He’s written screen smashes like Dune and Killers of the Flower Moon. As Eric Roth plunges into theatre, he talks about classic westerns, being sacked by Robert Redford – and why writing for Martin Scorsese is a dream
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ric Roth chuckles into his bristly silver beard when I refer to him as the new kid on the block, but that doesn’t make it any less true. His debut play, an adaptation of the 1952 western High Noon, is about to receive its world premiere, and the fact that he turned 80 last year is neither here nor there. “Maybe I’m the old new kid on the block,” he concedes from his home in Los Angeles. His baseball cap bears a picture of a typewriter, as though there could be any doubt that he has writing on the brain.
Admittedly, Roth is more experienced than the typical first-timer. Behind him lies not so much a hinterland of a career as an imposing mountain range, all of it in movies. He won an Oscar in 1995 for writing Forrest Gump: he’s the one you can credit (or blame) for lines such as: “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.”
His own CV has something of the chocolate box about it, mixing chewy toffees – Michael Mann’s whistleblower drama The Insider, Steven Spielberg’s Mossad thriller Munich – with bonbons like David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, in which Brad Pitt is born elderly and ages backwards, and recent versions of A Star Is Born and Dune. All earned him Oscar nominations. Film or play, the pleasure is the same. “I love to put one word in front of the other,” he says. “See if I can get the right one.”
