Lawrence Kasdan
Lawrence Kasdan
Lawrence Edward Kasdanis an American screenwriter, director and producer. He is best known as co-writer of the films The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Return of the Jedi. Kasdan co-wrote the Star Wars sequel trilogy film Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and will co-write the series' Han Solo spin-off film...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionFilm Producer
Date of Birth14 January 1949
CityMiami, FL
CountryUnited States of America
I didn't really want to do another sequel. I go to those movies, and I just sort of enjoy them like a viewer.
I really liked Carrie a lot. That was one of Brian De Palma's best movies.
The movies that made me want to make movies were action movies, and thrillers, and Kurosawa films, you know, where you have an opportunity every day to shoot it in an unusual way. I was looking for something like that.
It's hard enough to get any movie made, and when you take on these tough genres - and I've done it a couple times - it just makes the whole struggle more.
The kind of pace that you want to use in a Western - just to acknowledge the land in the distance that everyone has to travel, and the way things develop sort of slowly - it's almost the antithetical of what's currently going on in the movies, you know.
It's against my programming to impersonate a deity.
Any story that Billy Wilder told, you can tell in a Western.
I mean, the trouble with some of the kind of relationship movies I've done, is there's only so many ways you can shoot a conversation. I was really tired of talking heads.
If your work is going to draw from life, you'd better work very hard to keep up with reality.
I haven't seen Clones, which has been during this period when I haven't seen much of anything, but I did see Phantom Menace, and see my feelings about it - see, first of all, I think that when you make a lot of movies, your attitude about the movies changes.
I want everything I do to have humor in it, because it seems to me that all of life has that.
I loved Alien, and I loved Carrie, and I loved The Exorcist - those were big movies for me. They were just brilliantly done, and unusual, and they all took horror to some new place.
That was certainly true the first time, when I did Body Heat, the first movie that I directed. I was looking for a vessel to tell a certain kind of story, and I was a huge fan of Film Noir, and what I liked about it was that it was so extreme in style.
And you know, when you take on something like this, you read a book like this, you know that it's going to be an adventure. That's part of what draws you to it.