Stephen Gaghan

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Stephen Gaghan (born May 6, 1965, Louisville, Kentucky) is an Academy Award and Emmy Award-winning American film writer and director. His most acclaimed accomplishment is writing the screenplay for Steven Soderbergh's film Traffic, for which he won the Academy Award.

Gaghan attended Kentucky Country Day School, a college prep school in Louisville. In his final days of high school before graduation, Gaghan was expelled for driving a go-cart through the halls of the school. A straight-A student, he is also a recovering drug addict. During the release of Traffic, a critic commented on one of the teen characters in the movie who is a drug addict and a straight-A student, calling it unrealistic, which Gaghan defended by stating that he had straight-A's while he was living through a drug nightmare in school also. Gaghan has stated that the high school in Traffic is at least partially based on his high school experience.

In addition to Traffic, Gaghan has also directed and written the screenplays for Syriana (2005) and Abandon (2002). Other writing credits include Havoc (2005), The Alamo (2004) and Rules of Engagement (2000), as well as a handful of episodes of various television series. Gaghan recently turned down the chance to adapt Dan Brown's novel, The Da Vinci Code.

In his television writing career, he won an Emmy Award for co-writing a NYPD Blue episode entitled Where's Swaldo, in 1997. In addition to NYPD Blue, he has also written for The Practice and New York Undercover.

As a filmmaker, Gaghan is generally regarded as one of the two precursors of the style known as hyperlink cinema, along with the Alejandro González Iñarritu/Guillermo Arriaga writer-director team of Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel. Most especially, Syriana's barely comprehensibly narrative, which mimics the confusion and lack of information of the characters yet manages to capture the complexity and feel of being in its particular milieu, is considered a prime example of the hyperlink film.

From November 15, 2006, Nintendo ran a series of television advertisements for the Wii directed by Gaghan as a part of a US$200 million ad campaign. The productions are Nintendo's first broad-based advertising strategy and include a two-minute video clip showing grandparents and parents enjoying the Wii console with their children. 80% of the advertisements target adults in an attempt to expand the market beyond Nintendo's traditional audience. The music in the ads is from the song "Kodo (Inside the Sun Remix)" by the Yoshida Brothers

His next project is a film adaptation of Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. The film is said to star Leonardo Di Caprio.

He is engaged to Minnie Mortimer, the sister-in-law of New York socialite Tinsley Mortimer.

External Links

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