Aaron Sorkin
Aaron Sorkin
Aaron Benjamin Sorkin is an American screenwriter, producer, and playwright. His works include the Broadway plays A Few Good Men and The Farnsworth Invention; the television series Sports Night, The West Wing, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and The Newsroom; and the films A Few Good Men, The American President, Charlie Wilson's War, The Social Network, Moneyball, and Steve Jobs...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth9 June 1961
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
As an audience member, I like the sound of something that's been written - I like it to sound written. And then, of course, you can't do it without the musicians who can play it.
The thing I know how to do most is write a play. I came up loving plays and learning about plays and writing plays. I actually feel like an outsider when I'm writing movies and television.
The stuff that I write doesn't work very well as background music. You have to watch it from beginning to end and pay attention as if you were watching a play.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be an actor. I was acting in all the school plays. I went to school for acting. I was really sure that that's what I wanted to do.
I'm a playwright. All I care about is the play being good.
Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep can play with the boys but there just aren't that many tour-de-force roles out there for women,
When you're writing a movie or a play and writing isn't going well, which is for me the normal condition - it's an exceptional day when suddenly I've got something and it's going well - you can call the studio or the producer or whoever is waiting for it and say, "I know I said I was going to have it in by the end of the summer.
I send them a lot of 'West Wing' hats, and they send me a lot of White House T-shirts and that kind of thing,
Believe me, for a 28-year-old writer, getting a check for $200,000 was a big deal indeed,
Well, what a show like this will do that conventional news reporting can't, is, we can show you the two minutes before and after what you see on CNN.
John was an uncommonly good man, an exceptional role model and a brilliant actor.
The problem with getting actors of this caliber is that if the show doesn't work, Tommy and I can be pretty sure it was our fault.
I can justify those two things by simply saying, when that stops happening, when we lose our credibility, the show isn't as good.
The play was written before 9/11 and July 7 and Abu Ghraib and a lot of things that have informed how we feel about the military, but I think it is going to resonate.