John Logan on Skyfall, Rango, and the Secret of Successful Screenwriting

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Ryan Gosling and Jessica Chastain have each had a well-documented great year, each no fewer than three well-received films — and all their corresponding buzz — arriving in theaters in 2011. Investigate slightly below the radar, however, and you’ll find screenwriter John Logan faring just as well — if not better.

The busy scribe has his name on a trifecta of acclaimed work this year, once again positioning the two-time Oscar nominee (for Gladiator and The Aviator) in the awards race for both original (Rango) and adapted (Hugo, Coriolanus) screenplay prizes. The fall whirlwind complements his work on Skyfall, the new James Bond film on which Logan has been working for the last year. Heady times! Logan recently talked them over with Movieline.

Congrats on the success this year! Considering how busy you are and how much ground we have to cover, let’s get right to the movie everyone wants to talk about. Can you enlighten us on the creative experience of writing Bats?
[Laughs] You know, let me tell you something, my friend: Every Halloween I get a nice residual check from Bats! So, not to scoff at our winged friends!

Who’s scoffing? You wrote dialogue for Lou Diamond Phillips!
Hello! You know?

The thing is that you were a very successful playwright before you ever ventured into screenwriting. How much of those early scripts still amounted to ‘paying dues,’ if at all?
Not a lot, if only because I spent 10 years as a starving playwright in Chicago. That’s where I learned how to do my job, and that’s how I learned what a dramatist does as opposed to a poet or a prose writer or a journalist. So it was the 10 years in Chicago — shelving…

Source: http://www.celebrities.com/celebrities-gossip/john-logan-on-skyfall-rango-and-the-secret-of-successful-screenwriting/

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