I can’t express how funny I find the fact that upon Niles first interactions with the other immortals she finds them in absolute chaos. Like she has to be so exhausted and anxious. Yet, she walks in to find these ancient warriors giving each other wedgies.
Okay, now that I’ve had some moments to screech over the screenplay and read it over twice...
I have some thoughts™️ about Andy/Booker. A lot of thoughts, even. So, for the 0.0000001% of people who wanted a detailed exploration of the good and the bad of their relationship bordering on a ship manifesto, here it is.
In fact, I’ve always had some thoughts about Andy/Booker, because even though it was always a rarepair ship (and I’m actually glad about that, at some level, because maybe if it had been canon, it might have taken some of the wind out of the sails of Andy/Quynh and Booker/Nile both of which I ship), I got the strongest of vibes from them in the film—the intensity of how they look at each other, both when Andy is trying to wake him up in Goussainville, and when he realises that she’s not healing, is off the charts.
I had even more thoughts after that one interview where Matthias suggested that Andy and Booker had hooked up back in the day, and oh boy oh boy do I have thoughts after reading that screenplay.
First of all, let’s look at the facts of what’s in the screenplay:
The first we see of them together is Booker playfully teasing Andy with his motorcycle and her having brought him an expensive and thoughtful gift after vacation. That part is in the final film (though the specific book she gives him changes), but the second half of the scene isn’t—when Booker can’t help but ask if she’s met anyone special and, “both truthful and kind,” she replies that she hasn’t and asks him if he has met anyone.
The “truthful and kind” could refer to her entire reply, but I kind of think that the “truthful” refers to the first part—no, she hasn’t met anyone that she would consider special—while the “kind” part is that she goes ahead and asks him if he’s met someone, even though both of them already know that that’s, as he says, “unlikely”.
Then, the screenplay implies that Nicky and Joe are sharing one room in the hotel in Marrakech and Booker and Andy are sharing another.
When they talk in Goussainville about how they might not live forever, “an intense moment” passes between Booker & Andy according to the script—something which I think makes a lot of sense given their convo right after Booker betrays Andy.
The desperation when Andy is trying to wake him up in Goussainville is just as strong in the script as it is in the film.
In the script, it takes Nile literally one day of interacting with Booker and Andy to ask him if he’s in love with her. Think about that for a second—whatever vibes they have going on are so strong that in less than a day, in the middle of coming to terms with her immortality, Nile is still like....”you’re definitely into her, no?”
He doesn’t answer the question, of course, which—well, his lack of answer kind of answers the question. There’s no doubt in my mind that the way the original script was written, Booker is in love with Andy.
The question, to me, is more how she feels about him. And...I don’t know.
There’s a lot of water under that bridge, clearly. And she trusts him, more than anything—right before he betrays her, she says “You and me, Book. Now and always.”
They may not be together in a romantic sense, but she has clearly come to think of him as a partner—he’s the one she calls when she finds Nile and jokes about how she has potential, he’s the one she trusts to have her back, now and always. (That might be different if Quynh were around, but...)
The scene, the betrayal scene. This was the scene that first made me think they had had a history together, honestly. They are both gutted about what happened and it seems like a horrible misunderstanding where he was doing what he thought she wanted, while she is devastated that he somehow misunderstood what she wanted so badly.
This is even clearer in the script, where there are a couple of lines that are missing from the final film—Booker’s desperate attempts to confirm that she had wanted to have “real lives” as mortals, and her admission that “maybe I did”. But not like this, of course—he’s tried so hard to do what she wanted, and yet he’s missed the mark.
Booker then keeps trying to apologise to Andy (more than in the movie) and is described as “miserable” while she’s not healing.
She, of course, is the one who’s sent to tell him about his sentence; she’s the one who—as the script puts it, “needs a second” to collect herself before she can break the bad news, and then there’s the “have a little faith, Book” line that closes their on-screen relationship.
this is fascinating, they really intended for merrick to be a villain you could empathise with as well... like idk if they ended up scrapping that on purpose or if they just missed the mark by a mile but that’s so interesting
