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ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How'd your career get started in the first place?
TONY GILROY: I grew up, and my dad [Frank D. Gilroy, a writer and director who won a Pulitzer Prize for his play, The Subject Was Roses] was my dad.

When did you start writing?
I left home really early. I was a musician in Boston from the time I was 17 until probably around the time I was 22 and 23. I started writing songs and lyrics, then I decided I was going to write serious fiction. I wrote a bunch of stories and started a novel, and I came down to New York still playing music, doing both. And then I thought, Well this is ridiculous. I'm going to get out of this, and I'll write a screenplay really quick and get rich. And I spent five years tending bar trying to figure it out.

How old were you then?
I think after the first sale I had of anything, I quit tending bar when I was 30. I got my first gig writing a movie that never got made for Chuck Norris. So I quit tending bar, and I was a screenwriter.

Was the Chuck Norris premise good?
Oh dude, please! [Laughs]

Your first credit is The Cutting Edge. How long was the trek from Norris to Cutting Edge?
A couple of years. I had a script that was a great writing sample. It was called RSVP, and it was a bickering Preston Sturges '80s romantic comedy. And Robert Cort at Interscope read it and said, ''I want to do a movie about figure skating.'' Figure skating! I was like, Oh no. [Laughs] But he could greenlight a movie, and I really liked him, and I said, ''If I really [nail] it, are you going to make it?'' Because you get burned all the time. And we did it.

That movie was your first big break?
Oh, totally. Definitely.

How did you come to working on The Bourne Identity and its sequels?
I gotta be careful here. I got sent a very, very — what's a polite way to put it? Something got sent to me that was a really, really poor script, and [The Bourne Identity director Doug Liman] had passed on another film of mine six months earlier. I only went to meet him because I was curious why he was doing this and not my movie. And in the course of that conversation — explaining why I didn't like it — there were enough ideas that people got excited about, and it started a whole [thing]... but it was really under false pretenses.

I always wonder: How do writers like you get your arms around the international-espionage stuff in scripts like Bourne?
I've been a freak for all that stuff for 30 years. I have a huge library of stuff that always interested me. And for those kinds of movies, it'd be hard to write them if you didn't have a sense of their physical world. There are a lot of great writers who have difficulty with that because they're not mechanical. You need a physical understanding of the world you're writing about.

For a screenwriter as successful as you've been, how hard is it still? Is it still really easy to lose control of your own scripts?
The truth is, you wake up every morning with infinite creative rights. You trade them away as the day goes on. You cash a check; you trade 'em. It is shocking sometimes how important you are until the moment you deliver. Even with A-plus writers, that's still a shock. You're important, and extremely well paid, and pampered and catered to, until the moment you deliver. But I can do whatever I want.

Was that true on Michael Clayton?
I had final cut. That entire movie is what I wanted to make. I didn't get burned.


Posted Oct 04, 2007 | Order Article Reprints
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