I was trying to figure out what a memory feels like.

In a lot of movies, especially big studio ones, they're not constructed in any other way than to get people to like them and then tell their friends. It's a product.

There is a lot of management going on with directing. Maybe that was the biggest surprise-just the amount of tending that I had to do. The different personalities . . . It's not my way, and it's never been my function before as a writer. I tend to be a moody and somewhat withdrawn person, and I felt very clearly that I had to throw that away because that wasn't allowed here - there were other people who were going to be filling that role. Sometimes it became exhausting, especially around the eleventh hour of the day.

Before you start production, you have characters you have created without actors in mind, then all of a sudden you've got actors. They bring an enormous amount in creating these characters, and creating the dynamics between the characters that you've written.

The only honest and generous thing for me to do is to give people myself. That's all I've got as an artist, so I want to do that in an unflinching way.

I can never watch anything I've been involved in, because I know it, and I know what the making of it was like, and I know what's been cut out and changed. I just know it.

The biggest thing that I came across, right off the bat, was that you can't shoot this like a regular movie with multiple takes. You have to, because it's such a protracted process, break it down to the frame and pretty much get one shot.