Eric Roth wrote the screenplay for films like Dune and Forrest Gump. Having turned 80, he decided it was time to write his first ever script for the stage. This piece is published in City AM The Magazine, Winter edition, distributed at major Tube stations and available to pick up from The Royal Exchange.
“When Forrest Gump comes on, I just stop,” says the screenwriter Eric Roth. “I watch the rest of the damn movie.” And it’s a rare occurrence that the scriptwriter of Dune, A Star Is Born and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button will “just stop” what he is doing. His routine is sacred and doesn’t allow much room for spontaneity. He wakes early in the morning and writes until one o’clock in the afternoon, then again at night. “If I’m on deadline I’ll work in the middle of the night,” says Roth. “I’m very disciplined about it.”
The screenwriter of more than 30 feature films is one of Hollywood’s most prolific scribes. He has written famous lines for some of the 20th century’s most iconic actors, from Robert Redford to Paul Newman. But when Roth turned 80 this year, he needed a new challenge. This month, he makes his playwriting debut at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London with his adaptation of the classic Western movie High Noon. “I’m really pretty good as a screenwriter,” he says from his LA office, a characteristically writerly sort of room with books piled halfway to the ceiling. “I’ve written a lot of movies, won an Oscar… but that’s no longer enough: I’ve reached an age and thought, ‘I’ve gotta try something else, see if I can do it’.”
Roth says that “a little fear of changing genres” delayed him diversifying sooner. High Noon is an Oscar-winning 1952 movie starring Grace Kelly and Gary Cooper as a newlywed couple embarking on their life together when Cooper’s character, Will Kane, becomes embroiled in a face-off with a murderous gang. “I’d never written a play, it was a great discovery. It’s been one of the more joyful experiences of my life,” says Roth, who bought rights to the screenplay, and says the collaborative way theatre companies work has made him feel “like I’m 22 again.”
“As I get towards the end of this thing – I won’t say life, maybe this career – it’s a great way to explore a whole different world and feel the same way I did for my first movie, 60 years ago. The uninhibited quality of pure creativity and feeling everybody working together. But I don’t want to gush too much – it sounds silly…”
From Dune to the West End: Eric Roth on 60 years of screenwriting
Eric Roth won an Oscar for the script for the 1994 movie Forrest Gump, and has also written Dune and A Star Is Born
It’s vanishingly rare to see a Western on stage, although musical versions of the genre have become box office gold, in particular the Young Vic’s radical 2023 adaptation of Oklahoma!, which was critically acclaimed for its stripped-back staging and feminist approach. That interested Roth: “Will Kane is a complicated man, it’s a beautiful love story with music and dancing – plus there’s a gun fight that will be harrowing, I hope! The piece, to me, is about courage. How do we stand up for our principles even if everybody abandons us and we have to do things alone?”
One challenge for Roth has been realising that subtlety doesn’t work on stage. In movies, close-ups of faces and hands can reveal emotion, but that won’t fly if you’re sitting at the back of a 1,000 seater Edwardian auditorium like the Harold Pinter. Roth, who was born in Brooklyn in 1945 and now lives in Los Angeles, learned this during recent workshops with High Noon director Thea Sharrock, the Olivier Award-winner behind Equus and After the Dance. “I’d written ‘he shuffles his feet’’” remembers Roth, “and the director said ‘I’d like someone from the balcony to see him. He’s going to have to do a jig!’”
Writing about drugs always comes out in some corny way. It doesn’t reflect what you’re feeling, or seeing
Roth is notorious for his extra long screenplays, which frankly had become a bit of a problem. He told Deadline in 2024 that he had developed a reputation “not for unproduceable, but for slow, long scripts, which can be dangerous.” So it must have been a joy to work on Killers of the Flower Moon, which runs at nearly three-and-a-half hours with plenty of dense, character-driven dialogue. It won Roth Variety’s Creative Impact in Screenwriting Award. But that movie and other epics like Dune with long run times are the exceptions rather than the rule. “I used to get away with it. You can’t anymore. That was the frustrated novelist in me, I guess.”
Despite his strict routine of sitting down at a given hour, doing the actual writing is something Roth has less control over. “The idea of just sitting and writing – it’s more of an abstraction,” he says. “The words come out, and hopefully they come out in the right way.” He sometimes doesn’t even remember writing the scripts, rather certain scenes “reveal themselves on the screen”.
He studied English at University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as Columbia University, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree. He studied for a masters at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, and won his first plaudit for writing, the Samuel Goldwyn Writing Award, in 1970. It was the same year his first script was released in film form for the movie To Catch a Pebble, a love story set in Israel. His breakthrough followed four years later with The Nickel Ride, a crime thriller which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1974; it was nominated for the Palme d’Or, the festival’s highest honour. But he didn’t receive popular acclaim until the 1990s, when Forrest Gump won him the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar.
Roth doesn’t drink – he says he never liked the taste – but in his formative years he’d be stimulated by “a marijuana lunch.” Drugs are famously hard to write about – the screenwriter falls silent for a moment when I ask if anyone’s ever nailed the sensation of being high. “It always comes out in some corny way,” he says. “It doesn’t reflect what you’re feeling, or seeing. Maybe Tho Wolfe’s non-fiction book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I’d have to think. I’m sure there are a couple good ones.”
He’s debating whether to write a novella about a long Hollywood life, but is wary of doing a cradle to grave sort of thing. “Maybe I’ll get to it, maybe I won’t, we’ll see.”
The only thing that seems to vex him is writing, and the pursuit of the perfect semantic flow. He says “the only thing I do know” is how to string a sentence together. “I appreciate the use of words so much, one word having to follow another, picking the right words. The great writers all pick the best words to sound the right way, and it’s always a struggle.”
High Noon opens at The Harold Pinter Theatre on 17 December; go to haroldpintertheatre.co.uk