Before the production of Pleasantville, Gary Ross had written two successful screenplays.  The first, Big, directed by Penny Marshall, helped jumpstart Tom Hanks' film career.  The second, Dave, continued Ross' pattern of writing lighthearted comedies with a humanist, dramatic soul.

I had a chance to talk with Gary at San Francisco's historic Clift Hotel, where the two of us sat entirely alone in its beautiful Art Deco appointed bar, which is paneled with dark inlaid hardwood and dimly lit with the warm glow of antique lamps.  The room, like a time capsule from another age, seemed the perfect place to talk about the time-bending properties of his newest film, and to ask the first-time director about screenwriting, narrative, and the place of story in our culture.

Allen White:  I actually just reviewed Big and Dave again last night, just to look at your earlier work - I'd seen Big before and I'd never seen Dave - and I noticed that in these three films one of your strongest themes seems to be "triumph of the everyman." What is it about this theme that fascinates you?

Gary Ross: "Triumph of the everyman"...I don't know that Pleasantville is exactly "triumph of the everyman." I think Pleasantville is sort of "triumph of the everything."  (laughs)  I suppose I'm a populist at heart.  I mean, I'm drawn to that stuff, I'm drawn to a kind of Capra-esque thing, you know?  It's just a bit of what interest me or fascinates me, you know?  I don't know...I really don't.  I don't.

AW: Is Capra's work a big influence?

GR:  No. I don't really like Frank Capra, you know?  I mean, I like it, but I find it a little overly romantic.  He was an immigrant, and he had those sensibilities, and that contributed to it a lot.  I think in the earlier movies like Big and Dave, there's a whole populist thing that I just kind of feel deeply.  I mean, it's just part of my orientation, so it's understandable that it's going to come out.  You know, the individual over the state, or the individual over the system, and I suppose that that's present in Pleasantville to a certain extent.  Although it's more of a kind of pluralism about life in general in Pleasantville.   It's a little more complicated, I think, than just an individual triumphing over the system.  It's about deconstructing a system down to the motivations it created on the part of individuals.  And opening up who you are so that the society can become more open to a certain extent, you know? 

AW:  The premises -- speaking of coming from that background -- the premises of Big and Pleasantville seem to be inspired, at least to me, by the Twilight Zone school of storytelling.  So my question is, was Rod Serling's work of inspiration, and who else has inspired you, and are you a big fan of 50's TV overall?

GR:  No.  It is very Twilight Zone-ish.  Both Big and Dave are.  I can't say I was a huge Twilight Zone fan.  I really was not.  I was interested...I mean I liked them.  There are a few that I can remember.  But I was not a huge, huge fan.  I like where a fantastical premise takes me.  It's such a bizarre thing in modern culture that everybody looks for influences all the time.  "What shows did you watch?" I get a lot.  Or everybody trying to look for antecedents, and...it's so funny, I mean, there was one generation of filmmakers where there were no antecedents, they just did what they did, and that's what they did.  So, it comes out of me, you know?

AW:  (laughs)  I guess everyone keeps saying to you, "Did you watch lots of reruns of the Donna Reed Show?"

GR:  Well, that's reasonable for this one. 'Cause that's what it's about.  I really didn't, I mean, to me this was a way of talking about values, and memories, how we sanitize our memory, how we invoke those values, and the pitfalls of nostalgia -- what we use nostalgia for.  There's that Orwell line: "He who controls the present controls the past; he who controls the past controls the future."  And I think it's true.  When you clean up your past and your memory, and alter your existence based on that, it's a way of dealing with who you are and where you are.  It's a false reality.  So I was interested in memory, per se.

AW:  What do you like about being a writer/director versus simply being a writer?

GR:  Well, they're two different jobs.  I like to direct, 'cause I like to direct.  I like being a director.  Love it or not.  And you get to create something out of whole cloth -- I mean, I have a movie that's just mine.   From its inception to its completion it's entirely my responsibility.  And that feels good.  And I'm proud of that.  You know, just writing has its disadvantages, too.  It has limitations, and I don't have those limitations any more, so it makes me happy.

AW:  That's a very valid point.

GR:  But beyond that, I like the job of directing.  And directing is a separate job from writing -- it's not an extension of writing.  It's something different that you have to learn how to do.

AW: Absolutely.  Related to that topic, when Penny Marshal and Ivan Reitman were directing your first two scripts, what kind of changes were made to those screenplays, and how much did they work with you to make those changes?

GR:  No one changed anything in those movies.  I was the only writer -- Anne Spielberg and I were the only writers on Big, and then I was the only writer on Dave.  So no changes were made without our approval -- I mean, the directors had input, obviously.  Less so on Big than on Dave.   I mean, Ivan...there were things Ivan wanted to do to the script, and we fought about them, and, you know, but we had a great -- Ivan and I ended up having a great relationship.  And a great time together.  And it was a very collaborative process. 

AW: Pleasantville has several very strong messages, relating to themes like morality, freedom of speech, racism, suppression of emotion and behavior.   Were these ideas inherent from the story's inception, or were they an outgrowth over writing the drafts?

GR:  No.  I don't believe in discovering a screenplay or an intention in drafts -- successive drafts.  I believe in outlining.  I believe in an investigative process before you outline.  And I believe in sort of exploring a lot of the thematic content of the movie early,  figuring out your own point of view and what you want to say.  And then it becomes solidified.  So that the rewriting process really becomes honing and refining the text -- not in terms of meaning, but in terms of execution -- so that the focus is clearer and clearer.  If motivations don't make sense, if things seem overly protracted, if certain things don't flow organically from one another, if there seem like contradictions or redundancies -- that's what rewriting is for.  I think that the discovery of the piece itself has to occur in the outlining process and before.

AW:  So do you tend to write your first drafts really quickly?  

GR: No, 'cause I'm just not that quick.  But I do tend write them much faster than I outline.  In Pleasantville, the outlining process was months, and months, and months.  It was, like, I don't know, seven, eight months, and the writing process was only three.

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