So Kushner, who spent years assembly with Lincoln consultants and lecturers, determined that the one technique to inform this larger-than-life story was to focus the script on simply the previous few years of Lincoln’s life. He spent two and a half years trying to write down that model of the story, however nonetheless couldn’t discover a technique to condense it down right into a script. “Each time I did it, I might get by two or three months [of his life] and I’d have 100 pages,” he says. “And I might cease and pull my hair and scream and return to the drafting board.”
Then the 2007 writers strike pressured Kushner to place the script on the again burner, and the answer lastly got here into view. “I used to be strolling round in a picket line someplace, and I began going by the issues that occurred to him within the final 4 months of his administration,” says Kushner. “I noticed that I might cowl all the key themes of Lincoln’s administration in these final 4 months, beginning with the struggle for the thirteenth Modification.”
As quickly because the strike was over, he put pen to paper and wrote a 500-page script. He instantly despatched it to Spielberg. “I stated, ‘I believe, clearly, we want some chopping,’” says Kushner. “However I used to be enthusiastic about what I had achieved. And he learn it and he was thrilled.”
They continued to chop down the script, finally getting it right down to 200-ish pages, although it was nonetheless too lengthy. Then, as Kushner was driving to one in every of his first conferences with the movie’s star, Daniel Day-Lewis, Spielberg referred to as him to say he thought they need to focus purely on the struggle for the modification. “I used to be so shocked I needed to pull the automotive off the highway and sit for a minute, and I stated, ‘Can we actually do this?’” he says.
The movie was nominated for 12 Oscars, profitable for manufacturing design and finest actor for Day-Lewis. Kushner says now that the story’s tight focus allowed it to be about way more than simply the long-lasting president. “Steven didn’t do that consciously, however unconsciously he figured it out: There have been two heroes within the film. One is Abraham Lincoln, and the opposite, weirdly, is the Home of Representatives, which nobody would ever describe ordinarily as heroic, actually not lately,” says Kushner.
By Niko Tavernise/twentieth Century Studios.
West Facet Story, 2021
(Greatest-picture nomination)
“When he first informed me he needed to do West Facet Story, I got here house and informed my husband, ‘I believe he’s misplaced his thoughts,’” Kushner remembers about his first dialog with Spielberg concerning this specific adaptation.
