Screenwriter Jon Spaihts discusses his decade-long quest to see Passengers reach the screen.
A kind of noir, sci-fi story that took a big hook into deep sci-fi at the end.
Is there a story that might begin there?
I thought, Okay, thats an interesting question.
Nobody would volunteer for that job.
That would be the loneliest person in the universe.
The script made the Black List in 2007 and then went into development for years.
During that whole period of time, did you tweak it?
Did you revise it?
Has it evolved much?
It was revised incrementally at many points over the course of nearly a decade.
The thing that evolved most was the ending.
The consummation of the love story, and of the crisis, and the exact form of the epilogue.
Theres a lot of scenes, the character scenes that just landed and stuck.
Some of the logistical matters evolved over time, the sci-fi and the ending.
Thats a rare thing in Hollywood.
Yes, having succeeded in staying in the saddle from end to end is a rare thing.
Do you remember the craziest note you ever got on the script from a studio?
There tend to be a lot of those.
It doesnt have an antagonist.
What if there was an alien on the ship?
I had to push back and say, That is very much not the vision.
We didnt accidentally omit villains from the story.
It flows as it does for a reason.
Were getting something done here.
Youre on this voyage.
I think every love affair between two people is like a ship that no one else can see into.
It is a voyage that no one else can completely understand from the outside.
It is inevitably a voyage that doesnt take you exactly where you hoped or thought it might go.
I wanted to see more variation.
From that notion necessarily came the vision of a ship that would be part of a sales pitch.
Did you do research into the theoretical effects of this kind of travel?
Something I read a lot is, You know for a science fiction movie that was pretty deep.
Or That was pretty intelligent, which kind of ignores the entire basis and history of the genre.
But we seem to be in a space where films are coming out and pushing back against that.
I hope were moving past it.
Theres often a confusion between genre and setting.
That story can be a horror movie, as weve seen recently a couple of times.
It can be a love story; it can be a philosophical meditation.
It can be a war story.
It can be a heroic journey, or an anti-heroic journey.
I hope that fine art and high drama are on the menu, and thatPassengersis moving there.
You are adaptingThe Forever War, one of the classic science fiction novels of the last 50 years.
How are you dealing with those aspects of the story?
Some of it I think is very much dated.
The film will not have the same fixation with homosexuality that the book does.
Whats happened with that?
I love the script I wrote.
