John Logan
John Logan
falling love movies reason shakespeare writer
The reason that I'm a writer today is because of Shakespeare and falling in love with Shakespeare when I was 8. That was through the movies, actually - through Olivier's 'Hamlet.' That was the first thing that got me to fall in love with Shakespeare and movies and everything in one big preadolescent rush.
liked losing team watching
I liked watching their team play, ... I didn't like losing to them of course, but you always like watching a team like that play.
characters draw interested
I'm not interested in characters who aren't broken. I'm not interested in happy people. It just doesn't draw me as a writer.
biggest destiny god scene shaping sort
Oh, my God - I am really shaping the destiny of these characters. There's Patrick as Jean-Luc Picard, and he's now going to do a scene that I wrote. So that for me was the biggest sort of fan/professional synthesis.
adaptation opposed
Any adaptation - and I've done three in my career. I did 'Sweeney Todd' and 'Hugo' and 'Coriolanus.' It's important to find what makes it a movie as opposed to just a film presentation of a stage play.
clean
It was just a really nice, clean barrel,
earning money time
When I started earning money from screen-writing, for a long time my only indulgences were books.
movies
We wanted 'Hugo' to be a cornucopia of cinema, a celebration of everything we do in movies.
fragility man orphan
Everything about 'Hugo' to me is poignant, from the broken orphan to the old man losing his past to the fragility of film itself.
felt sort
'Coriolanus' has been around for 400 years, and it's going to be around for another 400 years, and nothing I can do is going to mess it up. So, going into it, I felt sort of very free to look at it as a filmmaker does.
frustrated understand until
Young screenwriters are always very frustrated when they talk to me. They say, 'How do we get to be a screenwriter?' I say, 'You know what you do? I'll tell you the secret, it's easy: Read 'Hamlet.' You know? Then read it again, and read it again, and read it until you understand it. Read 'King Lear,' and then read 'Othello.'
across area certainly class clearly cut damaged greater homes living odds poor racial storm suffering
The suffering from the storm certainly cut across racial and class lines. But the odds of living in a damaged area were clearly much greater for blacks, residents who rented their homes and poor people.
characters obviously ongoing
The themes, ideas and the characters from 'Skyfall' can obviously continue on, because it is a franchise, and it is an ongoing story.
director great hand star studio truism
Realistically, it's the great truism that screenwriters are fungible, that at the end of the day a studio is not going to want to fire a movie star. And they're really not going to want to fire a star director because the director has the hand on the tiller of a ship.