John Logan discusses his drama, RED Winner of 6 TONY's including BEST PLAY
JOHN LOGAN
Playwright John Logan - a screenwriter whose 2011 movies, "Hugo" and "Rango," - was in London working on the screen adaptation of Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd" when he went to the Tate Gallery. There he discovered a room devoted to the mural-size canvases Mark Rothko had been commissioned to create for the Four Seasons restaurant in the late '50s, the jewel of the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe-designed Seagram Building in New York.
"Honestly, I'd never been struck by paintings. But there was something powerful about these. They had a vibrancy, a severe and somber power to them."
The Russian-born, mostly self-taught Rothko pioneered the Abstract Expressionist school of painting, emphasizing color, shape, form and scale.
His most famous paintings involve what could be described as rectangles floating in rich and luminous colors. The Four Seasons canvases(known as the 'Seagram Murals') from the late '50s, for instance, are primarily rectangular shapes floating in a palette of red, maroon, brown and black. "Shapes," Rothko wrote in the late-1940s journal Possibilities, "have no direct association with any particular visible experience, but in them, one recognizes the principle and passion of organisms."
Suffering from a heart ailment and depression, Rothko committed suicide in 1970 at age 66. He died the same day his Seagram canvases arrived in London at the Tate.
As Logan researched Rothko's eventful life, he knew the story needed to be a play - not an opera or a movie or a musical - but a play about work.
"It had to be about work, about what people really do," Logan says. "Otherwise it would be a bunch of busts talking in highfalutin ideas. I knew the play would need the grit of reality to sustain the grandiosity of the ideas."
The resulting play, "Red," debuted at London's Donmar Warehouse in 2009, then moved to Broadway the following year. Logan won a Tony Award for best play, and the production snagged five other Tonys.
Though Logan is firmly entrenched as a go-to author of Hollywood blockbusters like "Gladiator" or the new James Bond movie "Skyfall" or his current project, a film adaptation of the Broadway hit "Jersey Boys," he says he will always make time for theater.
"It has to do with language for me. "Onstage, we relish the tumble of words, the five-minute speech with its eddies and currents like a river. We love the play of ideas and the rub between dissonant heartbeats. That's what we go to the theater for. I knew 'Red' would be a play because of the language of work. I didn't want to represent painting or painters onscreen. I might as well just film a painting. I was more interested in the sweep and metaphor of live performance. That is something I love."
"Honestly, I'd never been struck by paintings. But there was something powerful about these. They had a vibrancy, a severe and somber power to them."
The Russian-born, mostly self-taught Rothko pioneered the Abstract Expressionist school of painting, emphasizing color, shape, form and scale.
His most famous paintings involve what could be described as rectangles floating in rich and luminous colors. The Four Seasons canvases(known as the 'Seagram Murals') from the late '50s, for instance, are primarily rectangular shapes floating in a palette of red, maroon, brown and black. "Shapes," Rothko wrote in the late-1940s journal Possibilities, "have no direct association with any particular visible experience, but in them, one recognizes the principle and passion of organisms."
Suffering from a heart ailment and depression, Rothko committed suicide in 1970 at age 66. He died the same day his Seagram canvases arrived in London at the Tate.
As Logan researched Rothko's eventful life, he knew the story needed to be a play - not an opera or a movie or a musical - but a play about work.
"It had to be about work, about what people really do," Logan says. "Otherwise it would be a bunch of busts talking in highfalutin ideas. I knew the play would need the grit of reality to sustain the grandiosity of the ideas."
The resulting play, "Red," debuted at London's Donmar Warehouse in 2009, then moved to Broadway the following year. Logan won a Tony Award for best play, and the production snagged five other Tonys.
Though Logan is firmly entrenched as a go-to author of Hollywood blockbusters like "Gladiator" or the new James Bond movie "Skyfall" or his current project, a film adaptation of the Broadway hit "Jersey Boys," he says he will always make time for theater.
"It has to do with language for me. "Onstage, we relish the tumble of words, the five-minute speech with its eddies and currents like a river. We love the play of ideas and the rub between dissonant heartbeats. That's what we go to the theater for. I knew 'Red' would be a play because of the language of work. I didn't want to represent painting or painters onscreen. I might as well just film a painting. I was more interested in the sweep and metaphor of live performance. That is something I love."
