Maleficent Screenwriter Linda Woolverton Discusses the Scene that Makes Her Cry

Posted on June 5, 2014

Maleficent, starring Angelina Jolie as the iconic villain, is a worldwide hit for Disney: it brought in $170.6 million during its opening weekend and is still going strong. Linda Woolverton (The Lion King, Alice in Wonderland) wrote the screenplay and told The Hollywood Reporter about the challenges of writing the script and how she cries every time she reads one special scene.

Woolverton says the film is based on the original Disney animated film, not on the original fairy tale, but she had researched the fairy tale which sparked her imagination. She explains, ..."I had done some research, and the biggest surprise is that she's a fairy, not a witch. I've always wanted to do a dark fairy story. Then I watched that scene where she curses the baby, and I'm thinking 'well if she's a fairy, where are her wings?' Suddenly it was "boom. Lightbulb. Oh! It's the wings!" Then I worked backward from there to create the Stefan relationship."

She says that in her mind the most significant scene in the movie is the kiss scene, without question. She says she cries every time she reads it, just like she did with the big scene in Homeward Bound. She explains, "You have to rewrite these things 100 times, and every single time I wrote it I could barely get through it. I did Homeward Bound, you know that dog movie? Every single time I wrote the moment over the hill when everyone comes back at the end, I would cry into my hand over the keyboard. The kiss scene was like that for me."

You can read the entire interview here There is a big spoiler if you haven't seen the film yet, so you've been warned.