'country' Writer Found Story On 'today Show'

"Country" comments: When we think of how movies are made we tend to picture actors on remote locations and directors lining up shots and shouting "Action!"

Of course, the moviemaking process actually starts in a far less dramatic way than that with a writer sitting alone in a room hunched over a computer for hours at a time. It's easy to forget that two actors talking on the screen aren't having a spontaneous conversation. Somewhere along the way there was a writer (or, perhaps, several writing teams) who agonized over every one of those words and stayed up nights pondering where the story was or wasn't going.

A case in point is Warner Bros.' drama "North Country," opening wide Oct. 21, directed by Niki Caro ("Whale Rider") and produced by Nick Wechsler. Its screenplay by Michael Seitzman is inspired by the book "Class Action: The Landmark Case That Changed Sexual Harassment Law" by Clara Bingham and Laura Leedy Gansler. Its executive producers are Helen Bartlett, Nana Greenwald, Doug Claybourne and Jeff Skoll. Starring are Charlize Theron, Frances McDormand, Sean Bean, Richard Jenkins, Jeremy Renner, Michele Monaghan, Woody Harrelson and Sissy Spacek.

"Country's" story revolves around Josey Aimes (Theron), a single mother with two children to support, who returns to her Northern Minnesota hometown after her marriage fails. The region's principal employers are iron mines where the pay's good, but the work's backbreaking and dangerous. Needless to say, it's an industry dominated by men who aren't happy about having women competing for the few available jobs and, to put it mildly, make life quite unpleasant for Josey. Ultimately, her response to this mistreatment leads to the first U.S. class action lawsuit for sexual harassment.

Prior to "Country," screenwriter Michael Seitzman had written the teen romance "Here on Earth," starring Josh Hartnett, Chris Klein and Leelee Sobieski, and wrote and directed the heist film "Farmer & Chase," starring Lara Flynn Boyle and Ben Gazzara. Neither of those early projects suggested that his next screenplay would be a major studio drama that's already generating an awards buzz after its showing last month at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Meanwhile, Seitzman's very busy now with a range of high profile projects, including adapting Mary Doria Russell's sci-fi novel "The Sparrow" for Warner Bros., to star Brad Pitt; adapting Robert Ludlum's thriller "The Chancellor Manuscript" for Paramount and producers Doug Wick and Lucy Fisher's Red Wagon Productions, to star Leonardo DiCaprio; and adapting for Warner Bros. the non-fiction book "Storming the Court" by Brandt Goldstein, which Seitzman will also direct.

When I caught up recently with Seitzman to focus on "Country's" origins, he acknowledged, "There's nothing on my bookshelf that I've written that would really point towards this." In fact, prior to writing "Country," he explained, "I was in a period of my career that I wasn't happy with. I think I was just as unhappy with what I was being offered as I was unhappy with what I wasn't being considered for. I just didn't like where my career was at, so I was looking for the right project.

"I started by making three lists. I made a list of the things that I thought that my strengths were. And I made a list of the things that I thought my weaknesses were as a writer. And then I made a list of the things that interested me. I stared at (those lists) every day for months. I was looking and looking. I was reading and scanning the world and my mind and my imagination and then one day I saw the authors of the book 'Class Action' on the 'Today Show.' They were talking about the book and it just seemed like it fit. That must have been two and a half years ago."

At that point, he told me, "I contacted the publisher and I managed to contact Clara's agent and then I got Clara on the phone and we went to lunch. She was out here on a business trip. They were considering selling the rights to the book to a TV network (that) was looking at it as a movie of the week. I just thought there was more there (than a TV film). Part of the reason I thought (that) was that the case, itself, and what happened up there has been widely considered to be one of the most important legal decisions for women in America. And, frankly, I was embarrassed that I never heard of it. I thought (that) I won't be the only one that'll be interested in it and I won't be the only one that feels ignorant to not know about it.

"I tend to think about movies as what they're about and what they're really about. And this felt that like what it was about was the obvious, which is women going to work for the iron mines when the men don't want them there. But what it was really about for me in fictionalizing it was I thought it could really be about a woman and her son and a woman and her father and that there'd be an irony there. If she spent her days battling these men at work and if she spent her nights battling with her son and her father and somehow she could reconcile her relationship with them as she reconciles the world that she's thrust herself into that somehow those storylines would all come together at the end of the movie and we would feel that there was an inherent intertwining of them -- that it doesn't have to articulate itself, that we'll get it. And I felt that there was something cinematic about that."

How did he proceed? "Well, I begged Clara to not make the (TV network) deal that they were considering," he replied, "and I asked her for a couple of weeks with it to go and try to set it up. What I quickly found is that the book had already gone out in manuscript form a year (or so) earlier and everybody had passed on it. So already it was an uphill climb, but I felt like I had a take on it. I just asked her for a little bit of time so that I could figure out how to sell that take. And then I took it to Nick Wechsler, who is the producer of the movie (and whose producer credits include such films as "The Player" and "Drugstore Cowboy"). Clara Bingham, one of the authors of the book, it turned out -- and we didn't know this -- that when we took it to Warner Bros. where Nick has a deal, (Warner Bros. Pictures executive vice president, production) Courtenay Valenti, the executive we took it to, it turns out was a childhood friend of Clara's. When we sat down and we talked about it we had very welcome ears. Courtenay was very eager to hear the take on it.

"We sat down with Courtenay and Helen Bartlett and Nana Greenwald and Nick Wechsler and I gave them my pitch and that was it. They wanted to do it and all of a sudden I found myself for the very first time in my career in almost a familial atmosphere. It sounds silly, but all of a sudden I felt like not only had I found the right project, but I found the right group of people that loved it and loved each other and wanted to make a good movie. And I think that's why the process ended up to be as smooth as it was. It's not one of these stories where there's an unhappy script writer railing at the studio and the director and the producer. It all seemed to happen the way it was supposed to happen."

On the casting front, he continued, "We didn't know who should play Josie. There were a lot of actresses who were interested. We tossed it around for a long time and then Niki came on (to direct). After we all saw 'Whale Rider' (which won the People's Choice Award at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival and the Audience Award at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival) that was (a choice that was) obvious. And then Charlize came out in 'Monster' (for which she later won the best actress Oscar and Golden Globe) and we were all just blown away by it. Charlize and Niki, unbeknownst to us, had been, as they say, stalking each other to find a project to do together and it all just sort of fell into place."

Just as I typically ask directors to share insights into how they go about directing, I asked Seitzman for some details about he writes: "I write every morning before sunrise. I usually write around 5 or 5:30 in the morning. I get up (very early) every day, seven days a week. If I'm adapting, I start with the book. I read it a couple times. I try to pull out moments in the book that I think are going to be relevant, moments that are cinematic or character moments. I try to create character bios on each character. I do all that before I start writing. With 'North Country,' which was originally called 'Class Action,' it was a little bit different because I was fictionalizing the story. The reason I was (doing that) was frankly because it's huge. I mean, there are so many people in the book. I did a lot of research. Clara had really blessed me by giving me boxes and boxes full of interview transcripts and court transcripts.

"What I realized was that there were so many people that each had an important story. There were so many people that had something relevant that you couldn't just tell one person's story. I also felt that my responsibility was different than Clara's responsibility writing the book. I'm not making a documentary. I didn't want to make a movie that simply documented the events. I wanted to keep to the truths that were historically relevant, meaning the things that happen in the mine on screen in the movie happened in the mine in real life to somebody. All these events of abuse, the things that were relevant in the court case -- I didn't take any liberties with the truth when it came to those issues."

Seitzman said he felt his "responsibility was a little different in writing a movie that became a vehicle for those events and gave you a doorway into it and a character that took you on a journey to the other side. You would witness those events, but you would also have this other emotional journey that you could go on with this character. In this way, I could take all these events and I could kind of condense them and compress them into just a few people on the screen that sort of carried the weight of the those events. So I had to craft something that was largely original with elements and events in it that really happened.

"A lot of the central story I mapped out before pitching. And then I started writing the script. Once I turned in the script the response was really positive and the notes were great. Everybody really did see the same movie, I felt, each step of the way when people came on. It wasn't long after that first draft that I turned in another draft and then they were sending it out to actors, which was incredibly gratifying just because it had never worked that way in my career before that. I had signed with new agents and a new manager right before this during that period when I wasn't happy with my career. I remember Rosalie Swedlin, my manager, said to me over and over again, 'I've always found with all the people that I work with that it's that one project that you find that inspires you more than any other and that's the one that you're going to write in a different way than you've ever written anything. That's the one that's going to carry you.' And she's right."

When he started writing "Country," Seitzman told me, "I thought it appealed to every single thing that I wanted to do. It had a political underpinning. It had social relevance. It had these kind of deep familial tensions in it, which were important to me. And it was a story that didn't seem obvious, which I wanted. It was a story that sort of flew under the radar. Nobody seemed to notice it. But it was something that I couldn't wait to get up in the morning for every day. And then all of a sudden everybody was embracing it and I thought, 'You know, I'm not the only one that cares.' Then I just started writing everything. I tend to write dialogue at the same time that I'm outlining because it's hard to just outline in a vacuum. So often the characters tell you what they're going to do. Unless you're writing the dialogue and you're writing the way that they interact with each other they don't fully form during the outlining phase. You need them to start to form themselves and that informs the outline just as the outline informs that.

"I tend to work side-by-side. I have a working outline next to a working screenplay. Sometimes what I'll do during the early stages because I haven't fully flushed out the story yet, but I'm still trying to find the character, is I write scenes that aren't in the movie and that'll never be in the movie just to take the character for a walk somewhere so I can start to get a feel for how the character speaks. I tend to do silly things -- like sometimes I'll write a scene where it's the character and me at dinner with my family. Or, me and the character sitting on an airplane. Or, my best friend and the character sitting on an airplane so I can just try to hear the voice a little bit outside of the context of the central story. I keep all that stuff. It's fun to go back and look at years later. When you're not writing the script, but you're writing other stuff, to me it falls into the category of research."

As for how he writes, Seitzman explained, "I use (the computer software) Final Draft generally, which is just intuitive and easy to use. I use other (programs), too, depending on (the project). If I'm working with a producer that works with one of the others like Scriptor I'll use that one to make it easier to e-mail pages back and forth. But I tend to use Final Draft mostly. I have different computers for different purposes. I tend to use a large screen so that I can keep two documents open at once. I can keep the outline on the right side of the screen and I can keep the script on the left side of the screen so I can go back and forth between the two. And then I have a couple of laptops including a very small one that I can travel with easily. I never go anywhere without a computer. It's so much easier to write on a computer for me so I tend to carry one everywhere."

Caro came on board to direct "Country," he said, "right around the Oscars in '04. Niki had responded to the screenplay. She came in. There were a couple of directors that (we) met with. We all loved Niki and we loved her movie. I think one of the things that made her so relevant for our movie is that the world she depicted in 'Whale Rider' is this very isolated, very tribal world. And you can say the same thing about this world in Northern Minnesota. It's very isolated. It's very particular and specific to that part of the country. The people up there are also somewhat isolated the way that married people were in 'Whale Rider' in that it's a closed community and it's a community with its own rules and its own mores and its own customs. What happened in 'Whale Rider' is a little girl upset those customs and what happens in 'North Country' is that this woman upsets those customs. So there are these emotional threads in both movies that are very similar.

"The minute that we all saw 'Whale Rider' everybody felt the same way about it, which was that there was this almost gut-level feeling that at first blanch they're obviously not the same kind of a movie, but there was a gut-level feeling that there's a filmmaker there who was going to get inside the world. And I think that if the script lacked something early on, I felt that what it lacked in my mind was a texture of the world that it was in. I think that that's often the case with a screenplay. Because of the way that screenplays are written and because of the nature of the form you can only bring out so much texture. So you're relying on the fact that a filmmaker is going to add that visible flesh to it and this was clearly a filmmaker who had done that in a world that none of us were familiar with. So now the hope was -- and I think the hope came to fruition -- that she also would do that with this movie (and) add the skin on it."

Writers, of course, often find that directors have their own thoughts about what a script should be and screenplays are frequently rewritten by directors or by new teams of writers brought in by directors who have worked with them successfully in the past. That wasn't the case with Seitzman and Caro. "We got along really well," he observed. "First of all, I never got replaced by anybody. I think we're all used to replacing each other (as writers). As much as it's anathema, we all do it. I've been replaced. I've replaced other people. It's a part of the bargain you make when you become a screenwriter. But on this movie I didn't (get replaced) and I think that's largely because Niki also is a writer -- she wrote 'Whale Rider' -- and I think that she has a respect for writers. And I don't think we ever didn't see the movie the same way.

"We certainly had times that we disagreed, but they were never fights. They were the kind of healthy disagreements that are supposed to create something else. I think we always had a respect for each other. And I welcomed her on the movie. I knew the movie needed a filmmaker like Niki. I was just very happy and I think sometimes with writers -- and this has happened to me, too -- when your writing is getting changed (what) frustrates you (in part is) your ego that it's being changed, but part of it also is just that in your head you've seen the movie already because when you're writing it you've seen it. So you expect everybody else is seeing the movie that you saw while you were writing it and most of the time that's impossible. But I think with Niki, I just always felt like she elevated it. I felt lucky that not only did we see it the same way, but also in a lot of ways it just kept getting better. And as long as it was getting better, I think we were all happy."

Asked what else he did in the way of rewriting before "Country" was shot, Seitzman recalled, "Well, there were always revisions. We were always working on it from the time that Niki came on. I did a revision then based on conversations that she and I had. And then Charlize came on. And then as each actor came on each one had (ideas about changes). It's like buying a suit. An actor comes on and the suit's just not going to fit exactly right. So you're trimming and you're cutting and you're molding it so that it fits everybody right. As much as it's an actor's job to inhabit the role, it's also the job of everybody else to help make the suit fit. So I think in an ideal world you're constantly changing it to fit the various people and the various locations. The ebbs and flows of the process will always require changing. You know, there's a magic in it where you get all these people from different walks of life. If you look at just the birthplaces of all the people on this movie, you have a uniquely American story about women, written by a man from New Jersey, directed by a woman from New Zealand, starring a woman from South Africa. It's a miracle that it all comes out.

"You know, my father's an ob-gyn (who would) always say that the question isn't how does a baby get born with a problem, the question is, 'Given all the things that can go wrong during gestation, how is it that any of us were ever born normal?' I think it's the same thing with filmmaking. The question isn't, 'How do so many movies get made that are less than what you hoped?' I think the real question is, 'How do they ever get made in a way that you hoped, given all the things that can go wrong during gestation and all the pieces and the people that come together?' And so I just feel very blessed."

Filmmaker flashbacks: From March 7, 1986's column: "Moviegoers are one of the more difficult consumer groups to reach with point of purchase advertising. For years newspaper movie pages were the only means of letting people know where films were playing and what time they started. It's now possible, however, to reach moviegoers through a television system called the 'Now Showing Network,' which since Feb. 28 has linked stations in 20 key markets across the country.

"'The real purpose Now Showing serves is for studios to reinforce moviegoer awareness of their films,' explains Don Delson, executive vice president of marketing for the Kansas City based company...'We don't sell. We don't hype. We provide information about movies to the moviegoer who's shopping for movie entertainment and wants to know what his choices are before he selects which movie he might want to see.'"

Martin Grove is a regular contributor to CNN Headline News' "Showbiz Tonight" weeknights live at 4-5 p.m., PT (7-8 p.m., ET) with repeats at 7 & 9 p.m., PT (10 p.m. & Midnight, ET).