Steven Zaillian writes in behaviour rather than speeches, and he is at his best when he leaves a central figure unexplained. His weakness is tidiness: the same clarity that makes hard material easy to follow sometimes makes hard questions easier than they were.
Fi1m perspective
John Stone, the lawyer in The Night Of (2016), has eczema so bad he wears sandals in winter, and Steven Zaillian and Richard Price give the condition as much screen time as the murder. That is Zaillian's method in one detail. He has said his scripts run to around three hundred scenes where most films manage a hundred, and you can feel it in the first hour of that series: a boy on a bench, a call on the radio the police keep failing to connect to him, and almost no music. When the search turns up the knife in Nasir's jacket we felt sick, not with surprise, since we had watched him take it, but because Riz Ahmed plays a boy who has only just understood the night is not over.
He began as an editor in the late 1970s, which may account for the habit, and his first produced screenplay was The Falcon and the Snowman (1985). Awakenings (1990) and Schindler's List (1993) made him the writer studios call when the book is difficult, and for the next quarter century he was mostly that: Gangs of New York (2002) and The Irishman (2019) for Martin Scorsese, Moneyball (2011) with Aaron Sorkin, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) for David Fincher, three films with Ridley Scott. He directed in between, Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993), A Civil Action (1998) and All the King's Men (2006), and the reviews of the last found it lost its way in the cutting room. Then television gave him eight hours at a time, and The Night Of and Ripley (2024) are his from first shot to last.
What he does best is leave a man unexplained. Liam Neeson's Schindler is never tidied into a hero, and we keep watching him because we have not finished deciding what we think of him. Joe Pesci's Russell Bufalino in The Irishman speaks quietly, and the script gives friendship and loyalty enough attention to make us wary of both words. He can also make a hard subject clear without a lecture: the statistics in Moneyball, the medicine in Awakenings, the paperwork that moves a case through a New York courthouse long before it moves as story.
The same instinct for clarity is the fault. Awakenings tidies its emotional questions until illness becomes an invitation to appreciate ordinary life. Moneyball makes the old thinking too convenient a target, so its heroes rarely face anyone who can answer back. The romance in Gangs of New York asks for feeling the writing has not earned. When Zaillian is not sure of a person he is superb. When he is sure, the script gets neater than life.
The directors who serve him best have the patience for three hundred scenes, and Scorsese has it. On The Night Of he gave himself the time, with Robert Elswit, Igor Martinović and Frederick Elmes keeping the precinct in the grey-green of fluorescent tubes while the paperwork did the talking. Television suits him. It is the one form where nobody asks him to cut two hundred scenes.
Biography
Steven Zaillian is an American screenwriter, film director and producer. He wrote the screenplay for Awakenings (1990) and Schindler's List (1993), and provided the story for Mission: Impossible (1996).
Zaillian was born on 30 January 1953 in Fresno, California. He attended Sonoma State University and graduated from San Francisco State University in 1975 with a degree in cinema. His other screenwriting credits include Gangs of New York (2002), American Gangster (2007), Moneyball (2011) and The Irishman (2019). He won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Schindler's List and received Oscar nominations for Awakenings, Gangs of New York, Moneyball and The Irishman.
