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As compelling as any movie might be, it won’t fully succeed unless it sticks the landing. The Envelope spoke to the writers of five of this year’s Oscar-nominated screenplays to discover the secrets behind their note-perfect endings.
(Warning: Spoilers ahead for “Sentimental Value,” “Train Dreams,” “Bugonia,” “It Was Just an Accident” and “Blue Moon.”)
‘Sentimental Value’
This drama’s final sequence — in which we realize that Renate Reinsve’s Nora has reconciled with her estranged father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), when we see her on set starring in his new film — came to writers Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt by accident. In 2022, while reviewing behind-the-scenes footage from Trier’s 2011 movie “Oslo, August 31st,” they noticed how Trier was closely consulting with actor Anders Danielsen Lie after that film’s emotional finale.
“We watched the last take and how everyone reacted when that shot was finished. It was so moving,” recalls Vogt. “Joachim and Anders Danielsen Lie were just talking — and then the crew started putting away stuff. It was a beautiful moment. I said to Joachim, ‘Couldn’t that be our ending?’”
“Sentimental Value’s” final shot, which similarly shows Nora and Gustav conversing, neatly tied together the movie’s themes of family, fiction and forgiveness. As Trier explains, “[Gustav] just says, ‘Perfect.’ In art, it can all be perfect. There’s nothing more to say between them.”
‘Train Dreams’
Director and co-writer Clint Bentley filmed the ending of Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella, in which Joel Edgerton’s solitary Robert visits a carnival, encountering a strange wolf-boy. But as Bentley started assembling the picture, he realized that “Train Dreams” reached a more emotional crescendo earlier, when Robert goes up in a biplane, crucial memories suddenly flooding through him. “It was like, ‘Oh, the movie’s over,’” Bentley recalls thinking, moving the sequence to the end.
The biplane shoot almost didn’t happen. “On an indie film, it’s hard to get all the insurance and safety requirements and make sure you’re not putting people in danger. We had limited means and time. There was a certain point where I was like, ‘Do we just cut this and put our resources into other things?’ But there were members of the team who were like, ‘No, you can’t cut it — this sequence means so much.’”
Bentley laughs. “Thank God they talked me out of it. [I got] a lot of bang for something that was just going to be a short scene in the movie.”
‘Bugonia’
The 2003 South Korean film “Save the Green Planet!” ends with the aliens punishing the flawed human race by blowing up Earth. When writing his adaptation, Will Tracy went another direction.
“It seemed strange that this alien race, in order to solve what the human race has done to the planet, would essentially throw out the baby [with] the bathwater,” he says. “I had this idea: ‘What if humanity could be extinguished and the Earth would survive?’”
“Bugonia’s” darkly amusing final stretch shows humans around the world dead in the midst of coitus, getting married and other mundane activities. Because Yorgos Lanthimos’ movies often have a dim view of humanity, it’s tempting to see the ending as bleak. But Tracy insists, “We see it as strangely hopeful. What happens [in ‘Bugonia’] has not happened. It allows you to think about our relationship with each other and to our planet. That’s constructive more than hopeless: ‘Here’s a possible fate that we’d like to avoid.’”
‘It Was Just an Accident’
“When I was writing the script, I had the ending,” Jafar Panahi says through interpreter Sheida Dayani, “but I was still doubtful about the last 20 seconds.”
The finale of “It Was Just an Accident” is disturbingly inconclusive. Mechanic Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) returns to his shop after releasing the man, nicknamed Peg Leg (Ebrahim Azizi), who tortured him in prison. Then Vahid hears the telltale squeak of Peg Leg’s prosthetic leg. Is Vahid imagining it? Or is Peg Leg coming back for revenge? The image cuts to black.
“This is the shared experience of all political prisoners, whether they heard the voice of their interrogator or they imagined the voice,” says Panahi, who himself endured imprisonment by the Iranian regime. “It Was Just an Accident” hinges on that chilling squeaking, which Vahid notices at the start of the movie and then not again until the very end.
“It had to be a sound that would stay in the mind of the audience,” Panahi explains, noting he went through several different sound effects until landing on the right mechanical squeal. “After an hour and a half, when they heard it [again], they had to remember it — even without seeing the guy, they would remember what it was.”
‘Blue Moon’
Richard Linklater’s melancholy drama ends with indefatigable Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) closing out Sardi’s, delighting everyone with another colorful story, even though his world has come crashing down. Writer Robert Kaplow wanted to end the film on an upbeat note — he credits Hawke with a key suggestion during rehearsals.
“We were having lunch,” Kaplow recalls, “and he said, ‘What do you think of this? We’ll take that speech that you wrote about the original version of [the song] “Blue Moon”’ — it had been in the middle of the script, but we cut it to shorten the script — ‘and we bring that back? Hart starts telling that story, and then the camera starts moving away.’”
Kaplow instantly sparked to the idea. “Hart’s a guy that won’t stop talking,” he explains. “[In that final scene] he’s doing what he does, which is being funny and resilient and saying, ‘Despite everything that happened, I’m still the most entertaining guy in the room.’ I didn’t want to leave him alone with a shot glass at the bar.”
