Stephen Graham
Stephen Graham
Stephen Grahamis an English film and television actor who is best known for his roles as Tommy in the film Snatch, Andrew "Combo" Gascoigne in This Is Englandas well as its television sequels, This Is England '86, This Is England '88and This Is England '90, Danny Ferguson in Occupation, Billy Bremner in The Damned United, notorious bank robber Baby Face Nelson in Public Enemies, Scrum in the Pirates of the Caribbean films and a crooked police detective in the acclaimed...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth3 August 1973
In 1990, I was an undergraduate freshman archeology major sneaking over to the English building and unearthing an amazing repository of books I'd never even suspected. By 1998, I'd have my Ph.D.
I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.
Making people laugh is so much more difficult than making them sad. Too much fiction defaults to the somber, the tragic. This is because sad endings are easy in comparison - happy endings aren't at all simple to earn, especially when writing to an audience jaded by them.
There are always certain things that you tap into, your own personal experiences, and I try to base my characters on someone I know or someone I've seen.
You always want to read something that everybody says has gone too far, don't you? That's supposed to not just be charting our decline, but embodying it?
When Ellen Datlow was running the fiction at 'Omni' in the late '80s and into the '90s, I had a subscription. It was one of two subscriptions I'd saved for, the other being 'Spider-Man.' And they each opened my mind and my heart in wonderful ways.
With slow-moving zombies, what always comes at stake is our humanity.
Where 'Paranormal Activity' really comes into its own is its rhetoric of legitimacy - how it uses itself to authenticate itself, and thus furthers the pretence of being real.
Don’t let anybody ever tell you life’s fair. Not as long as I’m in it.
This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice--blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page.
This is form and content and diction and tone and imagination all looking up at the exact same moment: When Molly Tanzer claps once at the front of the classroom.
The stories I respect most aren't those with the rich, dense prose, but those which achieve a rich, deep effect with simple little nothing-sentences, lines I won't possibly remember, because they simply functioned, didn't draw attention to themselves, were properly humble.
I do love the challenge of screenplays. They're so difficult, such an alien form. It makes them endlessly fascinating. Something I can't keep my fingers out of.
There are moments when you're stepping out of a really nice car on to a red carpet, and you feel inside like, 'This is quite nice,' but I'm never whisked off my feet.