Out to Lunch
March 2012 Issue

Logan’s Run

Adapting both Shakespeare and Bond, screenwriter John Logan is living his childhood dreams.
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John Logan, who’s among the hottest—and most highly paid—screenwriters in Hollywood, met me for lunch at the Crosby Street Hotel in downtown Manhattan, looking terrier-like, very fit, and eager. He has an apartment nearby in SoHo, as well as a home in Malibu. He’s a versatile workaholic: among the movie releases in 2011 alone, he wrote or adapted the animated spoof Western Rango for Johnny Depp; Hugo for Martin Scorsese; and an updated version of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus for Ralph Fiennes.

“So how does it feel to re-write Shakespeare?” I asked.

He took it well. “There was audacity to it!” he replied. “I have a bust of Shakespeare in my office, and just to give me a little sense of freedom as I worked on the script, I put a bandanna around his eyes.”

His work on the forthcoming Skyfall, the 23rd Bond movie, might seem a ways away from the Bard. But then, Logan’s been a Bond fan since he saw Diamonds Are Forever when he was 10 years old, and says he remembers more or less every line. I put him to a little test. “Complete the following dialogue, if you please. Blofeld: ‘Right idea, Mr. Bond.’ ”

“ ‘But wrong pussy,’ ” Mr. Logan answered, correctly. “Charles Gray as Blofeld. An underrated Blofeld, by the way.”

He ordered a spartan lunch: chicken paillard (minus the asparagus that usually accompanies it) and a Diet Coke. He hasn’t drunk alcohol since his college days at Northwestern University outside Chicago—for fear, he says, of appearing “indecorous.” For a decade, he was a struggling dramatist in Chicago, where he worked as a library clerk and wrote 14 plays—not all of them produced—and lived mainly off a lot of tuna fish. Theater remains his first love; Hollywood is more like a long-lasting affair.

Surprisingly for a screenwriter, perhaps, Shakespeare is not only his touchstone but the formative experience of his life. I asked him what the first movie he ever saw was. “I’m told it was 101 Dalmatians! But the movie that changed everything for me was Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet.

He was eight when his Belfast-born father, a naval architect who loved literature, said to him one day, “Come and watch this movie with me on TV. It’s got ghosts and sword fights.”

“I lived for great sword fights,” remembered Mr. Logan, now a boyish 50. “And Hamlet has the most exciting, brutal, and honest sword fight you could ever see on film. And the ghost scared me. I loved Hamlet as a kid.”

“You didn’t find a guy in tights speaking a strange language peculiar?”

“I didn’t. I had no capability of understanding the majesty of Shakespeare’s language then. It was just a great, thrilling story to me. And my dad saw that, and we subsequently watched all the other Shakespeare films together and he read me the stories of the plays.”

He still treasures the Lamb Shakespeare that his father read to him all those years ago. “He was the most encouraging voice in my life,” he said. “Because within him was a frustrated writer.”

Mr. Logan’s lucky break came with the filmscript he wrote on spec about the world of American football, Any Given Sunday, directed by Oliver Stone in 1999, starring Al Pacino.

“I think of myself as a playwright who fell into movies, you know,” he explained. “I never had any apprenticeship as a screenwriter. I was a grown-up when I sat down with Oliver Stone. I was in my 30s. I love what I do, but the screenplays don’t happen in the white heat of inspiration. It’s the oldest trick in the book. I get up at five o’clock every morning and I work flat out until I’m exhausted. I may not be the smartest guy on the block—but, goddammit, I am the most tenacious!”

“What time do you go to bed in Malibu?”

“Very early. I’ve never been attracted to a Hollywood lifestyle. I live modestly. I don’t collect Porsches or do blow. I’m not comfortable socializing. I don’t go to Oscar parties. And nobody knows who I am. I value my anonymity. I’m rigorous about it.”

“What an exciting life you lead!” I said.

He laughed (which he’s fond of doing). “It’s like the salt flats. The sun rises—I write. The sun goes down—I’m done.”

His place in Malibu isn’t about status. “It’s 10 or 15 minutes from the best trails in the Santa Monica Mountains and the Malibu Creek State Park loop. I hike. And that’s what I do when I’m not writing. It’s my only hobby, but I take it very seriously.”

He certainly does. He rolled up his jacket sleeve to reveal a tattoo on his arm inscribed with the kanji characters meaning “desert wolf.” He wanted it to say “coyote”—“a coyote is a very tenacious survivor; it values its isolation”—but no equivalent word for coyote exists in Japanese. So Mr. Logan, the well-known desert wolf, trains for months for 25-mile endurance hikes in the killing summer heat of Death Valley, while carrying a little notebook and pen with him in his worn-out backpack.

Hollywood, with all its romantic and diabolical temptations, has given him the freedom to live his life as he wants. “Writers get burned out easily if they don’t have the resolve to take the hits,” he said. “If you don’t have steel in you, you’ll never make a career in screenwriting.”

The steel was forged in this engaging man during those lean playwriting years in Chicago. Two Broadway seasons ago, he won the Tony Award for Red, his exhilarating drama about the troubled artist Mark Rothko. When we met for lunch, he had so far been nominated twice for an Academy Award—for his screenplays for Ridley Scott’s Gladiator in 2000, and Scorsese’s The Aviator in 2004. “On the one hand, I couldn’t have had more fun at the Oscars. You’re inside what you’ve seen all your life on the outside, like stepping into the sparkle on a gem. But you’re also like a man condemned to the electric chair and they’re about to pull the switch. To the very last moment—until the envelope’s opened and the winner announced—you’re hoping the phone will ring and the governor is on the line with a reprieve. And you know what? He never calls!”

He laughed again, and I wished him well at the Oscars this year, should his admired script for Hugo be nominated. “If so,” he said, “I’ll be sitting there—hoping the governor’s gonna call!”