Going from book to blockbuster

Writers don't usually receive such name recognition. In Hollywood times past they were usually placed some way below caterers. Hence the ancient joke about the ambitious starlet who was so stupid she slept with the writer.

Zaillian, as Craig's singling out of him suggests, is no ordinary screenwriter. With credits including Schindler's List, for which he won an Oscar, Awakenings, Moneyball and Gangs of New York, Mr Z is on the A-list of screenwriters. The twist in this tale is that he stumbled into it after beginning his career as a film editor.

"I was perfectly happy being an editor," says the 58-year-old, smiling, in a remark sure to have struggling screenwriters everywhere chewing their MacBooks in frustration.

Though Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo hails from Sweden, Zaillian was on familiar territory. As in The Falcon and the Snowman (Sean Penn and Timothy Hutton as Americans selling secrets to the USSR), and American Gangster (Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe as drug lord and cop), Tattoo is a two-hander, in this case between cyberpunk Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) and journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Craig).

"It was like these two characters were two halves of a whole," says Zaillian. "What was so brilliant about what Stieg Larsson did is he has a female character with masculine traits, and a male character with more feminine traits. Combined, that's like one great film noir character."

Regardless of whether a book is a blockbuster or something less well known, he approaches the job in the same way. "I'm reading [the book] in two ways. One, do I get it, do I understand it. Two, do I think what I do would be good for it."

It's only after he begins to write the script that he starts to think in pictures, all the while knowing that what he sees is not necessarily what will end up on screen. Ultimately the visuals are the director's job. "I'm one of those writers that doesn't hang around on the set. I really don't know what they're doing."

As an executive producer on Tattoo he did see the rushes, but the finished film was still a surprise. Particularly gratifying was that a lot of little touches, the kind of things that frequently get cut once the budget starts disappearing, had been kept in.

"David shot absolutely everything and I think those things added up. I really appreciated that. He's very precise about how he shoots something, and like all good directors everything has a good visual idea to it going in. It's not like he just sets up a camera and hopes for the best. He's got a plan."

Part of the craft of screenwriting, it emerges, is to have a plan too. If there's one thing Zaillian knows from decades of doing the job it is that it is up to him to trim the fat off his work.

"I shouldn't hope that someone else is going to do that in the proper way. I shouldn't give them more than is necessary and hope they are going to know how to cut it." He learned that from his first film, The Falcon and the Snowman. "Certain connective tissue had to come out of it and that hurt."

The Falcon and the Snowman came along when Zaillian was 32. After studying cinema at San Francisco State University he moved to Los Angeles and found a job as an apprentice film editor. Meanwhile, he had started to write his own scripts, hoping to make indie films.

"I ended up selling one of them and that changed my life. People started thinking of me as a writer after that but that really wasn't my intention, I kind of stumbled into it. I was perfectly happy being an editor."

Zaillian is also a director, having helmed All the King's Men, A Civil Action and Searching for Bobby Fischer. He still has a soft spot for editing though, and thinks it made him a better writer.

"I still love that part of the process. The directing part is kind of torture for me, the writing part I'm comfortable with and the editing part. It's shooting that scares me to death. Still." Even on that front, he can see an upside. "The easy part about [directing] is that it is going to get done. There are so many people involved. It's a train on a track and it's going to keep going, unlike writing. With writing it's just you and there's nobody going to push it along."

Which brings us to Schindler's List. For a long time, Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark, which told the true story of the German industrialist who helped to save more than a thousand Jews from the camps, looked like a book that was going to be too difficult to turn into a film.

"When I started on that it was considered a troubled project. It had been around for 10 years, other writers had been involved with it and tried to do it," says Zaillian. When he took it on, Martin Scorsese was in line to direct. It was not, at that time, a high profile project, and that meant less pressure on Zaillian.

"I approached it the same way I do anything, I just wanted to do the best job I could with it. The fact it became more than that was great but I'm glad I didn't know that ahead of time, I would have been more self-conscious working on it."

Zaillian had been through a few drafts with Scorsese. When Spielberg felt ready to take on the project – it had been offered to him originally – more drafts were written but the spine of the script remained. The best way to tell the story, Zaillian reckoned correctly, would be through Schindler's eyes. Everything else that was happening, the full horror of those times, would be occurring around that.

"That was the stumbling block of a lot of people who had approached it, they tried to do everything. I tried to narrow it strictly to Schindler and what he was trying to accomplish, and we would get enough of what was going on in the larger story by telling that story. It kept it on a human, smaller scale. That was the brilliance of the book."

The film won seven Academy Awards, including best screenplay for Zaillian. That must have changed his life, I suggest. "They'll put it in the obituary. I guess that's the main thing," he laughs. "It doesn't really affect what I do on a daily basis. I'm sure it opened up a lot of doors for me and that's great. But when I go to work every day I still have the same anxieties and the same agony of wondering if I can get through a script. That part doesn't change."

From that, those struggling screenwriters can at least take heart.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo opens on Boxing Day.