Post by JillyMcBeam on Mar 10, 2016 23:16:29 GMT
Terrio recalls the experience of writing a dialogue-intensive scene for Argo:
Scene 58--nine men sitting in a conference room talking through scenarios for cover stories to get Americans out of Iran--was difficult. There's nothing to cut to except the actors' faces. The tension has to come from the subtle shifts of power. CIA and State Department officials debate ideas, each worse than the last. I knew the crucial beat would come when our hero, Tony Mendez speaks up. He couldn't seem disrespectful, yet he had to make his case. I settled on the idea that Mendez would throw a spitball into the conversation with a joke about giving the bicycle escapees Gatorade. The table would go silent. The attention of the room would shift to the court jester. I also had to determine whether Gatorade was on the market and a commonly recognized brand in December of 1979. I celebrated when I found a magazine from the year before featuring a dehydrated athlete with a Village People moustache: 'Gatorade: When You're Thirsty to Win.'
Scene 58--nine men sitting in a conference room talking through scenarios for cover stories to get Americans out of Iran--was difficult. There's nothing to cut to except the actors' faces. The tension has to come from the subtle shifts of power. CIA and State Department officials debate ideas, each worse than the last. I knew the crucial beat would come when our hero, Tony Mendez speaks up. He couldn't seem disrespectful, yet he had to make his case. I settled on the idea that Mendez would throw a spitball into the conversation with a joke about giving the bicycle escapees Gatorade. The table would go silent. The attention of the room would shift to the court jester. I also had to determine whether Gatorade was on the market and a commonly recognized brand in December of 1979. I celebrated when I found a magazine from the year before featuring a dehydrated athlete with a Village People moustache: 'Gatorade: When You're Thirsty to Win.'
Mr. Terrio recently finished his script for “Justice League,” which starts shooting next month, giving him a key role defining the big- screen versions of DC superheroes. To prepare, the writer says he studied red- and blueshifts in electromagnetic physics to think about the Flash, investigated deep sea biology in the Mariana trench to create the world of Aquaman, and read the Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily’s account of the war between Amazon and Atlantis to better understand Wonder Woman.
Mr. Terrio is a former student of British literature and phenomenology who dropped out of a masters program at Cambridge University to study film. On his first big-budget movie, he cites as influences not just Frank Miller’s seminal comic-book miniseries “The Dark Knight Returns” (which features its own Batman-Superman battle) and Mr. Nolan’s trilogy of Batman films. He also invokes Italian semiotician Umberto Eco’s 1972 essay “The Myth of Superman” and the W.H. Auden poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” which contrasts the quotidian details of normal people’s lives with the epic struggles of mythological figures.
