When Sony began fast-tracking development of The Quick and the Dead, the studio commissioned a series of rewrites from Moore. The writer was eventually dismissed and replaced with John Sayles, who, according to Moore, was chosen because the studio did not like the semi-serious tone and instructed him toward “making more of an American Old West film”. Moore was rehired and filming was to begin in three weeks because Sayles’s script was approaching a 2½-hour runtime. When rewriting the shooting script, Moore omitted Sayles’s work without Sony noticing. A week before shooting, Sony considered the script good enough to shoot; Moore described the rewrites as “a completely f–king pointless exercise”