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.
We're about to shoot an episode on Air Force One, for instance, and we're going to take liberties, small liberties, with Air Force One, as we take small liberties with our White House set.
Our responsibility is to captivate you for however long we've asked for your attention. That said, there is tremendous drama to be gotten from the great, what you would say, heavy issues.
There really isn't a story that you can't tell inside of it. It's very much a clearinghouse for anything that goes on in the world. So you're not at all limited.
There are some screw-ups headed your way. I wish I could tell you that there was a trick to avoiding the screw-ups... but they're coming for ya. It's a combination of life being unpredictable, and you being super dumb.
Don't ever forget that a small group of thoughtful people can change the world, it's the only thing that ever has.
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.
Believe me, for a 28-year-old writer, getting a check for $200,000 was a big deal indeed,