You Asked ... "W" Screenwriter Stanley Weiser

W scribe Stanley Weiser, whose films include Rudy: The Rudy Giuliani Story, Wall Street, and Project X, was thrilled by the high level of questions posed to him by the StoryLink Community. Those whose questions were chosen will receive a FREE copy of the Hollywood Creative Directory.

What was the hardest aspect of portraying living people and real incidents into a narrative? - Mario Moreno

In this case, the hardest part was that George Bush is the highest profile person on the planet practically, and everybody is seeing cartoonish stereotypes of him, including me.

Writing about him, before this job came to me, was unthinkable. I couldn’t stand the man, and I didn’t think there was any life to him other than what I saw or heard about in the news or … on TV. So I had to find a way to tell his life as any other person who is not a one-dimensional cliché. I had to dig and do a tremendous amount of research to find out that underneath the cliché is a human being.

How difficult was it to find a balance between "real life" and "dramatic need" in the story, and was there a specific litmus test you used to determine if a true element was right for the script, or needed to be edited in some way? - Michael Harper

Fortunately his real-life story lends itself to being a movie: you have a person who is an abject failure, an alcoholic, and somewhat of a ne’er-do-well bum who rises to the ultimate power. The story arc was there in reality, and there was very little need to invent.

It was there when you examined his life. It was a very unlikely, improbable rise from total failure to total success and then again to total failure. This story was true.

I was careful not to fictionalize and make things up, because there was no need to. The circumstances in his life were so improbable and shaped themselves into a cinematic, coherent whole unity of drama.

To what extent do your own views on politics or issues enter into the writing process & if they do impact your writing, do you practice "self-editing" or save that decision for the producers and development execs? – Kathie

My politics are far to the left. I kept a calculated choice to park my politics and leave them at the door and … allow the story to speak for itself. Because “Fahrenheit 911” was a brilliant movie, but it had already been made. I did not want to replicate that movie and I did not want to do a “Saturday Night Live” sketch or a YouTube parody.

The decision was to try and kind of walk in [George Bush’s] shoes and, as much as possible, see [the journey] from his point of view and let the facts and the political elements and social fabric … come out on its own.

George Bush's inadequacies as president have been well documented over the past seven years. The majority of Americans are suffering from a severe case of "Bush Fatigue." How did you approach the project/screenplay in order to make it fresh and interesting for contemporary audiences? - Jonathan

What I looked for were the parts of George Bush’s life that … I didn’t know about, that most people don’t know. There were a lot of details: he challenged his father to a fight; he had his own revelation that God wanted him to run for president; and basically, when he was working on his father’s campaign to … beat Dukakis, he had ambivalence—he thought it might be better for his own father to lose. The fact that he fought a war in Iraq and that, when his own father was president, he fought a war in Iraq, and [the younger Bush] never sought his father’s advice to me is one of the most staggering revelations. If your father was an engineer and you were an engineer, and you wouldn’t ask him for advice, there’s something wrong. He sought God’s advice.

I really wanted to focus on [Bush’s] relationship with God. He had a father who looked down on him his whole life, and, through finding God, he was able heal himself and also rehabilitate his past black-sheep image. He began to use that as a tool to elevate himself and became in effect a better Christian than his father.

I believe that Bush’s intentions were good and noble. People don’t think that. I didn’t think that.

I really tried to get across that here is a man who wants to be good, but his beliefs become so dogmatic and rock-solid that he could not tolerate anyone else’s point of view. He has a severe empathy-deficit.

Bush’s dream was to become baseball commissioner, not to be a politician. … He couldn’t get that job, so he ran for politics.

While adapting the complexity of Bush's story into a screenplay, how did you balance dramatic elements with the elements of humor? – Charles

That was one of the hardest aspects of writing the story. And I can’t say I completely succeeded, because the tone does shift.

I know there are a lot of dramatic scenes and then there are more absurdist scenes. We struggled—Oliver Stone and I—with whether to do this as a pseudo-satire or more naturalistically, like The Queen or Dr. Strangelove.

That was the most difficult part of writing this, because there’s so much absurdist information and detail—his life is effused with absurdity. At the same time, the consequences are so tragic: he was so singularly misguided in every attempt at policy, and there has been so much collateral damage.

It was a matter of a high-wire act.

There was a lot of humor that was cut from the movie, by the way. Oliver Stone actually had Bush on a magic carpet riding over Bagdad, flying over Saddam Hussein’s palace. That was cut, because it was too absurd. And there were also real … moments of humor that had to be sacrificed, as to not overwhelm the dramatic.

In depicting a public figure like George W. Bush who is so often imitated and parodied for satirical effect, how did you manage to characterize him in your script in original ways that captured his personality or essence while avoiding parody? - Jennifer M Parker

I tried to show the pain [and suffering] that he went through in his life. All of us have fears, inadequacies, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities. And George Bush, when you really read about him, is no different. He’s still a human being. And he had to live in the shadow of a great father. The father succeeded in everything he did. And Bush failed in everything. Bush was an alcoholic, and couldn’t find his way. And I tried to show his pain.

Beyond entertainment, what is it you would like audiences to come away with, or do, after seeing W? - CJH3 Productions

Hopefully it already will have been done when this comes out. [Note: this interview was conducted prior to Barack Obama’s presidential win]

On one hand [I wanted] to show the abject folly of American politics. And on the other hand to show, you can’t write a story from just one blind, dogmatic point-of-view. You have to find a way to subvert your own politics. You have to find a way to have middle ground to tell a story.

I wrote a movie called “Project X,” because I wanted to write an animal rights story. That was the goal, but I had to find a commercial way to do it. It was an entertainment film, but it showed how monkeys were being used [in an experiment] by the air force –they were being irradiated and harmed to prove how pilots would fly after they’d being irradiated and nuked. They actually nuked the monkeys.

You have to find a way to make the film entertaining and accessible to a larger audience.
If you want to write a political story, you have to be very careful how you approach it, so you are not clobbering people over the head with your vision.

You have to make it accessible to an audience. Otherwise you’ll be sitting in a room, having written your own political story, and no one will make it. If you’re just preaching only to the converted, or telling things from a completely one-sided point of view, people are going to see it as boring. Find a skillful way to put the message through.

How did you decide where to end the story in light of the fact that W is still in office? Did you begin the screenplay with this ending in mind and/or were you influenced by later developments in the W administration? – Terry

I felt it had to end with the start of the insurgency and the beginning of the failure, because the public [knows what happened next]. They see it on the news every day.

The choice was … also to end with Bush beginning to face the burgeoning failure of his policy that he was so confident about—and to end with the scene where he was brain-locked at a press conference, which actually happened. He could not answer the question, he could not think of one mistake that he ever made. And that is the same George Bush today.

You have to stay in your theme. My theme was God, father, and war. If I start straying to the economy and Katrina and mortgage collapse, it becomes a smorgasbord. It would bore people to death.

I wanted to end with him basically confused, amused, and not knowing what went wrong.

How did you learn the techniques for screenwriting and how long had you been writing scripts before you finally sold one? – Wendy

I got lucky and sold a script in 1977—I was in my 20s—but it didn’t get made. It was only three or four years [until my first sale].

I went to New York University film school, moved out here, sold a spec idea. I had a fractional moment of heat, it didn’t work out, and then I was back in the tundra. I wrote a movie that got made, and it wasn’t well-received.

It was hard miles in the beginning. The problem is that once you start out and you have a movie, you think you’ve arrived. But once you have the break, it’s harder to come back than it is to arrive. It’s a long road. You have to keep reinventing yourself.

Before sitting down to write a screenplay, what for you is a must, do you outline, research, etc. or do you have it all figured out in your head and just sit down and write? – Lynda

For W, I had an assistant, and the two of us read 20 books together.

I spend a tremendous amount of time researching. Then I do an outline. In this case I did two outlines, two treatments. One treatment was from the path to war in 2003 to the start of the insurgency. And the other treatment was Bush’s formative years, his earlier life, his road to political success, and his relationship with his father and God. This is unusual. I had two different treatments. Normally I just write one treatment.

When I started writing I didn’t use treatments. When you are doing comedy and character pieces, I don’t think it’s necessary. But if you are doing stories that are heavily defined by structure, it’s vital to do treatments. That’s just my theory, everybody is different. There are no rules. … It’s an outline, cards, treatment, whatever works for you to do it.