Interview (Written): Geneva Robertson-Dworet

A conversation with the screenwriter of the Lara Croft reboot Tomb Raider.

A Syfywire interview with Geneva Robertson-Dworet, whose screenwriting projects include the upcoming Sherlock Holmes 3, Captain Marvel, and Dungeons & Dragons, and the movie currently in theaters Tomb Raider.

Since the movie is based on the 2013 game, what were you allowed to stray from, and what were you required to include in the script?

It was an interesting background to the project before I came on board. I came on board in the fall of 2015. I want to say that MGM had the first draft of the reboot written in 2011 or something before the rebooted game came out. So those drafts are really different. They worked on various drafts or possible versions of the movie. When I came on they said we want to go back to the game and what is so great about this rebooted game. So we knew we loved the location. In the game, more than the movie, we know that Lara is already interested in archeology, but she still feels like a little bit of an amateur.

She’s young, and a little bit inexperienced at it. We of course took that even farther back to have that she’s not even interested in archeology at all when we need her. We were interested in going back further in her life than obviously the Angelina Jolie movie where she’s already a badass archeologist. Also, we were straight up interested in using some of the kick ass sequences in the games. There’s some really mind blowing action in the game, like why wouldn’t we use this, this is f — king awesome. As fans we loved it, so we were like, why wouldn’t we put this in. The plane sequence is actually one of my favorite parts of the movie, which is a version of what’s in the game. That was incredibly fun to write. I love writing action sequences and drawing inspiration from the game was like a real treat.

Is there a scene that you wrote that you really wanted to keep in the final draft, or film that didn’t quite make it?

There were many iterations of things…..that’s a really good question. It’s like a progression, right? I think some people just think that you sit down and just write it. The reality of a movie that’s this big, and expensive is that it takes about a year or longer to go from script to shooting. I came on in November 2015, and worked on it for a year straight. In that progression, that year of time, there were a lot of changes that happened in the movie overall. The original vision of Lara, the tone of movie was supposed to be very action comedy, fun, sort of light hearted like Indiana Jones.

The violence isn’t super real. Indiana Jones would not kill somebody then cry about it. In Indiana Jones you just whack someone and they fall out of the frame. Never seen again. So the original tone was much more like that to be honest, and then I have to give credit to Alicia. In many ways this is Alicia’s movie. She was very empowered as a creative force in this movie. It’s obviously Roar’s vision of the movie that’s on screen, but it’s also Alicia’s vision. When she came on in the summer of 2016 how she wanted a more grounded, realistic tone to the movie. So while the plot stayed the same we ended up rewriting a huge amount of dialogue. The first draft, to answer your question of what got cut, that I really loved was the opening birthday party like her 20th or something. She was younger and more of a sassy character. Her sassiness got taken out quite a bit, but for good reason. It was not in keeping with Alicia’s vision. I think that it’s pretty cool that we’re now working in a moment where actresses are more empowered to have more of a say with the characters that they play. Alicia had a huge influence over reshaping the tone of this movie.

Here is a trailer for Tomb Raider:

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