. And we were very, very, very lucky that Terry Gilliam took it. Because I don’t know if anybody else could have made it as coherent as he made it.
You’ve got to have a good director, and I’ve been very lucky. We had Terry Gilliam, I’ve had Clint Eastwood and Stephen Frears and Ridley Scott. The interesting thing that came of the collaboration, that shocked both me and Janet, was there is now this stack of scripts.
And if you looked at one of Janet’s scripts, you’d say, ‘Oh, this looks like a Janet Peoples script.’ If you picked up one of my scripts, you’d say, ‘Oh, it sounds like David Peoples.’ We have distinct voices. But this third voice, David and Janet Peoples, is different. It’s different than either of those voices. And we’ve written a bunch of scripts that way. We have not had a lot of success in getting them made but that’s another story.
Tell us about your directing career.
I directed one picture [‘The Blood of Heroes’, 1989], and I think I did a good job. But I was planning to make a great picture that everybody here would have seen at least five times, etc., etc.
I didn’t get it that good, and it can only be me who made the mistake. Because I had all the breaks in the world. I had a good cast, I had a good crew, I even had enough money, I think. So I realized my limitations. I did an adequate job but I was not a really good director and I think I’m a pretty good writer, so I thought, 'I’ll stay with that.'
But I’ve got an interesting story to tell you. When I was directing one scene — and when you’re a writer, and I was a writer of that script as well as the director—you know what it’s supposed to be, sort of. I was directing Joan [Chen], and she said, ‘Well I think I should stand up when I do that.’ And in my head, I said ‘No Joan, that’s crazy.’ But I was lucky to have good actors and have them care about it, so I was graceful and I said, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea Joan. Why don’t you do that?’
But in my head, I knew that I could cut it and I would not be stuck with her standing up, which was obviously wrong. Well about a month later, six weeks later, I’m in the editing room and we’re running the film, Joan stands up, and it was exactly the right thing to do. And it was obvious to me then, and I couldn’t understand why it hadn’t been obvious before, but there it was: exactly the right move.
Subsequently, Joan became a much better director than me and she directed the most wonderful picture called ‘Xiu Xiu The Sent-Down Girl’ [1998], which if you haven’t seen it, you need to see it. It’s got one of the great classic scenes I’ve ever seen in the movie, so it’s something to see.
Let me reinforce that. ‘Xiu Xiu The Sent-Down Girl,’ if you have not seen this movie, it’s an absolutely extraordinary piece of film—what movies are supposed to be. I don’t know how many of you have seen ‘Hero’? I actually read the script and the opening scene is one of the most brilliant funny scenes I’ve ever seen. Tell us about 'Hero'.
Actually, ‘Hero’ came about because Alvin Sargent, who was my idol— he wrote ‘Paper Moon’ [1974] and ‘Julia’ [1977] and a whole bunch of other pictures, he got an Academy Award for ‘Ordinary People’ [1980], if I’m not mistaken.
Anyway, Alvin is a giant and Alvin was married to the late Laura Ziskin, a wonderful producer who I worked for. Alvin had— somehow he’d found a pocket knife, and it said ‘Bernie Laplante’ on it. And Alvin wanted to write some sort of script about a guy named Bernie Laplante. And he and Laura sketched out kind of a story. And they came to me to write it. Why Alvin wasn’t going to write himself is beyond me, but there it is.
I didn’t care for the story entirely, but I liked the concept, because I had been working on something much darker myself about somebody who’s a complete asshole, but they do heroic things. And they wanted more of a comedy, and so I thought, 'Well I can go there.' So they listened to me, and we moved it in my direction with their original concept. So it became Bernie Laplante, the petty thief who saves a bunch of people in a plane crash. That was something I had envisioned as an exciting and crazy thing to happen.
In addition to great directors, great actors. Who could’ve done ‘Hero’ better than Dustin Hoffman?
I can’t imagine who could’ve done it. He was magnificent in it.
Let’s talk about 'Unforgiven' for a couple more minutes before we take questions from the audience. Francis Coppola originally optioned the script, correct?
Yeah, he optioned it. I wrote it in about 1976, and he optioned it in 1983, '84, somewhere around there. I did about a day, two days of rewrites. Mostly things that I wanted to do, but I also cut stuff that Francis thought was excessive. And the script was improved, even though there was only two days of work on it, which impressed me, because that doesn’t always happen.
He had just done ‘One from the Heart’ [1982] and the establishment was reluctant to have Francis go off to the wild west and make a Western after ‘One from the Heart,’ which was not a big success. So after a year, he let the option drop, and that’s when Clint Eastwood bought it.
Is it true that other writers rewrote it, but then Clint Eastwood read your original script and realized that was the movie he wanted to make?
I’m not sure what happened with other writers, but I’d heard that Clint Eastwood tried to rewrite it. I had tried to rewrite it because you always want to make something better—and you should make something better. If you know how to make a script better, you should make it better; that’s your job.
But when you see that you’re not making it better and you’re making it worse, one would hope that you’d have the forbearance to not do it. Now if you’re getting a big paycheck, you sort of have to make it worse because that’s what you were hired to do. But as I said, I didn’t rewrite it. Not because I was satisfied and thought it was some perfect script, but because I didn’t know how to make it any better.
And actually, I read something that William Goldman said similarly when he talked about the big lag in ‘Butch Cassidy [and the Sundance Kid’, 1969]. He said many years later in an interview, ‘The thing sags at that point, and I’ve tried to fix it, and finally I said, I can’t do it any better. This is as good as I can do it.’ And ‘Butch Cassidy’ was a pretty good movie.
Clint Eastwood I think tried to do some rewriting, or had somebody do some rewriting on ‘Unforgiven’, but what I admire about him is, he said, ‘It’s not gettin’ better.’
When we were about to shoot, he called me up and asked me to make a couple of changes in the script. And I was kinda horrified at them, but a little intimidated, and it was a brief call. So I did rewrite a couple of scenes and faxed them off to him.
And then later, I was in LA working on ‘Hero,’ and Clint Eastwood called and said, 'Come over,' and he showed me a cut of 'Unforgiven'. And it was quite astonishing to me, to see that he had actually shot everything that was on the script. I could even hear the screen directions in my head some of the time. The rewrites were things that I didn’t feel comfortable about, but they turned out better than I expected.
I asked him, ‘What happened to those two rewrites I sent?’ and he said, ‘Ah, ya had it better the first time.’ And I like that, when people can actually look at something and say, ‘No, it’s not getting better.’
[David took audience question before the showing of ‘Unforgiven’.]
Audience Member: As an editor and a writer, is there something different that you would have done with ‘Blade Runner’ if you could?
There are many things different that I would do, but it’s the same old story, if he did the things I thought were right, he’d probably ruin the movie. There are many cuts that I’ve seen and many drafts that I’ve seen, and some of them have the most wonderful things in them that aren’t there, and some of them make more sense.
But the bottom line is, Ridley Scott made a great movie. It’s not good to tinker with a great script. I think it’s as good as it’s gonna get.
[After the film started, David, James and I left the auditorium and I was able to ask a few questions of my own.]
Sky Tallone: What do you think about film today? How it’s changed, whether it’s gotten worse or better?
It’s dangerous to say if it’s gotten worse or better, because it always goes in cycles. It’s never worse or better, it’s always just different.
It’s very different now, from when Janet Peoples and myself started writing. And we find ourselves still often writing scripts for the '70s and '80s, which I’m not sure if it’s a waste of time, because maybe they’ll come around again.
I mean, Clint Eastwood still makes those kinds of dramas and so does Quentin Tarantino. So those kind of guys do it, but of course they can’t make every picture and unless they want to do your script, you find a very small market for that kind of vision nowadays.
But it doesn’t mean that movies aren’t good today, they’re terrific. I mean, Janet and I wish we wrote ‘Iron Man’ [2008]. We wish we wrote ‘Spider Man 2’ [2004]. And we wish we wrote ‘Gran Torino’ [2008], and most of all, we wish we wrote ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ [2006].
So there are plenty of terrific pictures out there, and there’s always frustration. It can be frustrating for us [writers], if the movies out are not the kinds of movies we would want to do. But that’s not frustrating to the audience, they’re still just getting a great movie.
Do you have any advice for the new generation of screenwriters and filmmakers that are trying to make it right now?
I wouldn’t have advice, but I would say, if I was trying to get into the business now as a screenwriter, I’d say, 'Don’t even go into the movies. Go to the TV where they’re making some really exciting stuff now.' I mean, starting with ‘The Sopranos,’ and now ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘Mad Men.’ They’re just doing miraculous, terrific things in TV. That’s where a writer can not only make a lot of money, which is a good thing, but it can also have huge creative satisfaction.
People don’t need to go to the movie theaters or even turn on the television to see a movie any more, so it seems like it’s going to become more and more possible for independent filmmakers to get their stuff out there.
What it’s going to be more and more impossible is to finance those great big pictures. Because if they don’t have a big theatrical audience, how are they going to get enough money to make $200 million movies?
It’s like cathedrals. Cathedrals were great when they were great, and then all of a sudden, they didn’t make cathedrals any more. When they’re gone, we’ll miss the big spectacles. We’ll feel sad about the good ones. But this is the cycle of films.