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My piece on Source Code went up on AOL today (you can see it here.) Alas, they cut much of the input that I got from screenwriter Ben Ripley. He was one of my favorite interviews that day — which happened to be the day of the L.A. Marathon, also known as Monsoon Day. It was raining sideways, and by the time I made my appointment with him, the marathon was starting to draw to a close. We stood out on the balcony of his suite at the Four Seasons and watched all the street cleaners — at least 20 of them — laying in wait for the okay to go sweep up after the runners. But getting the opportunity to get a peek inside his brain and process was one of the highlights of my day.

Anyway, my interview with Ben was both fun and informative, so I’m posting it in its entirety here. Be forewarned — there are some spoiler-ish bits.

One of the things I liked that you said in the roundtable interviews is that this is not a time travel movie. And I thought it was interesting that you put it that way, because to me, it was more about exploring the opportunities of the mind. Was that your intention going in with this story?
Yeah, I didn’t want to make a movie that was about changing the past, because we’ve seen that so many times. I wanted it to be about learning about the past in the hopes of preventing something in the future, so that was what I hoped set it apart from a lot of other time travel movies.

You were saying you’re not a very technical person. Did you do any research surrounding the mind and its capabilities when you were working through the concept of building the source code?
No. I know a couple physicists that I discussed the idea with, but it never got to a technical level. It was more, “If this were possible, how would it look like?” I was actually channeling a lot more military background. I know a black hawk helicopter pilot, so to me if there’s a lot of jargon in the movie, it’s more militaristic than it is geeky sciencey. You don’t see a lot of technology in Source Code. You don’t see a lot of infrastructure. You don’t see the actual device. In earlier drafts you did, but we took it out and that made it much more believable. Your imagination is the most powerful tool. So I didn’t really research a lot of the science — I worked the hardest on the characters.

And it really is a very character-driven story. I mean, ultimately, there was just the train and the office, and it really had to be driven by the people in each of those spaces. What were the challenges in creating those characters?
You want to create characters that don’t get along. That’s the first rule of any drama: you want to find your conflict. So if you’re the controller and I’m the guy in the source code, you and I have very different agendas. I’m just trying to get out of here and understand this, and you want me to focus and get me to do what you want me to do. And once you figure out that once you find two characters that have radically different agendas, then you just have fun because as a writer, it just starts coming to you. I could go on for five pages of them having arguments and talking in cross-purposes, and most interactions are people who don’t listen to each other. And once you understand that as a writer, you find situations where people are in conflict and try to maintain that conflict. It’s not until the end of the story that they’re both on the same page finally. Coulter and Captain Goodwin finally agree at the end, and the story is over.

But even at that point, there was more.
That little sting at the end.

That twist, that turn. How did that come in?
That was something that Duncan (Jones, the director) thought up. And I think it challenges people in the way that his first film Moon challenges people. Hopefully it gets people debating different theories. I have my own opinion about that, but it’s consistent with the logic in the movie. It’s just a subtle trick.

What was your process like in writing this script?
I wrote it on spec. I wrote it as an idea. This wasn’t a paid writing assignment, this is something I wanted to do — to challenge myself to do. And I wanted to write a non-linear story that was a science fiction thriller, that involved some element of terrorism, but wasn’t ultimately about that. And in workshopping it with Mark Gordon the producer, it went through a lot of different permutations. In the early days [the character of Coulter] would go back as a lot of different people on the train, and then that just got kind of confusing, so we limited it to just going back to the kind of same person. Once I realized that I had that very simple structure of going back and forth between two sets, that was the movie — that was the breakthrough.

Writing can be a very solitary thing. You’re in your mind, you’re at your computer and that’s it, and then you release it out to other people and then all of a sudden there’s that experience of collaboration on all sorts of different fronts – with your producer, with Duncan, and then Duncan and Jake (Gyllenhaal) put in some of the humor. So what was it like for you to be able to open up to make it a community effort?
People have a misconception about writing being a solitary existence. If you look at the average day of any screenwriter, a lot of it is spent on the phone with people, meeting with people, going over notes. You’re collaborating from the minute you start a project. So it’s never the case that you’re working in an isolated cabin in Montana. And I’m glad that that’s the case, because you become a little too enclosed in your own world and you don’t have the perspective that you need, so you want collaborators. You want a couple people who work well with writers as producers, and you hopefully get a studio that likes and understands and wants to make the same movie, and they weigh in. And you hopefully get a director that feels the same way. And you never quite really know the personalities that you’re going to get.

But I’ve always felt that if you come in knowing that this is going to be a collaboration and you respect the point of view of your collaborators, you get a lot of respect back. And no one ever challenged the central premises of the script. I think it’s in part because we worked to make them so strong, but also because I think they realized that I — as the writer — am not there to combat them and fight for everything that I’ve done. I’m actually here to help everyone make a great movie. Then you have a more congenial spirit. I think that screenwriting is hard for people who work in other disciplines to come into. If you had a career as a novelist or a playwright where you really are the author of the end product and you come in as a screenwriter, it can be shocking. But I started when I was 22 going to film school, so this is all I’ve known. So I don’t at all feel uncomfortable in it.

But even writing something on spec? I mean, certainly it’s different when a studio approaches you and you’re collaborating with someone on that level and they’re saying, “Hey, we want you to write this.” But when you write something on spec, it’s just you, right?
The process of writing something on spec is different for different writers, but if I have an idea that I want to write, I don’t just sit down and write it. I discuss it with a lot of people. I talk about it with my agent, or my manager, or my wife, or a producer that I want to collaborate with, so it’s instantly collaborative. You’re right that it is seen as your own product if you write it yourself on spec, but the nice thing is that, you can keep working on a spec before the world sees it. You can get it as good as you want it to be before it goes out to the world. You’re incubating it with your producers, draft after draft after draft. I probably wrote ten drafts of Source Code before Universal bought it. Conversely if you’re writing on assignment as a writer, they have a property they want you to adapt, you go in, you do your first draft, you turn it in. It’s a first draft. It’s underwhelming. The first draft of Source Code was underwhelming. So they will always be disappointed.

You really have to check your ego at the door in doing this.
Sure. It’s not until the fifth or sixth draft of any project that it starts to, you know, have that sort of magic and momentum. It wasn’t until I hit on that very simple structure of Source Code that it became the movie. And that structure stayed throughout all the development process after that. No one messed with it after that because it worked.

One of the things that I was entertained at in the press materials is they were talking about how as much as you were very collaborative, you also had very firm feelings about what was absolutely necessary in terms of staying in the script and you had no problem standing up and asserting yourself over the things you felt were absolutely necessary to keep. What were some of those instances?
I didn’t want to step away from the confinement of the world. I didn’t want to cut away to downtown Chicago, where Coulter’s dad was shopping and could be threatened by the terrorist attack. There was some pressure to open it up because people were afraid it’d be too confining for people to watch the movie. So luckily, we resisted that. We resisted changing the title, because no one knows what the source code means. I thought that was a terrible idea to change the title, and I’m glad that they didn’t. But I would say for the most part, those instances are few and far between. The majority of the interaction is, “Well, how can we make this slightly better?” not, “How can we throw this out the window?”

How much of what you wrote made it up on screen?
It’s hard to say. It wouldn’t be correct to say, “72% of what I wrote was in the film.” They’re all my characters. Every situation in there — or at least, most of the stuff — is things that I thought of. All the themes are mine. So I think in that respect, it’s my script. Now, dialogue changes all the time. Little moments change all the time. You know, the structure of the actual bomb changed when someone had a different idea that was better. The last ten minutes of the movie are entirely different. So, you know, I still feel like it’s my story even if the dialect is different. And I was given sole credit on the movie, so someone must’ve agreed with me.

You were mentioning film school… what’s the most valuable thing you learned about screenwriting from film school?
There’s a lot of valuable things you learn about in film school. Taking the time to study the classics was very valuable. Watching movies that work again and again, and asking yourself, why do they work? Reading a lot of scripts. I think the most valuable thing you can do as a writer whether you go to film school or not is to be prolific. Because your first script you write is not the one that’s going to get you noticed.

That’s the embarrassing one that you put in your underwear drawer.
Exactly. And maybe it’s not until the fifth or sixth one that people start taking notice. I wrote maybe 12 scripts before number 13 sold, and I was able to become a working writer. Had I stopped at the eighth script, I never would’ve become a working writer. So the value of persistence is something that you learn. But you also have to be good at it and like writing, or else you’d never stick around for nine, ten or eleven scripts.

What was your evolution as a creative throughout the process of doing this script?
I’m not sure I understand. Phrase that a different way.

For me, each article I write, each book that I write, I wind up evolving as a writer. I reach a different level of being able to create, and that opens me up to different ideas, and where I can go now with them, what I can do now, and do things that I may not have done before. So did you discover anything coming out of writing Source Code?
Yes. I learned a lot of things. I learned the virtues of being simple rather than convoluted. Less is more in terms of dialogue. I also learned to break certain rules. And if you break certain rules, and as long as you know you’re breaking certain rules, it becomes distinctive. I’ll give you an example. Writing a movie with two sets — a train and an isolation unit — certainly breaks a conventional wisdom of storytelling, because you’re not opening a story up and you’re not explaining enough to the audience. But I think trusting your instinct that “No, this seems the right thing to do,” was good. Writing roles that challenged actors, I realized, was a great idea, because Michelle Monaghan gets a ton of scripts, and she’s looking for something that’s different. I think she had an extremely difficult job to pull off, because she is sort of the touchstone for Jake’s character in a way, and she never at any point knows the truth of what’s happening. And the fact that she’s able to somehow be so important to the story and only in these snippets of eight minutes is amazing. And I think that’s because she’s really good at her job, but she was also challenged by the part.

I remember when I was in film school I took an acting class, and the acting teacher said, “Remember for actors — the difficult is easy, and the easy is difficult.” If you give an actor an easy thing to do — “Hey, could you cross the room and sit down on camera?” — it’s really hard to do, because you’re just crossing a room and sitting down. How do you make that interesting or distinctive? But if I say to the actor, “Could you cross the room, but you should be carrying a tray, and on the tray are six balls that could roll off at any time, and you also have a vodka martini that you’re trying to bring to this other table, and you’re also going to try to speak to this one person as she goes by and catch her attention,” they love that stuff because it’s so hard, and it’s easy to do hard things. It’s one of those weird paradoxes, but I think it holds true in presenting an actor with a challenge, because they’re looking for that — they’re looking to test themselves.