Stephen Gaghan [The Wunderkind]

By: Julian Chavez | December 21, 2009 | Ten by Ten

Golden Globe, Emmy and Academy Award-winning writer and director Stephen Gaghan is most noted for writing the screenplay for the film Traffic, and writing and directing the film Syriana. As a filmmaker, Gaghan has been known to specialize in “hyperlink cinema,” a style that includes plot twists and interconnected story lines. Gaghan’s next project is the film adaptation of Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking that will star Leonardo DiCaprio.

What is the most important lesson you’ve ever learned?
Let’s maybe not call it the “most important lesson,” which kind of freights it. Let’s call it “an important lesson I have learned again recently.” Which is: You become what you fear if you’re not it already. I find myself listening to oldies stations, singing along to America, Three Dog Night and “Puff the Magic Dragon,” a song I used to loathe to an almost ecstatic level. I could generate the ecstasy of a dervish in my loathing of oldies, oldies stations and people who listened to oldies. Punk swept all that away. Yeah! And then Grunge swept it away again. Double yeah! And then yesterday, there I was in my old station wagon singing along to the oldies, and I realized it was Nirvana. And the DJ was announcing that song before was “Guns of Brixton,” and I hadn’t even noticed.

Who is your favorite contemporary artist and why?
I like a lot of people, but lately, I’ve gotta say Doug Aitken. He puts pictures and moving pictures and narratives of everyday things together in ways that always snap me awake, energize me to think about whatever I’m thinking about in a new way. And he does it over and over. He’s just colossally inventive both in the body of what he creates and the means of delivery. He’s inspired and very, very smart — a rare combo.

What characteristics constitute intelligence?
Intelligence is one of those words, you know, like Kleenex or Xerox, a brand that stands for a category, so I prefer characteristics like “soft” or “extra absorbent,” which I guess would be “insightful” and “empathic.” I learn a great deal from my dogs.

How would you describe the current state of American politics?
Enervating. I hope we’re approaching what would be called in the recovery community a “bottom,” where the machinery is just too big, unwieldy, overextended, depleted, that a complete break leads to a starting over. Then again, I imagine this is the sort of thing Andrew Jackson was saying just after the corrupt bargain.

What do you think is the biggest threat to world peace?
Human nature. Probably too facile. History is looked at generally through an ideological or economic lens, and both forces are sending us off the rails just now. More specifically, I think India and Pakistan are our next best opportunity for total conflagration.

What is your definition of success?
Being happy with what I have.

What do you consider your greatest professional achievement?
I don’t like looking backwards. I’m squirreled away right now writing the thing that will make all the difference, the one that will really show them. I’m sure of it. Kidding! The other day, I discovered that both Ernest Lehman and I were nominated for three Edgar Awards, winning two. And Ernest had a child at age 85.

Which five people do you most admire and why?
I admire all sorts of people. Any top-five list is a rotating list. One week Z is my favorite film, the next it’s Il Conformista, then it’s La Dolce Vita, then Seven Samurai, then Andrei Rublyev. Then it’s five new films. I don’t know. I was watching a documentary by Louis Malle last night, And the Pursuit of Happiness, about immigrants to the USA in the mid-’80s. They were from Cuba and the USSR and Cambodia and Korea. I admired every one of these people. I admired America.

What is the best advice you’ve ever received?
I’m sitting in the lineup at Topanga. I’m on an Anderson board that he’s shaped for me, that I had the word “NOW” stenciled on, up near the nose. It’s a great day, overhead, clean. But I’m doing terribly, just an off day. I’m slapping the water, cursing to myself that I messed up the wave of the day. It was embarrassing. I was infuriated. Out of my mind. And just then, a dolphin leaps out of the water about two feet in front of my face, leaps in a clean arc right over that little admonition of “NOW,” three or four hundred sleek pounds, eye looking right at me, the power of the leap swirling the water slightly, disappearing, heading north. This seems a clear message from the universe: You will be in the moment even if we have to hit you in the head with a porpoise.

How would you define love?
Here is something interesting about love: Scientists in the “wet brain” lab at Yale did an experiment. They showed people pictures that engender feelings of love — one’s beloved wife, grandmother, children, and video of the person you just fallen in love with. They confronted deeply religious people with the conception of the god they “love.” They showed art collectors the Warhol they’ve just purchased. On and on. And they mapped the brain, isolating exactly the neural responses that generate those feelings in the presence of “love.” And then they had the people whose brains were all lit with love on the fMRI start to talk about love, talk about what they were feeling and why. And here’s what happened: It went away.

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