Screenwriter Clark Gregg Looks Back on WHAT LIES BENEATH for 20th Anniversary
Mike Sprague
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Clark Gregg is best known for playing Agent Phil Coulson in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But did you know he wrote Robert Zemeckis’ fright flick What Lies Beneath with Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford
Gregg tells ComicBook.com: “I started writing, ’cause I needed to be busy. And I wrote a couple of indie scripts and one of them got the attention of a really amazing person who’s become very successful, Nina Jacobson, who was a young executive at DreamWorks. And she said, ‘You know, we have this ghost idea. It’s a couple of sentences and there were some rumors that Steven Spielberg had been in this idea, possibly.'”
Gregg continued: “We talked about it for a while and they sent me off and I wrote a script, and the first draft turned out okay. And I guess DreamWorks had a deal with Rob Zemeckis and weirdly, I guess, he walked into their offices a few days after I turned in this first draft and said, ‘You know, what I really wanna do is kind of a Hitchcock, Hitchcock-ian ghost thing.’ And they were like, ‘Okay, that’s weird.’
He adds: “[Zemeckis] kept me around all the way through and taught me a million things … It was, it was ridiculous. Every step of it, I just was like living in a tiny guest house in Venice, going, ‘Oh, for real?’“
Finally, he admits: “I have to admit, for no reason that makes any sense, I have never watched What Lies Beneath since the premiere. And actually, I think I’m gonna watch it for the anniversary. It’s hard to go back and watch things you’ve already made. You can’t fix anything you wrote.”
What do you think of What Lies Beneath? Let us know what you think in the comments below or on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram!
It’s currently streaming on Amazon Prime.
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