MakingOf talks to Evan Goldberg inside The Green Hornet's Black Beauty car.

(MakingOf) Tell us, because we talked to Seth earlier, about how you got involved in the process.  I want to hear your perspective on writing the screenplay with Seth.

(Evan Golderg) Seth fought me every inch of the way, but I made him see the light.  But no uh, Neal Moritz and his cohort Orimar kjhlkjhlkjh came up with the idea that maybe Seth and I would be the right guys to do this, and they brought the project to us.  And we thought it was the best idea in the world because everyone knows there's a green hornet character, everyone knows he drives a cool car and he has a martial arts sidekick.  But beyond that people didn't know a lot, so that kind of gave us a lot to play with without offending the fans, in our opinion, I hope not.  It seems like we had a lot of room to expand on what was without offending what is.

(MO) Paint a picture for us of life on set.  What did it look like?  Pick a scene, tell us a little bit about it...

(EG) I mean, this movie was a collaboration of numerous different camps that in no way were similar.  We have the studio, which is perceived how it is, you know, like they've gotta look out for the big picture and we've gotta make this a big movie.  Then we have Neal Moritz who does The Fast And The Furious...cars with big guns and coolness.  And then we have me and Seth who are like nerdy, dialogue, like emotion driven, and then you've got Michel Gondry who's like weird special effects and creative concepts.  And so it was a constant argument that always ended with. 'Okay so we all agree, great idea.'  And it was just never ending arguments that would always end happily with a 'Okay so we're going to do that.'  But it was a trial by fire.  You wanted your idea to win, you had to fight for it.  And because of that the best idea always pretty much came out on top. 

(MO) And that was Michel at the end of the day saying. 'Okay we've had our debate, this is what we're doing...'

(EG) Ehhh...or Neal, or me, or Seth.  It was a real commune.  Michel was the director for sure, but sometimes he would say, 'I disagree,' and we would say, 'Well we disagree with you.'  But there was never really even one moment where we had to agree to disagree.  We always got there eventually.

(MO) And were there any script rewrites?

(EG) According to my calculations Sony owes me 40 million dollars on rewrites on this movie.  We rewrote the movies like 15 times, I don't even know.  We just jept doing it again and again and again and again.  And rightfully so, the studio said this is a gigantic movie.  The likes of which Seth and I have never been partied to, and it's going to require a lot of rewriting.  And so unlike our other movies where we would just write it and be like, 'What do you guys think?' we would write for two weeks, we would do notes with the studio, and then we would go back writing, we would do notes with Neal, then we would do notes with Michel, then we would do notes with all in the room.  So it's the same point I keep stressing, just a massive collaboration. 

(MO) And were you involved in the process of bringing Michel on board?

(EG) Yeah, Seth and I really wanted him to be on board.  Strangely Michel is known for his artsy, creative, and I would say emotionally open kind of cinema.  He came in with a fight sample, and that's why we hired him.  He came in with the coolest sample of two guys fighting that I've seen in years.  And a lot of people don't know it but Michel kind of invented "bullet time" from The Matrix.  He made a Smirnoff commercial many many many years ago where a bullet goes traveling and a guy goes yuurrnnn and like avoids it, and The Matrix kind of derived a lot from that.  So he kind of brought a new version of a Matrix style kind of fighting to The Green Hornet, and the fight samples won the day for him.

(MO) And so he put together a fight sample for The Green Hornet...

(EG) Him and his right-hand man Rafi, they went and spent two days, got two stunt men, got two cameras and shot a really good little fight thing and you know they showed it to the studio and they showed it to me and Seth and you know, we said to them 'Listen, any doubts you have of this guy, look at the fighting.  He can do action.'