The Burning Plain: The Shooting Script

by Guillermo Arriaga

The official screenplay book tie-in to the directorial debut by independent film favorite Guillermo Arriaga (screenwriter of Babel, 21 Grams, and Amores Perros), starring Charlize Theron and Kim Basinger.

From acclaimed screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga comes a multi-layered drama involving a mother (Kim Basinger) and daughter (Charlize Theron) who try to connect during the young woman's difficult childhood, with devastating effects for all of their loved ones.

The past and the present have a curious way of affecting each other as several people separated by time and space discover-Mariana, a 16-year-old girl trying to put together the shattered lives of her parents in a Mexican border town; Sylvia, a woman in Portland who must undertake an emotional odyssey to burnish a sin from her past; Gina and Nick, a couple who must deal with an intense and clandestine affair; and Maria, a young girl who helps her parents find redemption, forgiveness, and love. The five will discover that their actions may mean the difference between life and death as well as their own journeys into seeking redemption . . . and whether or not they will ever find it.

Filming of The Burning Plain began in New Mexico in November 2007, and the film premiered at the 2008 Venice Film Festival.

In addition to the complete screenplay, this Newmarket Shooting Script(r) book also includes an introduction by and Q&A with Arriaga, a color photo section, and the complete cast and crew credits.

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Guillermo Arriaga Jordán is a Mexican author, screenwriter, director and producer. He received the 2005 Cannes Film Festival Best Screenplay Award for The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.

Reviews

[Caterina]

Intense, indelible film* written and directed by Guillermo Arriaga, with deep sympathy for its characters -- their mystery and their wounds, inside and out. The title The Burning Plain -- El llano en llamas (the Plain in Flames) is a tribute to Mexican author Juan Rulfo's short story and story collection of the same title, but is not the same story. However, that story begins with an epigraph from a song lyric: “They’ve gone and killed the bitch / but the puppies still remain." In that story it was a political metaphor. This nonpolitical film opens with a scene of an isolated (and, I thought at first, abandoned) mobile home consumed by flames in a remote desert landscape. When three men in their late teens arrive in a pickup truck to investigate the charred ruins, one remarks: "This is where my dad and that f*king slut burned." The unfaithful father (Joaquim de Almeida) left a wife and two sons; his lover (Kim Basinger) left a husband and four children including a teenage daughter who becomes the story's central character -- played as a teenage girl by Jennifer Lawrence and as a woman near 30 by Charlize Theron. The story structure intertwines past and present, interweaving lives and generations.

I loved Guillermo Arriaga's earlier collaboration with Alejandro González Iñárritu: Amores Perros ("Love is a Bitch") and was impressed by The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. I wasn't aware that Arriaga was also a novelist, and hope someday I get a chance to explore more of his work -- and Juan Rulfo's stories.

*I did not read the shooting script, but watched the film and thought it was worth a report.