.and there aren't any big stars
that are going to be young people...
...we never thought of that at all.
Could you talk a little more specifically
aboutyour collaboration...
...and how you actually write together?
Yeah, we write together.
Wejustput ourselves in the office together
and we write together.
I think that the way I sort of describe it
is that wejust, basically...
...springboard ideas back and forth
and actscenes out together...
...and then if we come up with something good,
Bob writes it down.
He writes itin longhand.
We firststarted outlining it with index cards.
And a lot of times we'll think of a scene,
and we don't know where it goes.
For example...
...one of the firstscenes in this movie
was Marty Invents Rock 'n' Roll.
So we write that down on a card
and we pin it up on the wall...
...and you say to yourself,
"Okay, if Marty's going to invent rock 'n' roll...
"... we have to establish the fact
that he can play rock 'n' roll. "
So that automatically tells you
there has to be a scene...
...at the beginning of the movie
that has him, it turned out to be his audition...
...so thatyou could see
that he knows how to play it.
So, one scene then becomes two scenes.
And every time we come up with an idea....
He's gonna invent the skateboard.
So we have a card thatsays
Skateboard Chase...
...and that means we have to see him
on a skateboard somewhere...
...in the beginning of the movie.
So, again, one scene then becomes two scenes.
And pretty soon we have a bunch of cards
up on the board...
...and a lot of times there'll be a lot
ofspace in between them, and we'll say:
"How do we get from this scene here
to thatscene over there?"
And we'll start kind of focusing
on what would have to happen.
We always use pushpins on those cards
because we're always moving them around.
Sometimes we'll say:
"We can't have thatscene here.
It's gotta come two scenes later. "
And eventually we have a full outline.
And then we start really talking about...
...each scene, and the dialogue,
and the physical action that takes place.
It might be noteworthy....
I remember, to say a few things about...
...my recollection about writing the screenplay,
which was, it took years.
It took us years. I mean, this was....
I think it took us atleast three years to write this.
-Is that about right?
-No.
Maybe it feltlike three years.
Well, from when we finally made the movie it was.
But we started writing in....
I think it was around September of 1980,
after Used Cars came out.
And the first draft has a February '81 date on it.
And then we spent two months
doing a re-write on that.
And that was the draft we took everywhere
in town and everybody passed on it.
I remember, one of the things
that we suffered over...
...one of the big breakthroughs was the....
We didn't know how to get Marty
out of the Oedipal situation with his mother.
I remember that.
I think that took us months to figure that one out.
And we didn't know how we got....
We knew we had this greatstory
that got us to this place.
And then we didn't know what to do.
And I remember we were stuck on the fact...
...that the Marty character had to do something.
We couldn't figure out
what he could possibly do.
And then the big breakthrough came
when we decided that....
And my favorite line that we wrote
in the entire movie is when she says:
"It's like I'm kissing my brother. "
Thatjustsolved that whole problem.
We were able to actually make thatstory work.
We struggled over that for a really long time.
And I think the other big breakthrough
which made the movie...
...just charged the screenplay,
was when we came up with the idea...
...of making the time machine mobile.
Our first drafts were, the time machine
was this machine that was this big...
It was a chamber.
It was in Doc's lab and...
...if he had to go anywhere,
he had to putitin the back of a pickup truck.
In fact, in that early draft,