How One Writer Turned a Love for Writing Into an Oscar- and Emmy-Award Winning Career: Exclusive Excerpt from 'Traffic' Screenwriter Stephen Gaghan

The following is an excerpt from “Film Craft: Screenwriting,”edited by Tim Grierson. The book is now available from Focal Press. The excerpt below was made available by the book’s publisher.



Stephen Gaghan’s writing career started quite promisingly,

publishing a short story in The Iowa Review before he was even 26. He also impressed the

writing staff of “The Simpsons” with a spec episode entitled “Family Wheel of

Jeopardy,” as well as producer and talent agent Bernie Brillstein

with a collection of “Saturday Night Live” sketches he’d written. But a career in

television writing in the 1990s— including stints at “New York Undercover,” “The Practice,” “American Gothic,” and “NYPD Blue” (where he shared an Emmy for Outstanding Writing

for a Drama Series)—soon gave way to screenwriting. His first produced

film credit was “Rules of Engagement” (2000), which starred Samuel L. Jackson

and Tommy Lee Jones, but he received much acclaim for his next film, “Traffic” (2000),

which was based on the 1989 British miniseries Traffik. Traffic went on to win four Academy Awards, including

a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Gaghan. Around the same time as

Traffic’s release, Gaghan revealed that he had himself been a longtime

drug addict, finally getting clean in 1997. Subsequently, he made his

feature directing debut with Abandon (2002) and was one of three credited writers on the

historical drama The Alamo (2004). His next great triumph occurred in 2005 with

the release of Syriana, a multi-character drama he wrote and directed that

examined the danger of the world’s addiction to oil. The film earned

Gaghan his second Academy Award nomination, this time for Best Original

Screenplay, and George Clooney won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

More recently, he’s one of the writers (uncredited) on the 2013 big-budget

sci-fi film After

Earth, which stars Will Smith and his son Jaden. “I’m in

the adult-serious ghetto,” Gaghan says about his niche in Hollywood.

“That’s my pigeonhole. I made it, I dug it out, I climbed in the

hole—it’s dark and airless. But I dug it, you know? And no other

hole exists.” — “Film Craft: Screenwriting” editor Tim Grierson

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. That didn’t work

out very well. Later, when I won the Oscar, there was a federal judge

who contacted me to say, “I went to school with your grandfather,

and he was a smart guy, got the classics prize in Greek, was voted most

likely to succeed, that kind of thing.” My grandfather thought

he was gonna take over the world, but he didn’t—I think he got drunk

for 50 years, and then he was a nightclub columnist and reviewed plays.

He was a charming guy—you know, the hard-drinking, chain-smoking newspaperman.

He was married to my grandmother, who was a painter, and his father

had been a concert pianist, so there was this thread of drunk, failed

artists that went back on my dad’s side. The thing I wrote in Syriana where

Jeffrey Wright’s dad carries a card in his wallet that says, “If

you find me, call my son”? That’s based 100 percent on my grandfather,

who carried that same card. I try to imagine what that was like for

my dad—he’s working and suddenly gets a call: “There’s this

guy here, can you come get him?” So 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 didn’t mention anything about writing again until

I was about 20. It was a secret that I kept inside of me. I didn’t

know anyone who was a writer—I didn’t even know what it meant to

be a writer. I just loved books. But there was nothing on the surface

that said I would be a writer. I didn’t work at it. I didn’t write.

I didn’t even know how to type. But I just had this sense in a totally

mystical, strange way—I would get in trouble, and there would

be a voice in my head that would say, “Well, you’ll be able to write

your way out of this one.” I don’t know where it came from.

And 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. I loved

those guys, and I loved the lifestyle—take tons of drugs and you too

can write One

Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I think I had the chronology of

Kesey’s achievements a little cockeyed, but by then I loved the trio

of great drunk Americans: Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. Not so

much for the writing yet— I just really liked the drinking and smoking

and all that stuff.

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 didn’t know enough

to know it was really gonna be hard.

Things changed around the time I met Michael Tolkin.

When I saw “The

Player” (1992), when I was still living in New York, I had thought,

“I wonder if I could do that.” A couple of years later I had become

friends with an executive who was working with him on a project for

HBO about Microsoft, and she put the two of us together. When he and

I first met, we talked about Proust, and we both loved Tolstoy, and

we had a lot of similar references. So we ended up spending the whole

meeting talking about “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” and “The Kreutzer Sonata.” And I was just so happy. I didn’t care

what happened after that—it was just the greatest afternoon. I thought,

“I love this guy. He’s so funny and so cool, and just an absolutely

first-rate artist in all of his thinking.”

We teamed up on the HBO project, which was a satire

about Bill Gates and Microsoft, a sort of “Dr. Strangelove” piece about technology, called 20 Billion. We’d break up the scenes, we’d write our scenes,

we’d get back together, and his scenes were just so much better than

mine that I couldn’t believe it. I’m lucky I could see how much

better his were—I mean, that’s the first real break, realizing how

not-good you actually are, and cutting through all the nonsense smoke

that’s usually being blown at you in the zip codes around Beverly

and La Cienega boulevards. But I knew—I knew he was great and I was

terrible, so I started literally sitting behind him and watching him

type when he would write his scenes. We’d keep reworking the story,

and this went on for a long time. And then one day, I riffed out a subplot

involving two characters who were sort of like the girl I was living

with at the time and myself. I wrote the scenes, maybe 15 pages, in

a few hours. I showed Michael the scenes, and I saw it in his face:

“Hey, this is actually pretty good. That’s gonna be in the movie.”

And he was happy for me, too. And when it was over, I was at the point

where I felt like, “Wow, I’m writing scenes that should be shot.”

Three years of my writing career had gone by—I used to think, “I’ll

just dash off some Simpsons episode and make some money and come back

to fiction”—and in that time, I had written volumes of terrible

stuff. But watching Michael changed my approach to everything. I realized

that this was a real art form and that I didn’t understand it. I had

to prostrate myself before it and study it if I wanted to be good. I

had some other friends around this time, too, who were doing very interesting

scripts: Charlie Kaufman and Owen Wilson and Wes Anderson. We traded

our stuff back and forth. I saw early drafts of Being John Malkovich (1999) and Rushmore (1998). I saw fully formed film artists who were my

peers and I wanted to do what they were doing—get my own voice or

vision of the world out into that world. I had no clue how this was

going to happen, but suddenly I just really loved this fucking art form.

It’s like haiku repeated 10,000 times in one document. The bar was

set way higher than I thought.

My first produced credit was on “Rules of Engagement.” I did a major rewrite on it, and I was

on the set. And I learned that a film is like this great circus that’s

been brought together. They create a circus, and the circus travels

around together, and then the circus disappears, and you’re left with

a commemorative watch. And then it’s time to make a new circus. I

loved that—I was not sentimental, and the process is not sentimental.

It’s a business, and you fling your script into this machine. The

machine is very powerful, and it can destroy the material very easily,

and the fight never ends to get it out the way you see it. You can’t

ever give up, even at the end—you just have to keep fighting. But

the great thing about that machine is that it’s also an accelerator,

and it puts your work out into the world with such volume that it is

seen in little villages in countries that barely have electricity. And

that’s a really awesome thing to be a part of.

When I started writing what would become “Traffic,” I wasn’t aware of the miniseries “Traffik.” I just wanted to write a story about the War on Drugs.

I quit my television jobs because I wanted to do this movie really badly.

I mean, on some level I’d been training all my life to write this

movie. So I did all this research, and I read a bunch of books, and

I met all these people. I conducted a bunch of interviews, and I found

that tape-recorders make people in power very nervous. But thankfully

I’m not a real journalist— I’m just a screenwriter. So if you

don’t record them, and you just write stuff down subtly, they’ll

talk so honestly about everything. And so I started developing this

interview methodology that worked really well. When I met all these

people, I’d get Stockholm Syndrome—even if my point of view is quite

different, I tend to like almost everybody I talk to. And so I think

it gets people to really talk to me in a way that they don’t always

talk. But after all that research, I didn’t know where to start. I

knew I wanted to have a drug czar, I wanted to have Colombia, I wanted

to have Mexico, I wanted to have the consumer side—I knew I wanted

to have all these things. But I couldn’t make it work because the

hero basically had to time travel. He couldn’t be in enough places

plausibly to get all the story I wanted. So I literally had a nervous

breakdown. Nothing happened for six months—I couldn’t write. I was

reading more, researching more, writing notes, but I didn’t know what

I was doing—I’m not writing anything. A professor friend of mine

said this great thing to me once: “At a certain point, research becomes

a form of cowardice.”

Out of the blue Steven Soderbergh contacted me, because

he was trying to do a War on Drugs film, too. So he came to lunch and

gave me this miniseries from England. “Traffik” with a “K” it was called. I looked at that miniseries,

and there was a very melodramatic quality to the stories. I thought

it was really well done—the scenes are very well-written—but at

its core, it was like the melodramatic TV stuff that I didn’t really

like, that I was trying to get away from. But I realized my script had

the same types of stories, and I saw the brilliance of the way “Traffik” had

strung this all together, and the necessity for clarity when you are

crosscutting like that on a bigger canvas. It’s funny: I had written

a lot of TV very fast by that point, and TV was typically an A-B-C-D

story, but for some reason I hadn’t seen that I could do that in film,

too. It didn’t occur to me to do multiple narratives in the movies.

The process of figuring out how the stories wove together

in “Traffic”

was a learning process in understanding the value of a narrative spine

that starts here and ends there. When I’m writing scenes, I fall down

a well and time stops. I’m not thinking about the plot. If I’m lucky,

it’s like some other thing happens, and voices start popping from

nowhere and I’m just transcribing, really. It may not have anything

to do with what I’m supposed to be writing, but it will have real

energy and feel very vital, like it has to be in a movie. The scene

is declaring itself, and it’s coming from some pure place of inspiration—it’s

disconnected from anything. I can’t take credit for it—nobody can

take credit for it. It’s just appeared, and it has to be in a movie,

but the terrifying question is: What movie?

I was working with Will Smith on “After Earth,” and he broke this down brilliantly. He said, “Oh

yeah, you can start with character—you start with character all you

want. You’ll get lost for years. It’ll be great, but no one will

know it’s a movie. Or you can start with structure, and that will

be a device that you can present to a financing entity and say, ‘Here

is your movie.’ But it’ll suck, and you’ll have to find the character.

You can start with character and take forever—all that will make it

into the movie once you finally submit and focus on structure. Or you

can start with structure, and you’re still gonna spend all that time

trying to find the character stuff later. Your choice.”

Every time I do a script, I go completely insane:

“Why isn’t this working?” I get lost. The process for me

is somehow stealing the time to be lost for a very long time and to

not know what I’m doing at all. I need to have a complete crippling

loss of confidence where I think, “Why am I doing this? This is too

ambitious. This makes no sense.” And then I’m bumbling, bumbling,

giving up completely—three, four, five times— coming back to

it, changing it entirely, restructuring it, throwing it in a different

way. And then I’ve got 50 pages that work, and I wonder what the movie’s

about. Plus, there’s always this sense of, “I don’t want to do

something that’s been done before.” I want the scenes to come from

a magical place that I don’t understand. I don’t want it to be,

“That scene worked great in ‘Mission: Impossible’ (1996)—let’s do that scene.”

I just don’t want to work like that. It’s what

I love best and fear most about the process. Screenwriters face the

void. There’s nothing, and then there’s going to be something. It’s

the something-from-nothing business. Like magic. But all too often,

the stakes are very high and what feels familiar feels safe. And you

have to fight the derivative urge, the urge to safety, at every step

in the process.

With “After Earth,” they’re swinging for the fence—they created

an entire world that is as full and as rich as the world of “Star Wars” (1977). But at its heart, it’s a father-son story,

and that’s the story I’ve been writing my whole life. My dad died

when I was 15. He was released from a lot of suffering, and there was

something noble about it, and I learned a lot from him. A lot of the

stories I’ve written have a father-son element. Some of them are father-daughter—often,

I make it a girl because it’s just easier, but it’s the same stuff.

The Clooney character in “Syriana” had a son who ultimately wasn’t in the movie that

much, but it was a big deal. Matt Damon’s trying to figure out how

to be a father and a husband in the middle of a tragedy. In my draft

of “The Alamo,”

they’re all terrible fathers. “Havoc” (2005) is about this daughter whose parents are absent

and is trying to parent herself, but has no role models. I adapted Malcolm

Gladwell’s book “Blink” into a coming-of-age story about the son of a corporate

raider. When you look at “Traffic,” what does it mean? Well, I guess it’s saying that

love and patience and good parenting can help an individual with a pernicious

and often deadly problem.

With “Syriana,” it’s that foreign policy driven by greed will end

in disaster, but it’s also saying that with family, love, and forgiveness,

you can make a go of it in an almost absolutely overwhelming and uncontrollable

world. It’s the same story again and again and again. I don’t have

any other story—that’s the story. My friend Adam Gopnik once read

a bunch of my stuff and he said, “You have a story, Gaghan, and it’s

the same one every time.” I was really offended, and he said, “You

should be happy—most people don’t have one at all.”

I’ve been working on a project that took three years,

and it sucked every day—except where I had like three hours where

I just went, “Hey, wait, we have a movie.” It’s so preposterous

to be lost for so long and yet to have faith you’re gonna have those

three hours. Anybody working like this, they would quit. I’ve been

screenwriting for quite a while, and I’ve had maybe a handful of really

good moments. But one of those was when I saw the first cut of Traffic at

this little screening room at Warner Bros. When the film ended, Soderbergh

was in the back of the theater. I was in the very front, and I got up

and I ran back toward him, and I can see in his face that he’s thinking,

“Holy shit, he’s gonna attack me.” I hugged him—and he’s not

a hugger—and I just said, “You’re gonna win the Oscar for Best

Director. This is the happiest day of my life.” And it was—it was

one of the happiest days of my life. And that sustains you for a really,

really long time.”

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