Stephen Gaghan interview

In The Times, Brian Appleyard meets screenwriter Stephen Gaghan (Traffic, Syriana).

I’ve met some wired people in my time, but I’ve never met anybody quite like Stephen Gaghan after his third triple espresso. In his room at the Soho Hotel in London, he has made — and talked at some length about making — a perfect little pile of the sweets that came with the coffee; he has checked and rechecked his BlackBerry; he has bounced off the walls; run shrieking round the room with his hands in the air to demonstrate a typical crane shot of the Martin Scorsese school of film-making; crouched in a corner to demonstrate the way he prefers to make films; and talked rapidly, brilliantly, but not entirely connectedly, about drugs, politics and, when he was 14, getting trapped in the snow in Colorado with a girl he really fancied, but couldn’t quite bring himself to kiss.