Stephen Gaghan
Stephen Gaghan
Stephen Gaghanis an American screenwriter and director. He is noted for writing the screenplay for Steven Soderbergh's film Traffic, based on a Channel 4 series, for which he won the Academy Award, as well as Syriana which he wrote and directed...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth6 May 1965
CityLouisville, KY
CountryUnited States of America
believe bending cross feeling good inside kids life line moment ourselves people point quite rules tried
And they may even believe it most of the time, ... But I do think there's a point that we all have a feeling inside of us that we know - I mean, most people know - when you're just bending the rules a little bit, or you just cross the line a little bit, or you're doing something that doesn't feel quite right. In that moment you tell yourself, 'It's for my family, it's so that I can be set for life so my kids can go to the good colleges.' You give yourself an out, and it's that little out that we give ourselves that I think that I tried to get in the film.
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See No Evil. We had support in the intelligence sectors.
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It tackles, hopefully in an interesting way, things that are going on right now. We're talking about oil and oil politics, about the war on terror and about how families are adapting
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It's remarkable. The guy I started with in the end was the only person that I thought actually had a sort of selfless motivation.
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What I really got from Bob was this unbelievable sadness. He really did know how the world worked, and he really did seem like a wandering guy without a country, like an exile. And it was sad.
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It's tricky to ask a filmmaker to explain his own work; usually we're the least qualified to make sense of what we've done, unfortunately, because of the tunnel vision required to create anything over four years.
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I remember, when I was writing 'Traffic,' talking to top federal drug-enforcement officials and having them say they read it and found it very good and believable, except the scene where the girl describes her resume.
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I can't separate the process of writing from the visual process. I'm speaking only for myself here, but I'm a highly visual writer. In my imagination, when I'm thinking of a scene, I think of every last detail of it: The space, the color palette, the blocking of the actors, the placement of the camera.
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I know Charlie Kaufman really well, for instance. Charlie Kaufman starts a story, and he has no freaking idea where he's going. None. Zero. And he doesn't want to know, because there's a little bit of death in that.
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When I was seven and told my mom, 'I'm gonna be a writer,' she said, 'Oh, that's a terrible idea. You'll live in misery and die teaching other people's children badly.' My parents wanted the safer path for me, and I think they failed miserably achieving that.
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My father's father wrote for a Philadelphia newspaper and aspired to be a playwright. We had in our house a couple of crazy unproduced plays that he had written. For the one creative writing class I took in my life, I didn't do any writing - I decided that I would plagiarize his terrible play to not fail the class.
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At the beginning, everything's possible and everybody gets equal time, all the characters, all the ideas. You don't know who's going to be the main characters; they're all fighting it out. It's like kind of the best time in a way.
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Life serves up satire. Unfortunately. Or fortunately. I don't know. You have to reel it in to drama.
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Starting in '98 when I was researching 'Traffic,' I got to meet really serious people in Washington, which for a screenwriter was kind of a great gift. And I really valued these guys; I stayed in touch with them, and I find their point-of-view quite interesting.