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

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

When you sit and watch the film with an audience, the focus groups and the cards and all of that is the less what you're worrying about. When you watch a film with an audience you see what is working and what's not working.

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.

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.

Directing my own writing, I see that I talk way too much, and everything can happen much sooner, with much less said about it.

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