Today’s script was written by one of the best directors of all time and was supposed to be his next movie before his death. I don’t know how the movie would’ve turned out, but I certainly have my opinions on the screenplay.
Genre: Period Drama
Premise: When a group of men find silver in a Spanish mine, they begin excavating it, only to realize that the local government wants a controlling interest in the spoils.
About: This was written by famous director David Lean (The Bridge On The River Kwai, Lawrence Of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago) and Robert Bolt (who was a co-writer on a lot of Lean’s films). The script is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel. This was going to be Lean’s next film after PASSAGE TO INDIA but he died before it could start production. It’s one of several films Steven Spielberg was trying to produce for Lean. Martin Scorsese has expressed interest in making it. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Nostromo 47th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “I’d rather have written Nostromo than any other novel.”
Writers: David Lean and Robert Bolt (based on the novel by Joseph Conrad)
Details: 92 pages (but feels like 192). January 1991 draft
Bardem for Nostromo?
Okay, I want you to imagine a movie where you have a hero WHO DOESN’T DO ANYTHING. Okay okay. I guess you could argue that that’s The Big Lebowski (and it did okay for that film). But now imagine you’re talking about a drama. And imagine, not only does the hero not do anything, but he isn’t in the movie for the first 25 minutes. And when he does show up, he just walks around and people stare at him. While he does nothing. But walk. Around.
Welcome to Nostromo, the most baffling screenplay I’ve read by professional screenwriters in a long time. Now here’s the thing. I didn’t grow up during the Lean era so I’m not as in awe of him as some people. But I do understand that this was a different time in movie-making. It was a lot harder to create spectacle – to create these big ambitious canvases. So if you were one of the few directors who could pull it off, like Lean, you were in high demand.
I also know that there weren’t screenwriting books back then. Storytelling had a lot more freedom. Some people argue this was a good thing. Some people argue it wasn’t. But as I’m looking back at this script…I’m sorry but this could’ve used some hardcore development help. I don’t know if these guys were writing in a vacuum or what but this story is just a mess. It never finds its footing. It never knows where it’s going. It doesn’t know who its main character is, even though his name is on the title page of the script.
I mean this feels like 60 different writers worked on it and someone took a scene from each of their scripts, threw them in a blender, and this came out. And the thing is, it could’ve been good! It has this big treasure at the heart of it. Who can’t make a treasure story good?? Ahhhh! This was so frustrating.
We’re in the Golfo Placido, which I’m guessing is in South America maybe but I’m not positive because it’s never stated. The year is “I don’t know when” because that’s not given either. A man named Charles Gould has come here because he believes there’s a stash of silver in one of the forest mines. He hires a local foreman named Nostromo to guide him to the location, and low and behold, he’s right! There’s lots of silver!
Gould hires a local crew of natives to start excavating the silver while Nostromo, the man we think is the hero because he’s on the title page, disappears. Not like, as a story choice. He just isn’t mentioned for the rest of the first act. In the meantime, Gould gets the third degree from the local authorities, who of course want their slice of the pie.
Now the plan is to excavate all of this silver and ship it back to the homeland. Unfortunately, there’s a government coup, and the new president doesn’t just want a piece of the spoils. He wants the whole damn thing, including the horse we rode in on. Naturally, Gould has put a ton of money into this endeavor so he doesn’t want to just give it away. So he hires Nostromo (this is around the midpoint – before that, we barely see Nostromo at all. And when we do, he’s basically standing around while people admire him. For what reason he’s so admired is never made clear) and a French guy who shows up after Act 1, to transport all the silver on a small boat and get it out of the reach of the government.
So that’s what Nostromo and Decoud (the French guy) do. You’d think they’d go on a lot of adventures along the way and that’s where the story would be. No. Instead, we’re stuck with these two guys who we know absolutely nothing about (except that people like to stare at Nostromo) wading down the river on a boat.
Remember the tip I gave you yesterday which The Big Lebowski pulled off so perfectly? Throw a lot of shit at your characters? Lean and Bolt didn’t get that memo. These characters just stroll down the river without so much as having to swat a mosquito. That is until a random steamboat passes them, tipping their boat over and sinking them. Yes, this is the big “obstacle” that challenges our characters. A wave.
But that wasn’t even the tip of this script’s problems. Who was the main character here? Was it Gould? Was it Decoud? Was it Nostromo? I have no idea. I do know that if they were trying to create three protagonists, it didn’t work. If you’re going to try the impossible and write a tri-protagonist movie, each character must be clear, with clear goals and clear motivations. Outside of maybe Gould, I had no idea what anybody was doing, especially Nostromo.
I mean this guy shows up at his village and he’s some hero there. Like he walks down the streets and people chant his name. WHY??? He’s a glorified assistant. Helping foreigners find their way around a forest. Why would that make you a king in your village? It’s just bizarre. And this isn’t some first draft either. We have numbered scenes and deleted scenes, even references to the score.
And the plot. This plot! What was happening??? Focus on one thing. Focus on the guys trying to get silver out of the country. Focus on the government trying to raid the mine and our heroes defending it. But we’re just all freaking over the place here. At one point we watch the bad guy travel across the Andes mountains. It was like a random game of hot potato. Whichever character caught the potato, that’s who they’d focus the next scene on.
I know this is going to sound like blasphemy to suggest Lean and Bolt take a screenwriting lesson from James Cameron, but this script could’ve been great with a Titanic structure. The ending of the script, as it stands, (spoiler) has Nostromo burying the treasure in a secret hiding spot, then dying. So no one ever finds out where it was stashed.
What if you started on a modern day treasure-hunting team looking for the Nostromo treasure, then cut back to the past in pieces as we get closer and closer to finding out what happened to the treasure? It would give this script some desperately needed structure and we’d actually have a reason (a point!) to keep watching.
And then focus on freaking Nostromo in this new draft! Follow him! Not these other losers. And explain to us why he’s a damn hero instead of cryptically showing everybody infatuated with him. And please, make him active! Have him doing stuff and going after stuff as opposed to taking baths in villages.
I wish I could say something nicer about this script but it really was a mess. I think it could be reworked into something worth making, but it would definitely need a page 1 rewrite.
[x] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I continue to notice that one of the best ways to describe a character is to describe their eyes via an adjective. Notice how wildly the impressions of these characters vary in your imagination as I use different adjectives: “Innocent eyes,” “Wild green eyes,” “Cautious grey eyes,” “Dark dead eyes.” Doesn’t that tell us so much more than had you just written, “Green eyes?”
