Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise in Lions for Lambs Courtesy of United Artists

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Matthew Michael Carnahan became a screenwriter out of anger. The political science major and former employee of the Advisory Board Company (a research firm dedicated to the healthcare industry) decided on September 11, 2001, that he needed to vent. So he stepped off his original career path and penned a script called Soldier's Field, which caught the eye of actor and director Peter Berg (who was appearing in the film Smokin' Aces, directed by Matthew's brother Joe). Berg tapped Carnahan to pour his post 9/11-frustration into The Kingdom. The rookie screenwriter then found some interest in a 90-page stage play he was writing called Lions for Lambs, in which Carnahan once again targeted the Iraq war and its tangled political web. Enter director (and star) Robert Redford and heavy-hitter actors Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise, and a little over a month after The Kingdom made its theatrical debut, Carnahan once again finds his words stirring up controversy.

The affable writer took a break from putting together his next project — he and brother Joe are adapting L.A. Confidential author James Ellroy's White Jazz, a film that has, in recent weeks, suffered the sudden and surprising loss of its leading man George Clooney — to talk about how this whirlwind career got started and where he thinks it might be going.

That Lions for Lambs started out as a play seems obvious, since so much of what propels the film is groups of people in rooms talking.
My whole ambition, when I started writing it — I was living in Chicago — was that I wanted to take it to the Steppenwolf Theater, which is one of my all-time favorites, and get it produced there. And then the more I started writing the military scenes, the helicopter scene in particular, I didn't think there was a stage in existence that could do justice to that.

Were you concerned it would end up looking like one of the plays in Wes Anderson's Rushmore, with toy helicopters flying around?
[Laughs] Exactly. But it probably wouldn't have looked that good!

How much did the script change once Robert Redford came onboard? Or did it change at all?
Absolutely, it did, but there were no wholesale changes. It was more, "Let's just trim the fat." Because when you're writing a stage play, for a writer, you can spread your wings and use every 10-cent word that comes to mind. It was more about let's get it down to brass tacks as much as we can, and really figure out what each scene means relative to its own storyline, and how it's going to inform what comes next. That was the biggest process, and obviously that's kind of like death by a thousand cuts. It's trying to figure out if it's a five-line bit of dialogue, can it be three? That was really the majority of the changes. And then when Tom and Meryl came on, they had their own notes, which were fantastic. Voluminous, but fantastic. And those characters changed where I felt those notes really hit the mark.

Was there anything specific in their notes that changed the way you saw a character?
They kind of threw themselves into the character the way that I wrote them, truly. The most impressive thing, and it's not very big in the grand scheme of things, was — well, there's the line where [Streep's and Cruise's characters are] kind of debating General Abrams in Vietnam, and that was originally written, in my script, as General Westmoreland. And Tom said to me, "Actually, Matt, this would have been General Abrams, not Westmoreland, he was gone by that time." Talk about dodging a bullet! We would have been killed for that. Absolutely, it's the most overused term but [a movie] truly is a collaborative effort. I liken it to "best ball" in golf — you just use everybody's best swings and hope you put something up that people will respond to.