Road to Perdition, The : Star Of The Week


Road to Perdition, The (2001) - Movie Poster

Max Allan Collins - Author of Road To Perdition

Who is Max Allan Collins?

Max Allan Collins is known as "Mystery's Renaissance man" and boasts great successes with comic strips and books, cards, short stories, novels, film, and even television novelisations.

Great achievements

Hailed as the pioneer of the historical private eye novel genre Collins' past work includes Flying Blind, which explores the most famous US mystery of the twentieth century, the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. Not forgetting the immensely popular True Detective, Stolen Away, Angel in Black, Chicago Confidential and Damned in Paradise.

He's been a president of The Private Eye Writers of America - an organization devoted to private-eye detective fiction - and has won and been nominated for numerous prestigious "Edgar" and "Shamus" awards for both his fiction and non-fiction work.

Collins also created three celebrated contemporary suspense series known as Nolan, Quarry and Mallory (thief, hitman and mystery writer respectively). He has also written four widely praised historical thrillers about real-life "Untouchable" Eliot Ness; and is an accomplished writer of short fiction.

Fans believe that Collins' talent lies in an instinctive ability to rework traditional theories and create new ones convincingly as well as the accuracy of historical research that goes into his work.

Road To Perdition

The original graphic novel about Capone-era crime inspired the makers of the film Road To Perdition immediately.

Producer Dean Zanuck, received Collins’ novel and having never even seen a graphic novel, he began flipping through it and was hooked. “I just loved it,” he recalls. “The father and son story had a powerful emotional impact on me, and the illustrations by Richard Piers Rayner provided a great visual of the period. That, combined with the action in the piece, made it very appealing. When I finished it, I said to my wife, ‘I think something special is going to happen with this.’” Father and producer Richard D. Zanuck and Steven Spielberg (Dreamworks) also felt the novel had amazing potential as a film and went on to base the major production on the book.

Screenplays and novels

As well as working as an independent filmmaker Collins was creative consultant on "Dick Tracy". Having scripted the comic strip from ’77 to ’93 and written three Tracy novels Collins was more the qualified for the role!

Collins has written the novelisation of Road To Perdition’s screenplay and says: “The screenplay is very good and quite faithful. The cast and director and producer are all the best the movie industry has to offer. I do wish I could have written the script. Their take on the story differs from mine slightly -- my vision is more violent, wilder, a John Woo kind of American samurai thing...whereas this movie will fall more in the Godfather area...which is a nice area.”

Collins has also published other movie tie-in novels, like international bestsellers In the Line of Fire, Maverick, Waterworld, Air Force One, Saving Private Ryan.

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