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The nominated writers will break down select pages that were essential to the stories they were telling.
That had been done before, and he wasn’t eager to see the cliche play out again.
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Here the Oscar-nominated writer shares his thought process forHell or High Water’s uncertain end.
I’m a real stream-of-consciousness writer.
I knew the characters so well by this point that I just wrote.
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It made sense that they would say this and that this would be the way the character would react.
They’re playing a chess match, both of them.
They’re boxers circling each other in the ring, and the punches they throw are with honesty.
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Marcus deserves to know why.
This was a way to tell him without confessing, yet it’s still a confession of a sense.
He never got an opportunity to apologize for that and to tell him that he was his only friend.
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Marcus is suffering a tremendous amount of guilt as well.
When violence takes place in my films, I want there to be real consequences for it.
I want to watch the suffering beyond the act.
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When Marcus talks about his partner having a family, it’s the consequences of actions reverberating through generations.
How much Alberto’s death affected his children and their children?
Toby’s actions were foolish, but they were also selfless as well.
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They will, so that his doesn’t.
It’s just how it unfolded as I wrote.
The family does the math on their faces.
He says, “The things you do for your kids, huh?”
He recognizes that Toby did none of this for himself.
What would have happened if his family had not come home?
Skipping ahead to the very end…
I just thought that for either one of them to die was letting them off easy.
There was a certain amount of suffering that they both deserved to endure.
I love a movie that when I see it makes me come up with a story beyond the film.
I love imagining what might have happened.
