As a director, when you cut scenes from a movie, you do it with the idea that it is making the story move forward and progress. Sometimes, you don't realize that something is actually a sidetrack for the story, or it takes the tension out of a scene.

You actually do confront your dark side, your impulses, or your feelings of sibling rivalry in Cinderella or whatever. You admit that they exist and then you work through them and conquer them and come out living happily ever after having learned something. That's one reason why the fairy tales keep having traction and meaning.

I think it's true that the more sanitized a person is, you can't really relate to that person.

If a scene doesn't work on three levels - it's not advancing the story, the characters, and telling me something new - then put it in the trash.

I just wrote a really cool script. It's called "One Track Mind." It's an origin story about the most successful and the most foul-mouthed, outrageous songwriter in history.

I used to be an architect, so I have a series I am working on with USA Network that I created and am co-writing.

We read about secret lives that people have on the Internet, or alternate lives of a serial killer where the whole family didn't know that their dad or their brother or their child was that. There are all the things in our heart that no one really knows, and I thought that that was interesting territory to explore.