Burning up his keyboard

Many writers toil away their entire career hoping for a shot at writing a summer action blockbuster. This year, Simon Kinberg has three. With “XXX: State of the Union” (his first on-screen credit), “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” and “Fantastic Four” all hitting theaters within months of one another, and with the assignment to write the third “X-Men” film, Kinberg has made a leap to the top of the heap.

It is “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” that Kinberg is most excited about because it reflects more than five years of work. The film began as Kinberg’s thesis project in the Columbia University graduate film program and has shaped up as a much-gossiped-about, highly anticipated feature directed by Doug Liman and starring, as you may have heard, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

Though numerous other writers were called in during the long process of bringing “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” to the screen, their work was always filtered back through Kinberg, the project’s first and last writer. It is the film’s unusual tone that was both its main appeal and one of the initial stumbling blocks to the project. As Kinberg, 31, explains, “It’s an action film and a comedy and a romance and a satire. Studio executives would always say, ‘We don’t know what this is. Pick one of these and write that.’

“ ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’ is extremely personal to me. Literally there are lines these characters say to each other that I have said to girlfriends, or lines my wife says to me still. There are scenes that make my wife cringe because they are lifted directly out of our real life. As a screenwriter, as much as you rely on comic books or music videos, if you don’t invest something emotional into a screenplay, it’s nothing but a video game.”

-- Mark Olsen