Free-form additions kept 'Silver Linings' script swelling

By Glenn Whipp

Dec. 6, 2012 12 AM PT

When “Silver Linings Playbook” began filming, the script clocked in at 110 pages, which made it barely manageable for the movie’s scant 33-day shoot. But then writer-director David O. Russell and his actors worked on some things while rehearsing the film that Russell then incorporated into the script. And, throughout the shoot, they kept discovering things. So many things that when Russell tells Cooper in this excerpt from the Envelope Screening Series that the final script eventually ballooned to 154 pages, the actor can respond in only one possible fashion.

“Oh, my gosh!” Cooper says. “Oh, wow!”

“We were in denial of it the whole time,” Russell says. “Because I think if the production found out, they would have had us arrested. They would have said, ‘You can’t shoot that many pages!’ In the end, we were doing like eight to 10 pages a day. Usually you’re lucky if you do three.”

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