“Once I have an idea that I think works, my first step is to take pages and pages of notes, whatever comes into my head.”
Screenwriter Ben Ripley
The movie Source Code is what you get when you mix The Matrix with Groundhog Day. The new movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan was written by USC grad Ben Ripley and is about saving the world eight minutes at a time. And while millions of lives in Chicago are at stake in the Sci-Fi film that doesn’t mean there can’t be a little humor on the ride downtown.
Carson Newman at Scriptshadow has been a fan of the Source Code script for years calling it “one of the best (if not the best) executed Sci-Fi scripts I’ve ever read.” Back in 2009 Newman interviewed Ripley and asked him why he wrote Source Code.
I wrote Source Code because I was discouraged with the work I was then getting. In the four years between the sale of my first spec and that of Source Code, I was mostly doing rewrites on other people’s horror scripts. I’d put a lot of effort into them, I’d get paid, and then the scripts would just sit there. I felt I had more to say creatively, and the great thing about being a writer in Hollywood, the source of our power, is the ability to generate new material.
Source Code was an immensely difficult script for me to write. All I had at the beginning was the impulse to tell a non-linear story with a structure like Groundhog Day, where you experienced the same event repeatedly. I asked myself if there was a science fiction conceit that would be the occasion for the narrative, and before long I had the setting on the train and the idea that source code would be used as a tool in a terrorism procedural.
Ben Ripley
Interview with Ben Ripley—writer of Source Code
And on a blog titled Screenwriting from Iowa I can’t pass up a shout-out to Monaghan who is from Winthrop, Iowa and has several relatives in and around the Cedar Valley area where I write this blog. In recent years the actress has co-starred with Tom Cruise (Mission: Impossible lll), Casey Affleck (Gone Baby Gone), and Shia LaBeouf (Eagle Eye). She was also in The Bourne Supremacy, Made of Honor, The Heartbreak Kid and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
Monaghan is further proof that it is possible to come from a small town of 800 people and go on to do some pretty big things.
[…] “Once I have an idea that I think works, my first step is to take pages and pages of notes, whatever comes into my head.” Screenwriter Ben Ripley The movie Source Code is what you get when you mix The Matrix with Groundhog Day. The new movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan was written by […] Original Source… […]
Hey, Scott. I haven’t had a chance to stop by your wonderful blog in awhile as the restaurant is back open.
Love your site and I wish you were on Twitter.
Hope 2011 treats you well.
Jamie
@Jamie—I’ve been on Twitter for a couple years and you can find me at this address: @scottwsmith_com