So a kindly person over at Twitter posted the link to this for me yesterday evening. It's a scene from Privateer 2: The Darkening, in which Clive Owen (as a guy who has awakened without his memory in a dystopic spacefaring future) meets up with a priest of a religion essentially based on, not to put too fine a point on it, the worship of beer and its patron deity. (They call their priests "Uncle" the way Catholics call theirs "Father": this is "Uncle Kashumai.")
When I wrote this part I had no idea the producers were going to cast Clive Owen and BRIAN FUCKING BLESSED in the roles. At the time, I thought to myself in one of the writerly forms of esprit d'escalier, "If I'd known they were casting him I'd have written that part much bigger!"
As I'm now reminded... I really needn't have worried, because the drape-chewing here achieves levels only rarely seen before in human history. This is the exact and diametrical opposite of the concept of "phoning it in." Dear gods. Nobody could possibly have paid him what this performance is worth. Yet out it came anyway. :)
...It's easy to forget now (or to remember only with difficulty) how hard the work associated with this screenplay was. Or how long it took. (I was working in a hotel in Slough, near the Electronic Arts UK offices, for six weeks while writing it—the longest I'd ever been away from Peter since we were married. It was... a strain.) What remains to me now of that experience is a binder containing the screenplay for Privateer 2, the single longest script work I've ever done—300 pages and change—the game itself, and moments like this.
...All worth it. What a trip. :)
