Stephen Gaghan Quotations

More attention and thought goes into naming a character in 'Call Of Duty' than all the work that can go into certain movies. Blood and sweat and tears go into figuring out the names because they are so important. The call signs say a lot about you. The brotherhood that's evoked by the name is quite profound.

The movie business has been in enormous flux. It's always changing, and you've got to scramble. The Internet came along and devoured the DVD backend of the movie business. Suddenly you're watching dollars turn into nickels, and that's interesting to me.

I came to Hollywood originally writing comedy and writing satire.

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.

When I moved to Los Angeles, I wrote spec screenplays. I was really poor, and I thought I was just gonna do this for a while to make a little money so I could write novels. I thought movies were a second-class art form. I condescended to it - I didnt know enough to know it was really gonna be hard.

Life serves up satire. Unfortunately. Or fortunately. I don't know. You have to reel it in to drama.

As I got into my teens, I started reading better books, beginning with the Beats and then the hippie writers, people like Wallace Stegner up in Northern California, and all the political New Journalism stuff, the Boys on the Bus dudes and Ken Kesey.

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.

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.

The average development time for a Hollywood movie is nine years. Nine years for a studio film. And a lot of what you do is abstract.

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.

I think the War on Terror has succeeded in creating more terror, more terrorists, a less safe America, and a less safe world.

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.

It's rare in Hollywood to get the chance to work on something that you actually care about. The tragedy of the place is all these talented people trying to get excited about stuff they themselves would only view at gun point.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

See No Evil. We had support in the intelligence sectors.

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.

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

I just wanted to get together with him. I wanted to see, what is a Bob Baer? I'd never met a CIA officer. I'd only seen them in movies.

I love the op-ed pages of the 'L.A. Times,' the 'Washington Post' and the 'New York Times.' There's just no substitute for the people who are thinking and writing on those pages.

I could have concentrated on George Clooney's character. I could have had him in every scene and told the entire story from his point of view. That certainly would have made my life a lot easier over the last several years. But the canvas was too large. These days, if you make a movie about East and West and turn it into a simple piece of disposable entertainment, that seems to me criminal.

I could have concentrated on George Clooney's character, ... I could have had him in every scene and told the entire story from his point of view. That certainly would have made my life a lot easier over the last several years. But the canvas was too large. These days, if you make a movie about East and West and turn it into a simple piece of disposable entertainment, that seems to me criminal.

the greatest field trip I ever got to go on.

We are living in complex, difficult times and I wanted Syriana to reflect this complexity in a visceral way, to embrace it narratively. There are no good guys and no bad guys and there are no easy answers. The characters do not have traditional character arcs; the stories don't wrap up in neat little life lessons, the questions remain open. The hope was that by not wrapping everything up, the film will get under your skin in a different way and stay with you longer. This seemed like the most honest reflection of this post 9-11 world we all find ourselves in.

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.

War and, apparently, hurricanes are very good for the oil business. But I've got to believe at a certain point, as a nation, we're going to go in a different direction toward an increased sense of personal responsibility, a lowering of each individual's carbon footprint and a real collaborative effort to help sustain our planet.