John Collee

John Collee
Born
John Gerald Collee

1955 (age 67–68)
NationalityScottish
OccupationScreenwriter
Websitewww.johncollee.com

John Gerald Collee (born 1955) is a Scottish screenwriter whose film scripts include Master and Commander (2003), Happy Feet (2006), Creation (2009), Walking with Dinosaurs (2013) and Hotel Mumbai. He is also a journalist and a novelist. Collee practised medicine and wrote three novels for Penguin before he became a full-time screenwriter.

Background

Collee was born in 1955 to Isobel and J. Gerald, the latter who was a professor of bacteriology at the University of Edinburgh. Collee grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland and in India. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and began practising medicine in Cambridge, Bath, and Bristol. In his third year of practice, he wrote the medical thriller Kingsley's Touch, which was published in 1984. Collee subsequently worked in emergency medicine and worked as a doctor in countries like Gabon, Madagascar, and Sri Lanka. He then wrote a second novel titled A Paper Mask, which was published in 1987. Rights to the novel were acquired for a film adaptation, and Collee wrote the screenplay for director Christopher Morahan, who released the film Paper Mask in 1990. With income from screenwriting, Collee wrote his third novel The Rig, which was published in 1991. Around the same time The Rig was published, Collee became a weekly columnist for The Observer and wrote about travel, science and medicine for the next six years.

Collee met his wife Deborah Snow on the way to Azerbaijan; he was escorting a shipment of medical aid when he met Snow, who was a TV correspondent in Moscow, Russia for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. When he began writing a book about Soviet medicine called The Kingdom of the Blind, he visited Moscow and Snow. The book was unfinished, but when Collee went to the Solomon Islands for a year to work as a doctor, Snow went with him, and they had their first child, Lauren, on the islands. He worked in London for a short time before moving to Sydney, Australia in 1996 to meet Australian directors like Peter Weir and George Miller. For Weir, Collee wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-nominated Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, and for Miller, he wrote the Oscar-winning Happy Feet. He wrote an early (uncredited) draft of The Legend of Tarzan (2016) for Warner Bros. with Guillermo del Toro slated to direct. The movie was later directed by David Yates.

Creation reunited him with Paul Bettany and he later executive-produced The Water Diviner with Russell Crowe directing. Tanna was a collaboration with anthropological film-makers Bentley Dean and Martin Butler which was shortlisted for an Oscar in the foreign language category. Wolf Totem with director Jean-Jacques Annaud made upwards of $100M at the Chinese Box office. After co-writing Hotel Mumbai, which starred actor Dev Patel, he collaborated with Patel on the actor's first film as director, Monkey Man.

He has also written for radio, for example Brogue Male with Paul B. Davies.

John Collee is one of four co-founders of the Australian production company Hopscotch Features. He is also a board member of the Australian branch of climate activist group 350.org. and Vice-President of the Australian Writers Guild

Filmography

Screenwriter

Executive producer

Year Title Role Budget Opening Weekend Gross (US and Canada) Gross (Worldwide)
1990 Paper Mask Writer (novel, screenplay) $6,000 $8,000 $8,000
2003 Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World Writer $150 million $25 million $94 million $212 million
2006 Candy Script Editor $4,000 $45,000 $2.1 million
2006 Happy Feet Writer $100 million $45 million $198 million $384 million
2009 Creation Writer (screen story, screenplay) $10 million $53,000 $341,000 $2.1 million
2013 Walking with Dinosaurs Writer (screenplay) $80 million $7.1 million $36 million $127 million
2014 Son of a Gun Executive producer, script consultant, writer (additional material) $660,000
2014 The Water Diviner Executive producer $22 million $1.2 million $4.2 million $38 million
2015 Wolf Totem Writer $38 million $211,000 $126 million
2023 Whale Nation Writer (English adaptation) $743,000
2023 Lee Co-writer (story & screenplay), executive producer Post production
2024 Furiosa Story consultant $135 million Post production
2024 Boy Swallows Universe (TV Series) Writer (8 episodes), executive producer (8 episodes) Post production

See also

Bibliography


This page was last updated at 2023-08-10 02:12 UTC. Update now. View original page.

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