An Interview with John Logan

With a resume that includes the Oscar-nominated script for Gladiator, and the screenplays for Oliver Stone's hard-hitting football epic, Any Given Sunday; the making-of-Citizen Kane cable film RKO 281, and the controversial (amongst Trek fans) most recent film in the series, Star Trek Nemesis, John Logan might seem an odd choice to write the family-oriented DreamWorks animation epic Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas. Logan himself might be the first to agree: "I have lots of young nieces and nephews and finally they can see one of my movies. It was like, 'Okay, you can't see Gladiator or Any Given Sunday; now, you can go see Sinbad!"

Still, the prolific and much-acclaimed scribe admits, speaking recently in a roundtable interview in Los Angeles, that he "had no idea what to expect. [Producer] Jeffrey Katzenberg – who, by the way, is quite the con man – asked me if I would write an animated movie.

"I said," he continues, "'Well, I don't really know much about it.' He assured me, 'It's really fun, you'll have a great time doing it.'" Logan adds with a laugh: "That 'fun' would take four years of my life! Once you start committing to something, you just have to stay with it, and in animation that process is longer."

Amongst the first challenges for Logan was simply getting a handle on the Sinbad legend itself. While an admitted devotee of the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad films of the early sixties, Logan naturally wanted to research the "real" myth. "I naively assumed that there was going to be a Sinbad story, you know, like there's a King Lear or a Beowulf.

"So I asked for the Sinbad story to read," he goes on, "and the DreamWorks people got me like ten volumes. 'Here's the Arabian Nights Sinbad, and here's the Persian Sinbad, and here's the Greek Sinbad, and there's a Roman version who isn't called Sinbad.' I found out that Sinbad is one of those great archetypal stories: The wandering, swashbuckling seafarer that people have been creating stories about through the ages." So which version did he go for? "I was still so much in Gladiator mode that I was like, yes, Greek and Roman – this is a world I know! The Persian Sinbad, on the other hand, was just a little too much work for me."

<br+/><b><center>Brad+Pitt+is+the+voice+of+Sinbad+in+<i>Sinbad:+Legend+of+the+Seven+Seas</i></center></b>

Another surprise for Logan was just how collaborative the process of working on an animated feature could be. "Initially, I wrote it exactly as I would a live-action movie, and I was very used to collaborating just with the director," Logan explains. "The most enjoyable part of the Sinbad experience has been benefiting from the incredible talents of the producers, the directors, the animators and the voice talent, who all came in with great ideas and helped the material in ways that I could have never imagined. But frankly it took me awhile to learn that process of letting other artists help me make the material exponentially better. Also, the first draft I wrote was very complex, the relationships were very adult – it was too intense in terms of the drama for the audience that this movie was aimed at – and it took me awhile to understand how to shape it in a different way; not dumb it down, but just illuminating different facets."

Currently, Logan is on some very high-profile projects. The much-anticipated period Japan epic The Last Samurai, due later this year, is from Logan's pen, and he's currently "working with Ridley on the sequel to Gladiator and I'm working with [Martin Scorsese] on The Aviator [a biopic of industrialist Howard Hughes, starring Leonardo DiCaprio]," he says. "They're both such great directors. Ridley, of course, is very visual; he brings a world of visual creativity to the work, as well as great emotional truth and sincerity. And Scorsese is just great as the synapses flash in his mind – you just stand there and try to grab them!"