James Gunn
James Gunn
James Gunn is an American screenwriter, director, producer, novelist, actor, and musician. He started his career as a screenwriter in the late 1990s, writing the scripts for Tromeo and Juliet, Scooby-Dooand its sequel Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, and the 2004 version of Dawn of the Dead. He then started working also as a director, starting with Slither. He subsequently wrote and directed the web series James Gunn's PG Porn, the superhero films Superand Guardians of the Galaxyand its sequel...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth5 August 1970
CitySt. Louis, MO
CountryUnited States of America
I really like people who can do both drama and comedy and not some like middle of the road do both drama and comedy. I'm not talking about some guy who does these bland dramedies all the time. I'm talking about people that have done heavy drama and who have done heavy comedy.
Цhat is my intention being a filmmaker? To make as much money as possible, or get as much attention as possible? It's not really either of those things. Now I can tell the stories that I want to tell.
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with different planets in the solar system, and I used to create, for every single planet, a different alien race with a certain kind of pet, a certain kind of house, a certain kind of water system, and everything.
We live in a world where everybody's supposed to be cool and act tough and put up fronts, and everybody is so cynical.
My brain has always been wired in such a way that I'd rather communicate to a smaller audience who really get turned on by what I do than meet a wider audience and give them milk.
I always like to think that I make movies that are like Nirvana songs. They have a slow verse and then they pop into high gear and then they go back into slow and then they pop into high gear again.
[T]he one indispensable ingredient of science fiction [is] a belief in a world being changed by man's intellect, a conviction that what was being written could really happen.
I don't really think in terms of competing with myself.
I don't know if there is any one secret to successful writing, but one important step is to move beyond imitation and discover what you can write that no one else can - that is, find out who you are and write that in an appropriate narrative and style.
It's definitely not the character who it is in the comics, I'll say that much.
Most of the complexity of the stories has developed as the stories came along (and may be a product of the principle that "nothing is what it seems"). I did start with some essential ambiguousness in the aliens' motivation and the questions this raises in human minds, which I consider to have been disregarded in Contact (novel and film). That, in part, may be what has delayed the writing of the fifth and sixth novelettes in the series.
When people go to the theater, people say they want something different, but what they really want is something the same with slight permutations. To really not know what is going to happen next is a hard thing.
God giving man life and taking it away is not nearly so bad as God taking away childhood and giving him life.
Thinking that everything is going to come together in a perfect way is not necessarily the way it's going to happen.