Matthew Robinson on The Invention Of Lying

For the Writers Guild of America West, Dylan Callaghan talks to Matthew Robinson about how he came to co-write The Invention Of Lying with Ricky Gervais.

So, to go back in time, a year before your career nadir, you’d written what was essentially a sketch?

Yes, it was an eight-page sketch of two people who had to tell the truth on a date and one of them was a loser. That was all there was to it. And the sketch is unchanged in the movie.

When you ultimately revisited it, was it out of desperation?

Yeah, I returned to my vault of ideas and it was the one I was most excited about. I let it marinate in my head for a few days and came up with a few more scenes, and I came up with the idea that, what if that loser on the date could totally flip it and come back lying?

From that point you were off and running?

Yeah, and the scenes I started thinking up sort of gave me the world. It was literally the easiest thing I’d ever written. It just sort of spilled out.

So after you got a few more scenes and the world you wanted this to take place in, do you then go to an outline?

No, I rarely outline. I just wrote. I just logically tracked each moment to each moment and fluidly went through it organically.