When I started earning money from screen-writing, for a long time my only indulgences were books. John Logan Read Quote
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. John Logan Read Quote
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. John Logan Read Quote
Theater people say you are either a comedian or a tragedian, and I’m a tragedian. And the vexing, dark characters, the ones where I don’t understand their pain or their anguish, they are the characters that appeal to me. John Logan Read Quote
We wanted ‘Hugo’ to be a cornucopia of cinema, a celebration of everything we do in movies. John Logan Read Quote
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.’ John Logan Read Quote
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. John Logan Read Quote
The history of screenwriting – of what we do – is more than 100 years old. It’s thousands of years old, going back to Sophocles and Euripedes. I believe the only – the only – separation for being a dramatist is reading drama. John Logan Read Quote
I love novels, but I’m not a novelist. I’m just a dramatist, which means I write lines for actors. That’s all I have ever wanted to do. John Logan Read Quote
I grew up on the Bond movies. The first one I saw was ‘Diamonds Are Forever,’ when I was a kid. I just loved them to pieces. John Logan Read Quote
