John Logan – the writer behind GLADIATOR, THE AVIATOR, HUGO and SKYFALL – was in energetic and affable form at this year’s Watersprite Student Film Festival in Cambridge. A lively speaker, he extolled the virtues of poetry as a means to learning the craft of scriptwriting: “Poetry teaches economy.” The 51 year old playwright-turned-screenwriter, nominated for three Oscars over the course of his brief yet productive film career, is keen to raise awareness of the debt owed to history in today’s cultural landscape: “Know the continuum of writers”, he urges. “If you want to learn how to write, read Shakespeare’s Hamlet. And then read it again and again, until you know and understand it completely.”

“In movies, the script has to be truthful to the characters, not the writer.”

He invokes Shakespeare again later on when the subject of artistic integrity is raised. He says the image of the pure artist, grumbling about their vision being mangled by the Hollywood machine, is a fallacy. “In movies, the script has to be truthful to the characters, not the writer.” That’s why Shakespeare the person remains unknown after 500 years, he argues. But that’s not to say that the greatest writer of them all doesn’t inspire him. On the contrary, in 2011 he collaborated with Ralph Fiennes on an adaptation of CORIOLANUS. “You don’t want to wake up every morning thinking you’ve failed Shakespeare.”

So how did he not only survive but thrive within the Hollywood system? First of all, he says, you have to be precious with your talent: “Respect the fact that there are only so many plays within you, or so many films in you.” He deliberately turned down offers which he felt he couldn’t sufficiently deliver on, even when he needed the money (“To this day I can’t eat tuna,” Logan recalls, having lived off it for so many years while churning out plays from his tiny rented apartment). Once he got on the ladder it was a matter of ensuring that the director of each film he worked on was on his side, so that when the studio asked for the inevitable script changes, he had a powerful ally fighting his corner. “The centre of gravity in theatre is the text; in movies it might be the director, or the star, or the studio.”

After the talk I was able to sit down with Logan for a few minutes to discuss some of his inspirations, and the future of the film industry. He picks Carol Reed’s ODD MAN OUT as the film that most inspired him to become a writer: “There was something about the language of that… maybe because it was filmed in Belfast, the area my dad grew up in. The movies that had the most influence on me were Olivier’s HAMLET and LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. They were the two that just rocked my world completely.”

He describes SKYFALL as “the single best experience I’ve had on a movie.”

He says growing up with his Irish parents inevitably affected his style of writing. “You grew up with the lilt of the language. America has a very different cadence. It can have a honeyed sweetness if you’re in the South, perhaps, or a clipped stringency if you’re in New England, but it doesn’t have the romance and the rolling sensitivity that perhaps Irish or British language has.”

Did he find writing SKYFALL – which is a sequel after all – a restrictive experience, working within a pre-defined formula and template? “I thought I might, but not at all. Because one of the reasons why it was such a joyous experience is that there were so many newbies doing it: Sam Mendes, Roger Deakins, Thomas Newton, people who had never done a Bond before, plus a whole new cast: bringing in a new M, a new Moneypenny, a new Q; we were all just really excited about it. I never had the sense that you have to put all the toys back in to the toy box when you’re done, and clearly we didn’t. The reason I think Bond has been going for 50 years is that the producers understand it has to reinvent itself boldly, and boldly is the key word. The producers were afraid of nothing.”

Could he have done the same for Roger Moore’s era? “I don’t know. If you look at the difference between MOONRAKER and FOR YOUR EYES ONLY, they are so different in tone. Perhaps the range isn’t as broad, but there are great shifts in tone between all those movies, and certainly between Bonds, when you go from Roger Moore to Tim Dalton, and Dalton to Pierce Brosnan, and Brosnan to Daniel Craig, you get the big seismic shifts in the franchise and it’s a great opportunity to reinvent the character for the particular zeitgeist.”

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Is there now an opportunity to rejuvenate the character again after SKYFALL? “We’ll see”, he smiles knowingly. As he’s signed up to write the next two Bond films, contractual obligations doubtless prevent him from saying anything more.

Stepping away from the billion dollar Bond, I ask him whether his take on CORIOLANUS was a passion project. “Completely.” Just how hard a sell was it? “You have no idea! First of all, it’s Shakespeare, so half the people leave the room; and then it’s Coriolanus! So the other half leave the room. It’s not Shakespeare’s most beloved work, you know? But you get to the point when some things you do because you just love them, and you have to do them. It was impossible to get that movie made, but Ralph Fiennes and I just believed in it so deeply, we had to do it. We didn’t make any money, we didn’t get paid for it. Eventually we got something, but we believed that Shakespeare’s Coriolanus deserved to be preserved on film in the way we wanted to do it. But they were not lining up at the door to give us money, that’s for sure.”

Logan has had the luxury of being able to work on both big budget and personal projects. But Hollywood is famously risk-averse, perhaps never more so than now. A new version of THE MUMMY is on its way, with two separate scripts being commissioned simultaneously from different writers. Is this something that worries him? Are writers being devalued in Hollywood? “Not because people are remaking films and doing sequels; all those employ screenwriters. Studios are getting more and more comfortable with established properties. THE MUMMY is a brand name. The game BATTLESHIP is a brand name. And that’s obviously troubling to people who want to develop something new. But there are always studios willing to take insane chances with things, and I’ve been the happy beneficiary of studios willing to take insane chances on things.”

“Movies are the export from America. It is our greatest calling card, for good or ill, around the world.”

“When you look at the golden age of Hollywood, there was the studio system, it was a beautifully functioning machine. Then came New Hollywood, where there was this revolution in the late 60s which started in Europe, spread to America, and suddenly there was a New Wave, where the primacy of the director, the independent film, the independent writer was being celebrated. There was a new way of looking at the business of movies, and what cinema is. It’s where Scorsese came from and Spielberg came from, it’s where so many of those artists came from. We’re still somewhat in that world, it may be more of a business but it’s less a factory. There’s always going to be individual artists involved in creating material and bringing it to studios.”

But he certainly acknowledges the danger of Hollywood choosing easy money over the artistic risk. “It can only be seen as a stultifying fact that there’s only so many studios, they are producing fewer and fewer movies, and they are all owned by huge corporations that sell other things. But that’s globalisation and that’s the economy that we in movies have to function in now.”

Is there a danger that Hollywood will creatively die? “Never. Movies are the export from America. It is our greatest calling card, for good or ill, around the world. People need it and want it and they always will. Perhaps in different forms; as digital media takes off, perhaps you’ll stream it on your Ipad. So the delivery devices may change but the need to have it and the need to make it will never diminish.”

Indeed, sites like Kickstarter have opened up opportunities for film funding to those who might otherwise be unable to get their film projects off the ground. Is this exciting, or does it risk crowding the marketplace even more, making it harder to find an audience? “It does both. Anything that gives a screenwriter or a director or an actor a chance to make a movie, is a chance for a Godard to look through the viewfinder for the first time, a chance for a Robert Towne to write the first line of his screenplay… it is always a great opportunity for a creative explosion.”

Before he returns to world of 007, John Logan is working with SKYFALL alumni Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw in his new play Peter and Alice, inspired by a meeting between Alice Liddell Hargreaves and Peter Llewelyn Davies (the ‘original’ Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan) in 1932 at a Lewis Carroll exhibition. It opens on 25 March 2013 at the Noel Coward Theatre in London.

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