Tony Gilroy Talks ‘Beirut’; Unearthing A Script From 1991 & More [Interview]

Was the radioactivity what stopped it from being made at the time?
Yeah, cause I’m not really kind to—I have one hero in Jon Hamm and I have three and a half villains, I have the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which its administration is really corrupt at that point, the PLO aristocracy is living comfortably in West Beirut and 600,000 refugees are waiting to go home and so they’re not looking too good, though they are trying to keep a cease-fire during this period. You have the Regan White House which is just a combination of banality and bungling and mixed signals that they’re sending politically and you have Israel just desperate to make this invasion into Lebanon for any reason, any reason at all, You’ve got Syria up there in the wings, but take your poison, the movie was just considered a little too close to the bone for some people. And that was the reason we were given why it didn’t happen because it really did get a lot of interest. It was meant to be a Sydney Pollack, Peter Weir, Wolfgang Petersen kind of movie. It was meant to be the kind of movie that was really being made back then.

Wolfgang Petersen feels like a big touchstone for me. I could easily have seen him direct the ’90s version of this.
Yeah, also [Weir’s] “The Year Of Living Dangerously,” which is what, 1985? That’s a real touchstone. The movie feels like a real outlier coming out in the theaters now, but this was a very normal kind of movie during the day.

What does the ’90s version of this movie look like?
It would have been for Mel Gibson, Michael Douglas, Bruce Willis or Harrison Ford, it was a movie star movie. Back then it would have been much more lavishly funded, it would shoot on a schedule that would be two or three times as long as this film was, it would probably be a lot less gritty, a little cheesier, you’d probably be forced to lean into a romance in some way, I don’t know. I’ll tell you this, I would have been a lot more pliable in 1991. I woulda done anything! [laughs]

Was anyone attached?
It’s pre-internet so documentation is poor, but my memory is we went all over the place and a lot of people looked at the script, it got me a lot of meetings, and it earned me a little clout. The last person I met on this with was John Frankenheimer (“The Manchurian Candidate,” “Ronin“) which was about a year before he died, so that was long after ’91 [Frankenheimer died in 2002]. And Frankenheimer wanted to do it and I said, “a lot of people had trouble doing this,” and he felt sure that wouldn’t be a problem for him and then he came back later and said, “Wow, this is a lot tougher than I thought.” I can’t remember all the people that were attached to it at the time.

Rewriting and collaborating with yourself nearly 30 years later must be odd.
That was really fascinating because, I never thought they’d get the movie off and I kept helping them out, but I didn’t get down to work, it didn’t really get real, for a while, It seemed so impossible that they would be able to make this movie for this small amount of money, and try and find a place to shoot it and would work and make sense of it. And then when it came time to do the rewrite, Brad needed some directorial and production things done and I thought, “oh, this will take me a week, I’ll just breeze through this thing” because no one wanted to change much in the story, we weren’t adding or subtracting any characters. But it took me like weeks and weeks. It was a personally fascinating process to go through and collaborate with myself from 30 years earlier and you know, look at what I was really good at then and what was weird about my writing then and what’s gotten better. It was an educational couple weeks.

Well, good to know it wasn’t painful. Most writers can’t stand to look at old work.
Oh, sure, there was a lot of things in there that were real groaners for me, that I was really like, “oh my god,” but it was really not about the plotting or the research because the plotting was cool, the research still checked out and the aspirations of the script were good, but a lot of it was like, I was a bit glib. There were scenes where I’d get an idea or a line or a moment and I’d warp the scene around me and the writing.

Over time, as you make things and see things made, you get more self-critical. And you really need to be self-critical, you just beat yourself so much over anything that feels self-conscious. I’ll always say to actors, if you have a line in a scene that’s right on the bubble of being too much “of a line” and I’ll always say to actors, “Man, whatever you can do, take me out of that line.” If I can hear me in that line, I’m going to change it. The writer should want to evaporate in some way. The engineering was identical, but the writer in me was very present in the original version and I did a lot of writer removal if that makes sense.

“Beirut” is open in moderate wide release (710 screens) today via Bleecker Street Films. More from this interview soon.