Tony Kushner appeared on last night's THE COLBERT REPORT on Comedy Central to speak about 'Lincoln', his lastest film collaboration with director Steven Spielberg.
Colbert began the interview by asking the Tony Award-winning playwright what it was like to pen the script about the famous historical figure whom Americans have come to know as "Uncle Penny Face." The writer confessed, "It was scary. I didn't want to do it at first because I didn't think it was going to be possible." Check out the full interview below!
Kushner is best known for Broadway's Angels in America, a play in two parts: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, a seven-hour epic about the AIDS epidemic in Reagan-era New York, which was later adapted into an HBO miniseries for which Kushner wrote the screenplay.
His other plays include Hydriotaphia, Slavs!: Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness, A Bright Room Called Day, Homebody/Kabul, and the book for the musical Caroline, or Change. His new translation of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children was performed at the Delacorte Theater in the summer of 2006, starring Meryl Streep and directed by George C. Wolfe. Kushner has also adapted Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan, Corneille's The Illusion, and S. Ansky's play The Dybbuk.
In the early 2000s, Kushner began writing for film. His co-written screenplay Munich was produced and directed by Steven Spielberg in 2005. In January 2006, a documentary feature about Kushner entitled Wrestling With Angels debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. The film was directed by Freida Lee Mock.
Videos