I just think that society these days gets its stories from multiple directions, in multiple ways at once, so I was trying to reflect some of that.ĬNN: Ophelia uses a lot of acronyms, almost talking in text-speak. Someone’s tweeting us, someone’s calling us, someone’s texting us, someone’s Skyping us. … Any given moment, we’ll have the television on, but we’ll also have our computers on. It’s constant and it’s in short, jagged bits. One thing I was trying to get at was the fractured nature of the way we receive information these days. If I heard it as poetry or saw it as a narrative, I wrote it that way. If any given scene I saw it more as a film at that moment, I wrote it in screenplay form. What was your philosophy with that?ĭon Winslow: I just wanted to write a book the way I heard it in my ears and saw it in my mind.

When Ben and Chon’s wealthy, slacker girlfriend O (short for Ophelia), is kidnapped by a Mexican drug cartel known for decapitating those who cross them, Ben’s nonviolent stance is called into question.ĬNN recently spoke with Winslow, who shares screenwriting credit for the film with Shane Salerno and director Stone, about adapting his work, how he crafted a story as violent and haze-filled as “Savages,” and the creation of the infamous O.ĬNN: In “Savages” you play with format a lot – you take some trajectories into writing it like a screenplay.

Something that potent presumably wouldn’t stay within the confines of Southern California for long, and Ben and Chon become so successful that the drug business south of the border takes notice. Winslow writes in his novel that the two developed a plant so dope it “could almost get up, walk around, find a lighter and fire itself up.”

The story follows two Laguna Beach-based best friends and entrepreneurial businessmen: Chon, a trained Navy SEAL and war vet, and Ben, an idealistic Berkeley grad with a brilliance for botany. In the trailer for Friday’s “Savages,” a potential moviegoer can glean that the film involves: 1) a kidnapping plot 2) marijuana and 3) a pair of successful pot growers, portrayed by Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Johnson, who share a girlfriend in Blake Lively’s “O.”īut what some watching may not know is that Oliver Stone’s latest is based on the acclaimed 2010 novel of the same name from writer Don Winslow.

Savages by Don Winslow