What you care about [movie] is whether it's moving you, or whether you're caught up in it.

On the surface, Wonder Boys seemed like such a departure from L.A. Confidential - it's funny, it's contemporary, and so on - and yet at a certain point, I had a feeling that reminded me how I felt when I was shooting L.A. Confidential. I analyzed it for a while, and thought about how emotionally involved I was with the characters. Then I realized that in both movies, there are three main male characters and one female, and all of them are struggling to figure out what they're doing with their lives, independent of each other.

I also got to know Roger Corman a bit while we were on location in Mendocino. And then, subsequently, a woman who also worked on The Dunwich Horror named Tamara Asseyev and I teamed up and co-produced a picture that I wrote and directed, called Sweet Kill, that Roger Corman's then-new company distributed.

Here [in Wonder Boys] I had this group of characters where you didn't know which were the important ones or what direction they were heading.

Most scripts are so linear and simplistic in their plotline.

Bad Influence, which is an early movie of mine that I'm very fond of. It was an unhappy experience when that picture got released, because it coincided with that ridiculous Rob Lowe videotape scandal.

As ridiculous as it is for anybody who knows how movies are made, there were people who actually wrote in reviews that this picture [Bad Influence] had been put out to capitalize on the scandal. Which, of course, would have been impossible.