![]() This ended up being far simpler than anyone really thought. We worked on a treatment in the spring of 2000 to take my original stage-play-like mystery and open it into a big budget studio film. So that process began, and I went out to Australia for a month to work with Alex and a good development exec he had at the time. They brought me in and asked me to do a new rewrite from my original spec. They were looking at picking up Hardwired, so they did. For a few years, it was dead, and then around 1999 Fox was interested in doing a robot film. It had been developed in a completely different direction, which was a very heartbreaking thing for me. The detective was replaced by a group of marines, and instead of the robots, they were going to the space station to destroy the monster. The last draft I saw there a few years later was basically like a monster movie. Now, at Disney, the project eventually descended into development hell. So we transferred the setting and put it on a space station as a way to explain the fact that it was so confined. The problem was that the script was so contained - almost like a stage play - that we had to find a way to make this work for the studio. A while attached a good director, Bryan Singer. Other than that, it follows the same line as the finished film. It took place in one setting, one floor in one high tech building. Now, the original script was very much like an Agatha Christie type of mystery. He’s really the only human being in the story. He finds himself involved in a mystery where all the suspects are robots, cyborgs, computers, holograms. It was about a detective named Del Spooner who is called to the site of a murder by a hologram of the dead man. The original script was very much the same story that has made it to the screen. I sold the script in 1995 to Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone or Hollywood. I was living in San Antonio, Texas, and I didn’t have an agent. I, Robot started out as a spec script of mine called Hardwired, which I wrote 10 years ago. How did your own original spec become an Isaac Asimov adaptation? Then, when you get started, you have a tendency not to stop.” Then, when the prospect of actually speaking to someone comes up, it’s shocking because you’re actually going to talk to somebody for a change. “I’m usually sitting in this room with the ringer on my phone turned off, writing, not really seeing anyone, not speaking really to anyone. ![]() ![]() Scheduled for a 20-minute slot but ending up talking for 90, Vintar revealed halfway through that he never realized how much time he spent alone. Now, I, Robot is supposedly based on an Isaac Asimov book, so how could this spec script have the same basis? Well, since it’s the story of a robot suspected of murder, it actually fit well into the canon of Asimov’s collection of robot stories. ![]() He did rewrites on high profile projects like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within one of his specs was produced in Germany, and his most recent became this summer’s blockbuster I, Robot. He sold several specs but waited through years of development to see most of them still unproduced. Jeff Vintar lived a life not ideal but still somewhat enviable for most screenwriters. ![]()
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