Tony Gilroy Talks Unearthing His 'Beirut' Script From 1991 [Interview]

Sometimes a good thing will never die. That’s rarely a screenplay, the graveyard of unproduced scripts is an overfilled garbage dump that’s currently not taking any more bodies, but somehow against the odds, the international political thriller “Beirut” has come to life nearly three decades after it was born. Directed by veteran Brad Anderson (“The Machinist,” “The Wire,” “Fringe“), “Beirut” began as screenplay in 1991 penned by writer/director Tony Gilroy (the ‘Bourne‘ films, “Michael Clayton“) and is made in the vein of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” “A Most Wanted Man,” and “The Year of Living Dangerously” and John le Carré political potboilers. Starring Jon Hamm with Rosamund Pike, Dean Norris and Shea Whigham, “Beirut” centers on a U.S. diplomat (Hamm) who flees Lebanon in 1972 after a tragic incident at his home. Ten years later, broken and beaten down by life, he is called back to war-torn Beirut by CIA operatives pleading him negotiate for the life of a friend he left behind. Set in the middle of the Lebanese Civil War, Pike plays a CIA field agent working under at the American embassy tasked with keeping the alcoholic ex-diplomat alive and ensuring that the mission is a success.

Politically-charged, fraught with tension and the constant uncertainty of shifting geopolitical alliances, “Beirut” places a damaged soul within a damaged city where motives are shadowy, allegiances are circumspect and personal redemption feels like a fairy tale. It’s no surprise that “Beirut” was written in 1991, it’s an old-school espionage thriller with sensibilities of that time mixed in with ’70s political thriller vibes such as “The Day of The Jackal.” They essentially don’t make these kinds of movies anymore, but apparently, they still do. Premiering at Sundance earlier this year, on the eve of its North American release, we spoke to screenwriter Tony Gilroy who was shocked, but pleasantly surprised to hear his long-forgotten script, had been unearthed and resurrected.

The “Beirut” script is practically ancient.
Yeah, 1991. This was pretty shocking. Interscope had it. They were an enormous company in the nineties, just huge. I had different companies I worked for a while in the late ’80s and early ’90s and Interscope was one of them. Two of the producers, Mike Weber and Ted Field, dug it out of a drawer a couple years ago and they said, “If we go to Jon Hamm and Brad [Anderson] will you help us out?” I was like, “sure,” but I never thought it would happen, but they just kept going and here we are.

Unearthing a mid-range political drama from the 90s, the kind of movies that have shifted to TV, feels like a bit of a miracle right now. I’m a little surprised this movie was even made.
There’s a trajectory of momentum that things have and if they don’t achieve critical mass at a certain point, they disappear. And you think of all the amazing properties that are lying around that just couldn’t catch their moment or couldn’t find the right piece of casting at the moment they needed it. I think there’s a lot of potential things lying around that people haven’t fully developed, but it takes real determination to get them made. We couldn’t even find my contracts that’s how far back this goes. We couldn’t find the paperwork. [editor’s note: Gilroy had to be made a producer on the film to get any kind of credit or compensation since all the contracts had gone AWOL].

How much did the script from change? And for you, how different do you think the political climate is now?
Well, politically, the film takes place in 1982 and I wrote it in 1991. And the politics of it… my scholarship on this—and I had to research this twice— is really, really dead-on. I stand behind it. And in the intervening years, things that were seemingly radioactive to audiences politically, or the jury was still out or people were still arguing about some things in 1991 that are politically alive in the script, the verdict was in 20 years later on all those topics and there wasn’t much debate.

So it stalled.
A lot of people interested in the script at the time, and it really helped me out career-wise as a calling card, but in the intervening years, not only did the issues resolve, but it actually got more relevant in a way. Because it takes place in the winter of 1982 in Beirut and that moment was chosen because it was so potent and such an electric fulcrum kind of moment [two months before Israel invaded Lebanon]. Israel is going to invade a month or two after the movie ends, and Hezbollah is going to come in and all of a sudden, the story’s going to become about religion and not proxy wars, it’s really a last exit story. So, the movie has more political resonance now than it did then in a strange way.