Less Traveled By

"So finally, I got a script by a guy who was kind of in my world, and thinking about films the same way I was, and revered the same kinds of movie that I revered – Andy Walker, who had written a script called Seven. He couldn’t get it made and had rewritten it 13 times in order to make it more “likeable”. [audience laughs] So this script was floating around and my agent, who’s very sweet and always very hopeful, said, “You know, New Line is interested in this. You might like this, and they might want to make it with you, so maybe you should read it.” So I read it, and got to the end, with the head in the box, and I called him and said, “This is fantastic, this is so great because I had thought it was a police procedural; now it’s this meditation on evil and how evil gets on you and you can’t get it off.” And he said, “What are you talking about?” And I talked about the whole head-in-the-box thing, she’s been dead for hours and there’s no bullshit chase across town and the guy driving on sidewalks to get to the woman, who’s drawing a bath while the serial killer sneaks in the back window. And he goes, “Oh, they sent you the wrong draft.” [audience laughs] And he sent me the right draft, and there was a guy driving across town on sidewalks, serial killer sneaking in the back window. And I said that I wasn’t interested in doing that. So I went and met with Mike De Luca, who was ostensibly at the time running New Line, and I said that I really liked the first draft, not the 13th draft. And he said, “Me too.” So I asked what he was going to do, and I was laying out what I wanted to do on it. And he said, “Close the door.” And then he said, “If we develop this and get into a dialogue about changes that could possibly be made to this material, there’s no way that we could make this version of it, because I’ll have 15 people looking over my shoulder who are going to be reading these pages as they come in. But if you say that you’ll make this movie, starting in six weeks, we can make this version of the movie.” So I said, “OK, let’s go do it. Put the head in a box.” And that’s how the movie got made."