Doug Wright won an Obie Award for outstanding achievement in playwriting and the Kesselring Award for best new American play from the National Arts Club for his play QUILLS - and went on to write the screenplay adaptation, making his motion picture debut. Wright.'s plays, including QUILLS and the critically praised "Watbanaland,-" have a reputation for mixing wit, verve and outrageous comedy with thought-provoking larger themes. A graduate of Yale, he gained his Masters degree in playwriting from New York University and has gone on to write plays that have been performed across Manhattan and the country. He has been published three times in The Best Short Plays series and his work has appeared in Conjunctions and The Paris Review. Among Wright's numerous awards are the William L. Bradley Fellowship at Yale; the Charles MacArthur Fellowship a the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Centre and the Alfred Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University.

Bringing the story to the big screen
Every once in a rare while, a human being comes along who questions all the basic assumptions of society, who probes the very limits of morality, who negates the old, comfortable ideas of what it means to be human. Throughout history, such people have always been viewed as dangerous - and have, ironically, prompted the most extreme and morally questionable responses. At the turn of the 18th century, in the wake of the bloody French Revolution, one such dangerous maverick was undoubtedly the Marquis de Sade, the originator of the term sadism. Sade was so scandalous he continues to shock us in the 21st century - and his legacy continues to raise the debate about just what to do with those who gleefully explore the most sinister taboos.

QUILLS boldly enters that debate by imagining the final days of the Marquis de Sade as a blistering black comedy thriller, a battle between lust and love - and between the brutality of censorship and the unpredictable consequences of free expression.

QUILLS playfully turns Sade's story into a sexy, sinister and at once shattering tale he himself might have written. The motivation at the core of Doug Wright's scathingly witty stage play and subsequent film adaptation: to channel Sade's blasphemous and morally challenging sense of mischief, eroticism and creative triumph into a moving tale of madness and love.

And it was this provocative tone - part scandalous entertainment, part bold inquiry -- that Philip Kaufman hoped to capture on screen. Kaufman - whose filmmaking has always had a daring literary bent to it, leading to adaptations of Milan Kundera ("Unbearable Lightness of Being") and Tom Wolfe ("The Right Stuff"), as well as the story of Henry Miller and Anais Nin (,"'Henry and June") - had long been intrigued by the Marquis de Sade. `I have always been fascinated by extreme literature," he admits. "because it expands on our concept of what is human. And Sade more than anyone seems to demonstrate how extreme behaviour can bring out hypocrisy in those who claim to be moralists."

Kaufman found in QUILLS an opportunity to explore both sides of the censorship debate - and the delicate symbiotic interplay between evil and innocence, extremism and freedom. "It's a provocative film," he admits, ""but the Marquis would have it no other way.." Despite the depths of the story, from the outset Kaufman decided to keep the emphasis on fun, visceral, Gothic-style entertainment, bringing out the comedy and suspense of the story and letting the ideas beneath quietly simmer to a boil.