Over the course of his nearly 40-year career, Steven Zaillian has reinvented himself almost as many times as Tom Ripley, the indelible lead character of his latest project, Ripley. He’s written films about erudite cannibals, baseball statisticians, American gangsters, serial killers, and chess prodigies. “Each time I go out, I feel like I’m doing it for the first time and that it requires different material, requires a different approach,” Zaillian tells Tudum. 

Zaillian is freshly nominated for both writing and directing Emmys for his work on Ripley — accolades that join a healthy group of previous awards (including an Oscar for writing Schindler’s List and a Directors Guild of America award for his direction of The Night Of). He joined Tudum for a wide-ranging conversation about his entire career, from his work on Awakenings to his directorial debut with Searching for Bobby Fischer, and finally to the lavish con jobs of Ripley. 

Philippe Antonello/Netflix

“You learn something new every time, but it’s impossible to learn everything,” Zaillian says. It may be impossible, but he’s still trying.

The Falcon and the Snowman (1985)

Zaillian’s first screenwriting credit came with John Schlesinger’s spy drama The Falcon and the Snowman, a minor box office success that received highly positive reviews. 

“The very first thing I did was The Falcon and the Snowman with John Schlesinger, and at that time, John wanted me there. I think he felt that I was kind of like the American expert in terms of these characters, and he liked having writers around, so that was my first experience. It was my first experience and then [I] found out that it’s not usually what happens.”

Courtesy of Everett Collection

Awakenings (1990)

Five years later, Zaillian wrote Awakenings, a drama based on neurologist Oliver Sacks’ memoir of the same name. Awakenings told the story of Sacks’ efforts to “awaken” victims of encephalitis lethargica, the so-called sleeping sickness. The film nabbed Zaillian his first Oscar nomination, for Best Adapted Screenplay. He reflected on bringing Sacks’ memoir to life, and making him a character in the film (played by Robin Williams). 

“The doctor is not a character in his own book. He’s writing about patients that he had. The first half of the book is case studies of various patients that have this neurological disorder and their treatment, and then the second half of the book is kind of a philosophical essay on health and medicine and the human condition, I would say. I was fascinated, basically by the first half of the book. And once I met Dr. Oliver Sacks, I started thinking, ‘Oh, this story should actually be about him.’ And that came as a surprise to him. I mean, he didn’t imagine that he was going to be a character in that story, but that’s what I did with it.”

Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993)

Zaillian made his directorial debut with Searching for Bobby Fischer, the story of chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin. Zaillian adapted the film from the book of the same name, written by Waitzkin’s father. 

“I don’t want to really love a script that I’ve written and then hate the movie. And so I consciously was looking for something that I could do, and that book appealed to me. It’s very tricky to say what appeals to me about any given source material. It’s always something different. In the case of Awakenings, it was just the subject matter itself. In terms of Searching for Bobby Fischer, my initial reaction to it was picking up the book and seeing a photograph of a 7-year-old boy looking at a chessboard in a very adult way. His face did not look like a child and I asked myself the question, ‘How does that happen? How does a kid find himself in what is really a very adult sort of world with a lot of pressure?’ He was obviously under pressure even in that photograph. And then I started reading about the chess world in Fred Waitzkin’s book and there were just so many interesting aspects to it. So the challenge was really, OK, what’s the story? I have to somehow make a story out of this.”

Courtesy of Everett Collection

Schindler’s List (1993)

The same year Searching for Bobby Fischer was released, Zaillian had his biggest success to date, writing the Academy Award–winning screenplay of Steven Spielberg’s sweeping drama Schindler’s List. The film tells the story of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved more than a thousand Jews during the Holocaust.

“A friend of mine told me, ‘Oh, this is a great book. You should read it.’ At that moment, Spielberg was producing it. Scorsese was going to direct it. I had several meetings with Scorsese. At a certain point, Spielberg became the director, and then many meetings with him and that was it. I was kind of stunned that I was considered to do it in the first place and was terrified of not doing a good job. So it was important to me, and I spent a lot of time on that.”

Zaillian joined the project before Spielberg had settled on the director’s chair; he was first brought onto the film by Martin Scorsese, who eventually traded Schindler’s List with his friend Spielberg for the opportunity to direct Cape Fear instead. Zaillian would go on to work with Scorsese several more times, on Gangs of New York and The Irishman. Zaillian says their working relationship has remained consistent over the years.

“I’m left to my own devices in terms of the first draft. In Marty’s case, he does something that not every director does, and that’s to read the script. Not like a reading of a table read with actors, but he reads it out loud and I just sit there. I think it helps him visualize it. Questions will come up in the course of reading it out loud and we will talk about those things, and I find that process really helpful. When you read something out loud, it’s basically taking the amount of time that the scene is going to take, and you can get a sense of, is the scene too short? Is it too long? What’s the point of the scene? Is it really getting to the meat of the scene quick enough? And all of those things.”

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

Zaillian faced a challenge adapting The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; the sprawling, best-selling novel is full of narrative digressions. For David Fincher’s chilly 2011 film, Zaillian condensed it, excising subplots and a few minor characters. It was effective practice for Ripley — although in that case, he had the space to spread out.

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is more in line with what I usually do, which is condensing. If I’m doing an adaptation of a book that’s 500 pages long, obviously there’s got to be condensing to do. Sometimes that even means composite characters and things like that. With Ripley, I wasn’t trying to condense anything, but I also wasn’t trying to lengthen anything. It’s very faithful in terms of the movements of the book. The beginning of the book, which becomes Episode 1, that’s 30 or 40 pages of the book, so I was being faithful to that. In terms of the set pieces in Episode 3, in Episode 5, those were quite long in the book, and they were long in the script, and they’re long in the show. That was, again, by design to try to capture the feeling of the book in the series. Two very different things.”

Niko Tavernise/Netflix

The Irishman (2019)

For The Irishman, Martin Scorsese’s 2019 mobster elegy, Zaillian and Scorsese put together a staggering, lengthy screenplay that became a nearly four-hour film. Despite jokes about how to watch the film as a miniseries, the production shared little with Zaillian’s work on miniseries like The Night Of and Ripley. 

“I had various approaches in terms of the length of [The Irishman] script in particular, the beginning of the script, and that’s where we ended up. I mean, it is just a process. It’s not a formula. It’s not something that I think, ‘Oh, OK, I am going to apply what I know from some other script I’ve done to this one.’ This is a whole different form for me. I’m not used to, this is eight hours. It’s episodic. It’s not something that I’ve done very much, so I am still kind of figuring it out as I go along. The only way that I can approach it with any confidence is to think of it as a long movie and then start dividing it up. I very roughly lay out what I think the episodes are going to be, but it’s more about just how long they’re going to be, what’s the length of them, and are there enough of them, and then start kind of molding it after that. It’s super important to me to have an outline, like a really complete outline.”

Philippe Antonello/Netflix

Ripley (2024)

For Ripley, Zaillian also had a new challenge to face: setting his work apart from what came before. 

“When it was proposed to me as a series I felt, ‘OK, it’s dangerous because there have been films made from it.’ But this is a different form, and the approach is going to be so much different that I was intrigued by that idea. I didn’t feel like it was a remake. I felt like it was something new, and so that’s how I convinced myself to get involved in it. I wasn’t consciously trying to make it different, but I was consciously trying to make it in a way that captured what I felt when I read the book or how I saw things when I read the book, and just by doing that made it different.”

One new choice Zaillian made gave Tom Ripley a distinctly sadder edge: This iteration of the character is older than he’s ever been before.

“The idea that this person who’s a failure, this petty con man who’s got no future at 25, is not as serious as one who’s 35 or even late 30s. One of the themes of the show is that everyone is a fake. Tom is obviously a fake in every way. Dickie claims to be a painter and isn’t really. Marge claims to be a writer, and Freddie claims to be a playwright. So everyone is sort of a failure at what they want to be, and I just feel like characters in their 30s feeling that it makes more sense than characters in their 20s.” 

You might ask yourself — does Zaillian see any patterns connecting the diverse projects that make up his career? Only one: hard work.

“I consider each project on its own. Do I respond to a particular story or characters, and do I think I can do a good job? That's always been my only guide really.”

Ripley is now streaming on Netflix.