Screenwriter Wrote ‘Time Traveler’s Wife’ With Brad Pitt & Jennifer Aniston In Mind

This weekend, the romantic sci-fi drama, “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” debuts in theaters starring “The Notebook’s” Rachel McAdams and “Star Trek’s” Eric Bana. But according to the screenwriter of the film, Bruce Joel Rubin, he wrote the film’s leads – the time-hopping Henry, and his wife, Clare, with a former famous couple in mind – Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston.

Plan B, a production company the one-time couple owned (Jennifer left the company in 2006 to start Echo Films), originally optioned Audrey Niffenegger’s book for the big screen in 2003. Rubin was tapped to write the screenplay and he recently revealed to reporters that he wrote the dialogue by taking inspiration from Brad and Jennifer.

“I saw them as Henry and Clare. I just did,” Rubin told reporters at the junket for “The Time Traveler’s Wife’” recently, CinemaBlend reported. “They just seemed like a perfect version of Henry and Clare.”

Rubin said when he started writing the script – about a man who has a genetic disorder that causes him to time travel when he’s stressed – Brad and Jennifer seemed perfect for  Henry and Clare.

“I just found them equally attractive, equally competing in terms of the Hollywood sort of arena at that moment in time,” he said. “They were as good a couple as you could find and I thought that I would’ve loved to have seen them together in a movie.”

While the two never starred in the movie (they divorced in 2005 after almost five years of marriage) Brad, who still owns Plan B, was one of several executive producers on the film. He even turned up earlier this week at the film’s premiere in New York City.