Exploring a new genre

Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci,both experts in action films,have made People Like Us,a movie about relationships

When Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci were hired to rewrite the sequel to a yet-to-be-released reboot of the Spider-Man franchise,they were given one major directive. Kurtzman refers to it as the big idea.

Its one of those things that,well,we really have to plot around it, he said gingerly so as not to reveal any details. Reverse-engineering an entire movie from a single notion,often a preordained ending,is perhaps par for the course when making a sequel to a superhero movie that hasnt even come out yet. The reboot,The Amazing Spider-Man,will open on July 3; its sequel is planned for 2014. But its standard operating procedure for almost any big-budget action movie. They have a release date and a poster before we have a script,and its Go,go,go! he said.

As Hollywoods latest go-to reverse engineers,Kurtzman and Orci have written blockbusters like Transformers,Mission: Impossible III,Star Trek and next years still-untitled Star Trek sequel. They have recently signed a two-year writing and producing deal with Universal Pictures,for which they will reimagine two franchises,The Mummy and Van Helsing. And yet when these longtime partners,who met and started writing together their last year in high school,sat down eight years ago with a big idea of their own,they learned that not all the tenets of Hollywood blockbuster scriptwriting apply to every genre. We tried to attack this movie like an action movie,and it was a failure, Kurtzman said.

That script eventually became People Like Us. It represents both Kurtzmans directorial debut and a shift in his work with Orci. The family drama is loosely based on Kurtzmans own life. Chris Pine is Sam,an angry young man whose fathers death leads him to a half-sister he never knew he had Elizabeth Banks. As he deals with the emotional and financial legacy of his estranged father,a music business legend,he comes to find parts of himself he never knew he had. Much the same can be said of Kurtzman. At 30 he met his half-sister and half-brother,children of his fathers from a previous relationship. Unlike the movie characters,they had not been a secret,but,he said,meeting my half-sister was a life-changing experience. They both felt a sense of lost time,of the years that they could have known each other.

Kurtzman,now 38,also felt compelled for the first time in his life to write from personal experience. Orci said he was game. I said: Ill follow you wherever you want to go on this. If you never want to do this movie,its fine. And if you want to go full steam ahead,Ive got your back.