Steven Zaillian interview

Screenwriter and director, Steven Zaillian, interviewed by F.X. Feeney for the Writers Guild of America, west about his adaptation of All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren.

“There are six main characters,” observes Zaillian, “and I don't think you can tell the story if you drop any one of them. That's a testament to the brilliance of Robert Penn Warren-to have no extraneous main characters, yet have enough of them to tell a rich, complicated tale that's extremely simple and elegant at the same time-like a Chinese box. The book is so well constructed that the writing went quickly-just under five months, which is very fast for me. Structure is often the most time-consuming part of writing any script, I find. The biggest challenge was to fit the whole thing into a two hour time-frame.”

Jude Law and Kate Winslet in All The King's Men, written and directed by Steven Zaillian.