They/Them Writer John Logan Reveals Which Legendary Director He Learned the Most From
After years of writing films for legendary directors like Martin Scorcese, Tim Burton, and Ridley Scott, John Logan makes his directorial debut with the new slasher movie They/Them. It seems likely that Logan learned something while spending that much time working with that caliber of director, and he did. In fact, he learned something different from each of them. ComicBook.com had the opportunity to chat with Logan ahead of They/Them's release. When asked which director he learned the most from, Logan spoke highly of several of the directors he's collaborated with over his career, listing some of their individual talents.
"I think I learned different things from each of them," Logan says. "I think the way Marty Scorsese talks to actors is really, it's very intimate and I tried to mimic that as much as I could. Directors like Ridley Scott and Tim Burton and Sam Mendes have an incredible visual sense of how to move through a world cinematically. So I like to think over my many years as a screenwriter, I sort of cherry-picked bits of genius from each of those directors."
In talking about his work on They/Them, Logan also touched on the origin of the killer's slasher mask. "First of all, you look at every mask that has ever been designed for every slasher movie since the beginning of slasher movies. You find things you like, things you respond to, things you don't respond to," Logan said of designing the mask. "I'm very fond of the Jason Voorhees hockey mask, for all the obvious reasons, because that, to me, is the foundational text of slasher movies. But for our slasher, we wanted to do something more bespoke, because we're in the woods. We wanted it to feel very woodsy. And, also, our killer has, really, two sides to their personality, so the mask reflects one side that's calm and one side that's very angry and aggressive. I worked really closely with Tony Gardner, our brilliant mask designer, and Tony just came up with some great studies for it."
In They/Them, a group of teenagers at an LGBTQ+ conversion camp endures unsettling psychological techniques while being stalked by a mysterious masked killer. John Logan wrote and directed They/Them. The film stars Theo Germaine, Carrie Preston, Anna Chlumsky, Austin Crute, Quei Tann, Anna Lore, Cooper Koch, Monique Kim, Darwin del Fabro, Hayley Griffith, Boone Platt, Mark Ashworth, and Kevin Bacon.
They/Them is now streaming on Peacock.