Success is never bad in Hollywood. It is what you do with success that will dog you.

I was writing from the time I was 12 years old, but I originally wanted to be a novelist.

You know that certain things that you use in the film are going to be shown to audiences five hundred times before they ever sit down to watch the movie. So you have to kind of modulate what can I do to give marketing enough material but that I can still withhold certain things so that it's fresh and surprising for the audience coming to see the movie.

While I was a voracious movie-goer as a boy, I never put writing and films together in my mind.

Directing has completely changed the way I write and watch films.

To me, the ultimate crime in an adaptation is the crime of reverence. A novel is one form of media, a screenplay is another, and a movie is yet another. There's even reverence to a screenplay.

Success is never bad in Hollywood. It is what you do with success that will dog you.