There are so many people who are making movies now who can’t get any kind of distribution, so the market seems like it’s flooded.

If I were doing somebody else's script or I adapted a book by Philip Roth, on set there could be a million different interpretations of the material and people could argue with me. Certainly on Synecdoche, New York we had discussions and arguments, but I felt like I had authority because I'm a writer.

You're dealing with the body, and you're dealing with bodily functions. We romanticize everything about people in movies.

I think if I've worked anything through with screenwriting it's that I'm not going to be able to work anything through.

I do have some theatrical background. I've written plays and seen plays and read plays. But I also read novels. One thing I don't read is screenplays.

When I'm writing a script, before I can write dialogue or anything, I have two or three hundred pages of notes, which takes me a year. So, it's not like "what happens next." I've got things that I'm thinking about but I don't settle on them. And if I try to write dialogue before then, I can't. It's just garbage.

I think everything I do is based on my experience in the world in one way or another.