In an interview with the Script Apart podcast, Sacha Gervasi describes how he used real-life travel experience to create the characters in his script for The Terminal. “There was a guy at JFK who would sit there in a hat and glasses—he was well-dressed. He would spend all day sketching and I’d see him in the same seated area every time,” Gervasi says. “I was like, ‘Who is this guy?’ It turns out he had been working at an advertising agency on Madison Avenue and had been fired six months before, and had not been able to tell his wife he’d lost his job. So he’d come to the terminal and sketch people.”
