Gavin Scott | Film & TV
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Talking to Martin Scorsese about his latest movie

Last night I had the privilege of conducting the BAFTA/LA interview with Marty, his cinematographer Rodriego Pieto and his casting directors about his wonderful new movie, Killers of the Flower Moon, which I unreservedly reccommend to anyone who loves cinema, social justice and American history. He and his team were a delight to talk to and the three hours of the movie sped past, with amazing performances by Leonardo de Caprio, Robert de Niro and Lily Gladstone. Thank you Mr. Scorsese! ...

Talking to Rashida Jones

On Sunday night I'm taking a break from promoting #AgeofExodus to interview Rashida Jones for BAFTA LA about the splendid film she made celebrating her amazing father, Quincy....

18th Century Movie Mogul

This amazing drawing by an eighteenth century French artist called Edme Bouchardon reveals a woman who was clearly going around Paris in the reign of Louis the Fifteenth showing movies. She’s winding a barrel organ and carrying a portable projector on her back - and presumably a portable screen in the box. Here’s one of the actual projectors from that era she might be using, and another with the slides inserted. #AgeofOlympus @TitanBooks And we are talking about movies: if you slid the glass plate back and forward it did look...

Wrestling with Ursula le Guin

I was recently asked to write an article about my adaptation of two of Ursula le Guin's wonderful Earthsea fantasy novels for television: and this is my painful confession. http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2016/04/guest-post-gavin-scott-wrestling-ursula-le-guin/ ...

The Mitsubishi Commercial

Last year I played the part of a British tailor in a wonderfully absurd commercial for the Mitsubishi Outlander. To my amazement it still keeps cropping up - and just in case you'd like to see it, here it is. ...

Absolutely Anything

Absolutely Anything is a comedy I began writing with Monty Python’s Terry Jones many years ago. Terry and I became friends when he directed on of the episodes I wrote for The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and we’ve worked on projects on and off ever since. We’ve now got an amazing cast for the movie, including Pythons, Robin Williams, Simon Pegg and Kate Beckinsale, and Terry has asked me to do a daily blog from the set when we start shooting at the end of March – so stay tuned. In...

Treasure Island Kids

Treasure Island Kids was the overall title for three children’s movies I wrote for Daybreak Films about a group of children at a summer camp on an island in the Pacific which turned out to be the place where the events of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island had actually taken place. In The Battle of Treasure Island, the first movie, which I directed, the kids arrive at the ramshackle camp and are not impressed with the facilities or the eccentric old couple running it. So much so that they want to...

War and Peace

    One of the delights of working on the adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace as an eight hour mini series was that the director, Robert Dornhelm,is a brilliant cook, so script sessions became long leisurely talks over the best combinations of food and wine imaginable. And because writing the script required me to be in Rome for many weeks, staying at the hotel where Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway had been guests and strolling across the city to the offices of Lux Vide, the production company every day, the hardship...

The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne

The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne had a long genesis. I originally wrote a screenplay about Jules Verne and Captain Nemo called "Nemo and Me"; this aroused some interest in the UK, where I was then living, but no sales. The executive of an American company then visiting London asked me to write a second Jules Verne feature which she said her boss would soon be in a position to pay for. I plunged into it, but of course the promised funding never came through. I was, however, able to...

Earthsea

With Kevin Brown and the Sci Fi Channel I developed a four hour mini-series based on the first two books in Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series: "The Wizard of Earthsea" and "The Tombs of Atuan". [gallery link="file" ids="125,138,130,131,132,134,135,136,137"] Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHCGk5d3Gsw  ...

Young Indiana Jones Chronicles

Young Indiana Jones Chronicles In 1990, just weeks after leaving my career as a TV journalist, I was fortunate enough to be taken on by George Lucas as one of the writers for his series "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles." This involved spending weeks at a time at Skywalker Ranch, where the picture below was taken,with writers like Jonathan Hensleigh, Rosemary Anne Sissons,Matthew Jacobs, Jules Selbo and Frank Darabont, creating, under George Lucas' guidance, the plots for each episode of the series, which we would then go home and write, reassembling...

The Borrowers

After I had sold Small Soldiers to Spielberg I was asked by Working Title to write a movie based on the characters in Mary Norton's wonderful "Borrowers" books: possibly because I was regarded as the expert on little people! I created a modern story about a Borrowing family who had the save the house they lived in from the depredations of a lawyer who ended up being played by the inestimable John Goodman. Directed by Peter Hewitt, it looked gorgeous and is still popular with kids today. Hugh Laurie, now...

Small Soldiers

Small Soldiers was the first film script I sold, and was written while I was still living in England - although by then I was commuting to arin County several times a year to work on The Young Indian Jones Chronicles. I had been working on the idea for years but was never able to find a story to fit the concept. But when I got an agent in LA and began pitching my ideas around the town, this one aroused enthusiasm. Nobody hired me to write the script, but...

Mists of Avalon

I felt truly honoured when TNT asked me to adapt Marion Zimmer Bradley's extraordinary saga of the Arthurian saga as seen through the point of view of the women of the era. Women in particular award it the same enthusiasm that's usually reserved for The Lord of the Rings, and I was profoundly relieved that I didn't face a barrage of criticism for the fairly large structural changes I had to make. But I did them in the spirit of the book and everyone seemed to accept them in good...

Jules Verniana

Here are some of the colourful colours used to help make Verne's works bestsellers in 19th century France. His publisher Hetzel certainly had a flair for the eye-catching. I'm sure these jackets had the same sort of impact as the covers of Tintin comic books have in France today. ...

Jules Verne – New Zealand article

Article From Hawke's Bay Herald Tribune, New Zealand Scriptwriter Gavin Scott has always had a passion for history. Even as a kid growing up in Hawke's Bay he would "plunge into the history books at Havelock North Library". That interest has manifested itself in his work of the past decade, writing television and movie scripts for the likes of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Disney and HBO. Tonight Scott's television series The Secret Adventures of Jutes Verne starts on Prime Television. Scott had read a biography of Verne and discovered that his 20,000 Leagues Under...

Jules Verne Episode Commentary

Commentary By GAVIN SCOTT CREATOR, THE SECRET ADVENTURES OF JULES VERNE Welcome to the world of Jules Verne: or at least, our might-have-been version of it. The idea for this show came to me when I read that Jules Verne had written an original version of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” that was significantly different from the one we know. It was about a Polish nobleman whose family had been massacred by the Russians during the suppression of an uprising, and who built a submarine to take revenge. Jules’ publisher, Hetzel, knew he had...

Ghosts of Malibu

I often go hiking in Rustic Canyon in the Santa Monica mountains, and came across the ruins of what was, in the 1930’s and 40’s, a huge, secret fortified encampment of Nazi agents and sympathisers. Which led to the purchase of a large black hat and the creation, with my friend cinematographer Arthur Albert, of the following ghost story … Episode 1 ...