THE BOOK OF ELI - deleted scenes #1

In the process of writing a script and then turning that script into a movie, a LOT of things change along the way. The "Eli" folder on my computer holds almost 70 different drafts of the screenplay, some consisting of very minor changes, others more drastically revised. As I was digging through some of these old drafts recently I thought it might be interesting to post a couple of scenes that got cut during the development and production process to illustrate how and why things change.

This particular scene actually survived through all those different script drafts and was filmed, only to be cut during the editing process. The intention of the scene was to show that Carnegie's men were constantly on Eli and Solara's trail, but that Eli was doing what he could to slow them down (a necessary invention since Eli and Solara were on foot and Carnegie's team in vehicles).

But when the scene was filmed the directors felt that it simply didn't play as well on screen as they had hoped, which can happen for any number of reasons, and also that it maybe slowed down the pacing of the film during the third act in which things are usually expected to move at a more urgent pace. The deleted scene doesn't appear on any of the home video editions of the movie so it's interesting at least to see it in its written form. Click HERE to download/read it.

So this scene takes place in the silo where Eli and Solara hide out for the night. If you look at the movie and see the transition between the scene where Carnegie's men show up outside the silo and the next scene where Solara is following Eli and asking him about faith, this deleted scene was meant to go right between those two. And here's a still from that scene showing Gary Oldman at his demented best, which is probably all you will ever see of it!