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From Page to Screen
REVELATIONS screenwriters Dawn Cowings and Sarah Yaworsky talk about the writing process from initial concept to final revisions.
DAWN: I'd wanted to make a Star Wars film for some time but had difficulty coming up with a story I wanted to tell. It's easier for me to see little snippets and then build a story around it. I kept seeing an image of older Jedi standing back to back with several very young padawans peeking out behind their legs as stormtroopers and bounty hunters closed in in a circle around them.
And then I saw the trailer for Attack of the Clones. The one with the droids in a circle closing in around Jedi in a last stand. And I was outraged! (grins) Now I just couldn't use it in my movie.
But one idea that I kept coming back to was that the Jedi were being hunted which puts us firmly before Episode IV and George knows where after Episode III.
Sarah and I had dinner meetings for several months while we hashed out a plot and identified some of the elements that make Star Wars, Star Wars. The director had given a deadline of August 1 and by June the pressure was on. The story had undergone some changes although the characters had been firmed up months earlier. Their motivations changed but the relationships never really did.
SARAH: Yeah, we can't talk about it right now because it would give away too much of the actual plot. But the original story became the backstory of the characters. Needless to say that meant major story arc changes. We pushed 6 months into their future and ended up focusing on the consequences of the backstory.
One thing I can mention is that for a long time a major plot element was the destruction of the Jedi temple. However, as our characters emerged, the destruction became less something that occurred during the movie and more of something that happened in their past, something that drove them and made them the people they were.
Once we had a firm grip of the beginning, middle, and end of the story it was time to produce a script so that pre-production could begin: casting, location scouting, costuming, etc. Dawn sat down and came up with the first draft of the script. She's got the background in film and knows the script format.
DAWN: Since a page of script roughly translates into a minute onscreen I found that everything went smoothly until I got to the CG. How do you pace something like that? Especially when you haven't even recruited the CG team and you don't know what's possible?
The first draft was a Star Wars story but it ended up being more of a bare bones one. Neither one of us was quite happy with the dialogue but it was important to have something in order to move forward. We had intended to make changes to the script early on but it never seemed to work out that way. As the pre-production process rolled on, we found ourselves re-writing every scene a week before it was shot. It was certainly a learning process but we don't feel so bad about it anymore considering that on big budget films it's not unheard of for actors to receive new lines on the day of shooting. At least we didn't do that to any of our people... oh, wait. Yes we did.
SARAH: Hey, at least we were better than Jurassic Park 3! They didn't even have a completed script when they started shooting. Anyway, the revision process was an adventure in itself, as we had to keep in mind what was already filmed and what was still to come.
DAWN: This was especially difficult with anything in the cockpit of the Corellian Dawn. These scenes occur throughout the movie but were shot in a single day. The set was sold, dismantled and moved to North Carolina the next day. So a month later when we're trying to clarify motivations and dialogue in another scene we have to keep in mind what had happened in the cockpit because under no circumstances could that be changed.
SARAH: Let's see, what else? We never actually sat down and said, "Let's make the main characters female." It just sort of happened. It fit the story we were telling
DAWN: The director like the idea of the hero and villain being female but we wanted to make sure that the plot didn't actually revolve around them being women. For years we've always found it annoying that in Hollywood any male character can pick up a gun and be instantly competent with it but for a female character to do the same thing she required a backstory.
SARAH: That's one of the great things about Star Wars. It's taken for granted that any woman we see with a weapon is a force to be reckoned with. You just have to be careful to avoid the "Ooh, it's a girl. With a gun!" syndrome.
DAWN: For any good characterization you can't strengthen some characters at the expense of others so everyone needs to be well rounded and given believable motivation. Our characters have relationships that started before the movie began and what you see onscreen is the logical result of those relationships.
SARAH: To outsiders, the writing process of Sarah and Dawn is a mystery.
DAWN: We share a brain. We vet each other's word choices, sometimes arguing over a single word. Like the use of "a" versus "the".
SARAH: You think she's joking. She's not.
DAWN: The director would get disgusted listening to us and leave. But most of the time we finish each other's words and anticipate each other's train of thought and somehow arrive by different paths to the same place. It's a lot of fun actually. There's a lot of jumping up and exclaiming, "Yeah! Exactly!"
SARAH: Except for those times when one of us looks at the other and says, "No. No one else will think it's funny. Or even understand it." Then there's always the famous, "Just write it down and we'll figure it out later." These inspirational moments have saved us on more than one occasion.
DAWN: Ultimately the script underwent seven draft changes. We didn't only look to the director to approve our changes. We also ran some of it by a close group of friends who serve as a test audience and give us feedback on our changes.
We've all been Star Wars fans since childhood and had a vision of what that universe was like. And more than anything we wanted to get onscreen what we had envisioned, director and writers alike, since childhood.
SARAH: We never wanted to forget the harsh realities of what was going on in this time period. The danger, the urgency, the need for secrecy. And most importantly, we wanted to make sure that our movie was firmly rooted in the original Star Wars stories that inspired us, that it was part of that universe. REVELATIONS is a vignette in the Star Wars saga.
DAWN: And if you're curious... the real reason we set the story between Episodes III and IV? We didn't want to make Jedi costumes. We're sticklers for recreation and the thought of all that raw silk...! (shudders)
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