When you're creating new roles out of scratch in my opinion working with the actors is a great asset. You can learn a lot from that.

It's a rough and tumble game whenever power is involved - people's ambitions, their desires, their competitive spirit will often push them to play outside the rules. It's dramatic, it's interesting, and I think it's something we can all identify with to a degree.

When you're creating new roles out of scratch in my opinion working with the actors is a great asset. You can learn a lot from that.

We all experience power struggles in our lives - at the workplace, with our friends, in our love lives. In a way, we're all politicians.

Is self-interest a bad thing? We want our leaders to be pure and good, but at the same time we want them to be effective, and to be effective you often have to be ruthless and not bound by ideology or the same morals that we pretend to hold ourselves to.

When you have both parties who will not find ways to compromise, who won't meet in the middle, you have paralysis. It's the perversion of idealism.

My jobs on campaigns were pretty low on the totem pole - I was an advance man.