[lounge music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - The best response you can have to a payoff in a thriller is someone goes, "Oh, right, I forgot, of course..." [multiple voices chattering] [Narrator] On Story offers a look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators, and filmmakers.

All of our content is recorded live at Austin Film Festival and at our year-round events.

To view previous episodes, visit OnStory.tv.

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[waves] [kids screaming] [wind] [witch cackling] [sirens wail] [gunshots] [dripping] [suspenseful music] [telegraph beeping, typing] [piano gliss] From Austin Film Festival, this is On Story.

A look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators, and filmmakers.

This week's On Story, "Skyfall," "Any Given Sunday," and "Penny Dreadful" screenwriter, John Logan.

- Every morning I get to get up and write great scenes for actors which is my only goal.

My goal is not to explore great themes.

My goal is not to create great drama.

My only goal every single day is write great scenes for actors.

[paper crumpling] [typing] [typewriter ding] [Narrator] In this episode, three-time Emmy award nominated producer, playwright and screenwriter, John Logan, discusses working in multiple storytelling mediums, writing for actors, and bringing his vision to the stage and screen.

[typewriter ding] - When you started out your writing career, you were a playwright, and you wrote for the theater for many, many years.

I think you said 10, right?

When you crossed over to the dark side, and you did your first produced screenplay, it was with Oliver Stone co-writing and directing "Any Given Sunday."

Um.

How the hell does that happen?

[laughing] - Well, first of all, it wasn't crossing over to the dark side for me.

It was crossing over to the I can eat food side.

It happened because, you know, I was sort of born a playwright and a child of the theater, and I desperately love the theater, and I'm still first and foremost like a little theater mouse.

And I spent 10 years in Chicago writing plays.

You know, and some were good, some were bad, some were well received, some weren't.

You know, but it was a hard existence.

You know, I was shelving books at the Northwestern Law Library for years and working on plays at storefront theaters and in churches and wherever, but I always wanted to write a movie.

And because this was in the 80s, and I lived in Chicago, this is when the bears won the Super Bowl.

So football was very much the currency of the realm.

And I love football.

You know, and I always have loved football, and there seemed to be like a new baseball movie every 10 minutes, you know?

And I, frankly, no disrespect to the Sox or the Cubs, I just don't like baseball.

It's all so cyclical and slow, but you know football is like direct dramatic action.

So I decided to write my first screenplay about football, and because I was sort of raised on Shakespeare, I came up with the idea of writing a story about an older football coach as the world was changing around him, sort of a King Lear figure.

And so I spent a year writing it, and I hung out with the Bears, and I watched lots of game footage.

And I did all the sort of total immersion research you could possibly do, and I wrote the screenplay called "Any Given Sunday," and I didn't really have an agent, but a man named Brian Siberell at CAA agreed to sort of represent the script because he liked my writing.

He couldn't sign me 'cause I had no credits.

So I got a call from him.

I was in Adelaide, Australia, believe it or not working on a new play, and I was in the director's living room.

And I got a call from my agent saying, well, sit down, Oliver Stone's gonna be calling you in 10 minutes.

And he did.

And Oliver called me 10 minutes later and said, "I love your movie.

I wanna do it.

I gotta see you in Tokyo in three days."

It was like Dorothy stepping into technicolor.

It was such a different experience.

- The first 10 minutes of "Any Given Sunday" are so busy, so frenetic, it's action packed.

It's filled with all of this disconnected dialogue that actually is laying out plot.

[Announcer] Any given Sunday, Kev.

Anything can happen.

- They need you back.

Cherubini's down.

- Cherubini, what did he fall off the bench?

What the hell is next, Stigmata?

Okay, just sit him out, and don't touch him 'til I get back.

[TV Announcer] Tony D'Amato.

- Vincent, give me the names of who's available out there in the quarterback market.

How about every available line coach?

Maybe somebody who can actually teach this line how to [bleep] block.

Malloy, find out about him.

[Announcer] Things not looking good for the Sharks.

[upbeat music] - Cap out, man I can't believe this.

Can't believe it.

[Announcer] Do you know anything about Willie Beamen?

[Second Announcer] No, I don't.

Who is Willie Beamen?

- Beamen, what the hell are you doing?

I told you to warm up five minutes ago.

- What happened?

- Look at your [bleep] play card.

It's upside down.

Come on, get your head out of your [bleep].

Let's go!

[whistle blowing] - That's a really complicated thing to do I think, for people, and I just love to hear how you, you know, was it that way when it was, when it was, when you first wrote it and gave it to Oliver or was that something the two of you developed as you worked on the project?

- Yeah, we developed it together.

So Oliver, you know, really took me under his wing in sort of a very parental way in terms of like here's this guy who has talent and ambition.

He doesn't know the form as well as he might.

Because coming from the theater, I was very overly reliant on dialogue.

You know, 'cause in the theater, if you're watching "Uncle Vanya," you're in heaven if two characters sit there for 20 minutes and talk about the autumn, you know, but Oliver, the biggest lesson he taught me was, he said every scene has to do three things to earn its place in a movie.

It has to advance plot.

It had has to advance character, and it has to do some other third thing, doesn't matter what it is.

And you know, Oliver also taught me the other compact you make with the audience in the beginning of your film is how do they listen to it?

What's the language of this movie?

Is it slow?

Is it fast?

Is it a fast twitch movie or a slow twitch movie in terms of muscle memory and sort of kinesthetic response.

And Oliver wanted a tsunami of a movie that moves so quickly and sort of zoomed through the story that, you know, it became me trying to figure out how do I get those, those two first elements, plot momentum and character, into the tone that he was setting cinematically, which was so vibrant.

- One of the things that I loved in "Any Given Sunday" is your Shakespearian speech about the game of inches, and life's a game of inches.

- To me, it was what we in the theater call the 11 o'clock number, which is that you get to that point in a musical say where you want "Send in the Clowns," or "Hello, Dolly."

You want the big emotional climax for the character and the musicality of the piece at the 11 o'clock hour.

So the screenplay was always structured to make that the climax, not the final game, you know, which is perfunctory.

The point is getting all the characters to that speech.

And that meant getting Dennis Quaid's character and Jamie Foxx's character in a position where they would hear it and getting Al Pacino's character to the position where he would actually speak those words.

And when I first wrote the speech, you know, I thought, okay, this is long.

I think it sustains, but it's one of those things, you know, I brought to the director and I said, okay, I'm about to hand you three pages of solid text for Al Pacino.

And you sort of drop it off and just step back hoping you're not gonna be fired or hit.

You know, but he loved it.

He loved the passion of it because Oliver is an artist, and he has a soul, and he thought to let a character express their soul through words in a movie that is so visual would be very powerful and arresting.

And indeed, when I watch the movie now, it's the part of the movie that I think has true grandeur to it.

- Either we heal now as a team, or we will die as individuals.

That's football, guys.

That's all it is.

Now, what are you gonna do?

[players yelling and cheering] [uplifting music] [typewriter ding] - All of a sudden, you become a go-to person for things like "Alien" and "Star Trek" and the 007 franchise.

And so, you know, going from this dramatist background into those, how did you, how did you start looking at how you were going to approach those franchises?

- What you don't do is take it lightly because you have a responsibility to the story you're working on and all the stories that came before you.

You know, and "Skyfall" and "Spectre" is a great example of this because, you know, I read all of the Ian Fleming novels again.

I watched all of the movies again.

You know, and thankfully I'm a quick reader, so that was joyous to do, just to get it in my DNA.

Mostly Ian Fleming because where I think Daniel Craig is so successful as Bond is in tapping into the character that Ian Fleming wrote, who is highly vulnerable, depressive in a way, and not a Superman.

When you're working in a franchise, at least in my experience, when I'm working in a franchise, I do feel the weight of sort of history on me.

But at a certain point, you have to be able to take that cloak and throw it away.

And the success of "Skyfall" I believe is the fact that we did different things.

You know, we went back to his roots, we killed off M. We had a homoerotic sort of seduction scene with the villain.

- Oooh.

See what she's done to you.

- Well, she never tied me to a chair.

- Her loss.

- Are you sure this is about M?

- It's about her and you and me.

You see, we are the last two rats.

We can either eat each other... hmmm... or eat everyone else.

How you're trying to remember your training now.

- He is one of the greatest bad guys of all the Bond movies.

[laughing] - Yeah.

- I mean, he's incredible.

So, you know, I'd really love to hear about what your, you know, what those meetings were like.

Like, what were your thoughts in, that you took into the room to pitch the direction you wanted to go with this.

- Mostly it was Sam and I talking a lot about things we found exciting about Bond.

Because especially for Sam being British, you know, and I'm full-blooded Irish, you know, my parents live in Belfast.

There's a thing about Bond being a British hero, the only British hero.

And so we wanted to play the Britishness of the character.

You know, the majority of the movie is set in the British Isles.

There's iconography of flags and the little bulldog on Judi Dench's desk that really play into the Britishness of it, which the movies hadn't done for a while.

We were trying to ground it in the characters.

And the character of Silva is the perfect example.

That's the villain in the movie that Javier Bardem plays.

You know, the idea of motive-less evil, you know, which Coleridge talks about in relation to Iago is not really that interesting for a dramatist.

You know, you've gotta find fire behind your villain and have love for them and understand why they're making certain choices.

So Sam and I got to the point where we were talking about, all right, so Silva's gonna meet Bond for the first time.

We're keeping Silva, the villain off screen for a huge chunk of the movie, and then we're finally gonna introduce him.

So what's he going to say?

- How do you get rats off an Island?

My grandmother showed me.

We buried an oil drum and hinged the lid.

Then we wired coconut to the little space, and the rats would come for the coconut.

And boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, they would fall into the trap.

And after a month, you've trapped all the rats.

But what did you do then?

Throw the drum into the ocean?

Burn it?

No, you just leave it.

And they begin to get hungry.

And one by one, [chewing noises] they start eating each other until there are only two left, the two survivors.

And then what, do you kill them?

No, you take them and release them into the trees, but now they don't eat coconut anymore.

Now they only eat rat.

- And we talked about all the tropes of James Bond.

There's the Dr. No trope.

You sit at the table, and you have little mechanical hands.

And you're very like cool.

There's the Goldfinger trope where you're sardonic and ironic, you know, and one of the things that I find so interesting about the books is the level of sexual tension between the protagonist and the antagonist.

Be that, you know, Bond and Pussy Galore or Bond and, you know, Oddjob.

To say there isn't a sexual component to that is naive.

So, you know, I pitched this idea to Sam that why don't we really play that?

Why don't we just let this be a genuine homoerotic seduction where Silva is trying to destabilize Bond, not in the usual ways like come join me or I'm gonna kill you or I'm gonna torch all the people you love.

He's gonna try to destabilize Bond on a very central issue, his masculinity, and what became really fun in the scene is the way Bond just is able to turn the tables on him so sort of effortlessly.

And so what that hopefully establishes for the audience is these are two lethal adversaries who are absolutely equal.

- Well, first time for everything, yes?

- What makes you think this is my first time?

- Oh, Mr.

Bond.

[typewriter ding] - One of the movies that I think just stands out about how broad your book is, is "Rango."

And so I went, I had seen it in the theater a long time ago and rewatched it and forgot.

I'd forgotten how funny that movie is.

I mean, it's just incredibly funny, and also very sweet.

- I'm delighted you mention it 'cause I love, I love the movie, and I love talking about it 'cause it was such a unique experience for me.

You know, I had a relationship with Gore Verbinski, the director, I've met him 'cause he came in and did some work on "The Time Machine," this movie that I wrote, and I got to know him through there, and we've constantly discussed ideas back and forth.

And a lot of things I've written come from me talking with directors.

You know, Michael Mann and I are talking, and from that comes "The Aviator."

Gore Verbinski and I were talking, he said, you know, I wanna do an animated movie.

I said, well, good luck finding a writer for that.

I'm sure there are lots of good ones.

And he said, no, I wanna do it with you.

And I said, you know, I've never written anything under hard R in my life, I don't think, you know.

So it's not my natural swing circle, but he was just committed to the idea of finding this story.

And he had the idea of this lizard who's sort of a con man and goes on like a Don Knotts journey with these other animals.

And I said, oh, I love that idea.

But in my head I translated Don Knotts into Bob Hope.

And so I wrote it entirely as a Bob Hope road picture just without Bing Crosby in it.

[dramatic music] [blows smoke] [Rango coughing] [Rango swallowing] [onlookers gasping] [tapping] [liquid pours] [Rango swallows] [belch] [crowd murmurs] - Oh.

Oh, let me get that for you.

[nervous laughter] [nervous laughter] No, I know, here.

[flames bursting] [crowd gasping] Just take care of that for you.

All better.

[typewriter ding] - You're writing comedy.

You're writing westerns.

You're writing huge epics.

You're writing football.

You seem to be pretty fearless about the kind of content that you will write.

- I've always thought there's two kinds of writers, you know, wild generalization.

But I think there's Chekhovians and Shakespearians, and Chekhovians are those people who can write about the contemporary world.

And it can like break your heart with simplicity and truth.

And I have so much admiration for those writers.

That's not what I do.

I'm a Shakespearian writer.

I'm always drawn to the big, bold subject matters and the huge characters, you know, that are like giants to me because they're intimidating, they're frightening, they're seductive.

And they're not me.

- You hit on all of my favorite movie genres, or all of my favorite old films for sure.

Which, you know, you give us this orgasm of creature feature with "Penny Dreadful," and it basically seems to be like a yin and yang of your talent.

You know, you get the big spectacle, but at the same time, you get your Shakespearian opportunity here too, right?

- I've reached the point where I'd done a lot of things.

I wanted to do something dramatically new as a writer, but I'm a prose writer.

I'm a dramatist.

So that suggested long form television.

So I thought about various ways to do it that might be interesting and various stories to tell.

You know, I tried a few things but it really came from reading Wordsworth, reading a lot of romantic poetry, you know, 'cause I was sort of going through a personal heartbreak.

Eventually I went back to Mary Shelley and read "Frankenstein" again in the original version.

And I was just so stunned by how moving it was.

You know, how like how philosophically shocking was the confrontation on the mountain between the creature and Frankenstein.

And I thought that's amazing.

You don't, I wanna tell some version of that story, but I didn't just want to do Frankenstein.

And the other thing that reading about, so romantic and Victorian poets, particularly Christina Rossetti who's probably my favorite poet, and reading about the position of women in Victorian society in London mostly through the Christina Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites and the Raphaelites.

You know, I thought what an amazing character, a woman who is literally and figuratively corseted.

And I started thinking of the character that became Vanessa Ives who Eva Green played.

So that's one of the rare occasions that a story started for me with a character.

So going into "Penny Dreadful," I wanted to tell a story of this woman and the monstrous world around her and the monster within us all.

But I wanted to do it very seriously.

- If we're to continue, you must know how dangerous this is.

How dangerous I am.

- Tell me.

- You will think me mad, but I'll tell you the whole truth of it.

There's a creature hunting me.

He has been hunting me since the dawn of time.

He wants to feed on my blood and make me his bride, and... he will bring terror to everyone I love.

- Does this creature have a name?

- He's called Dracula.

- At a certain point, enough swords and guns, you know, and enough aviators and samurais, I really wanted do something different.

I was desperate to write a featured woman as the protagonist of a story, but the way I did it was like, like I do with every character, I went into the research.

I let my imagination go.

I started envisioning how she moved through her world.

And then I wrote her, you know, and I don't, I personally don't believe in the Balkanization of the writer's experience, meaning, well, you're a man, you can't write a woman.

Or, you know, you're an Irishman, so you can't write a Filipino.

I reject that entirely.

I think, you know, artists have to be able to imagine and dream in voices other than their own or we're going to have a very anemic artistic landscape, you know, so I just sort of dove right into Vanessa, and I love, and someone asked me like, so, you know, tell me, you know, who Vanessa Ives is?

You know, and I quoted Flaubert.

You know, about Bovary, which is Vanessa Ives c'est moi because she is the closest to me of any character I've ever written.

I mean, I'm not Victorian.

I'm not Catholic.

I'm not corseted, but her soul, I put so much of myself personally into that character that I'm very personally fond of her and connected to her.

- But you did I think something that's really interesting is that you said no more after three seasons, and I could have watched more, by the way.

So that, and you sacrificed your child, you know, I mean, here's your, you sacrificed yourself, which I think was an interesting way to go out.

I mean, what was your thought process in taking it to that end in particular?

- It was always going to go to that end because to me the essential question of "Penny Dreadful" is theological, and Vanessa Ive's struggle is with Catholicism and with God more than anything.

And so if you scan the series closely and really look at it closely and listen to it with that ear, you'll see that is her story.

It's about her relationship with God.

And so the idea that finally she achieves apotheosis, death, in a sacred and Holy act for her was the only way the series could end.

You know, and I felt it was the right time and the right way to do it.

- Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come.

[Both] Thy will be done.

On earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses - As we forgive those who trespass against us.

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever.

Amen.

[dramatic music] [gunshot] [dramatic music] - I still got bummed out, honestly, not to live with Vanessa and the creature, 'cause Vanessa and the creature were the sort of the heart and the soul for me.

- It just feels to me, everything that I watch of yours that you've had a tremendous amount of fun writing it.

- Yeah.

- And that I think is, I mean, that just screams I love my craft.

So, I mean, is that true?

Is it?

- I love it.

I love what I do.

You know, I wrote, I wrote my first play when I was 18.

So over 40 years ago, and from that day to this, I think I'm the luckiest man in the world because my job fits my character so well.

And every morning I get to get up and write great scenes for actors, which is my only goal.

[typewriter ding] [Narrator] You've been watching a conversation with John Logan on "On Story."

On Story is part of a growing number of programs in Austin Film Festival's On Story project.

That also includes the On Story radio program, podcast, book series, and the On Story archive, accessible through the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.

To find out more about On Story and Austin Film Festival, visit onstory.tv or austinfilmfestival.com.

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