I can't speak to how Michael [Douglas] approached it in terms of his process.

I grew up as a reader as well as a movie-lover, so many of the novelists I admired - and so many of the great filmmakers I loved - were self-taught.

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.

A day doesn't go by when I don't get a compliment on L.A. Confidential, for example.

Pittsburgh has this rich industrial past, when it was the heart of the U.S. steel industry, and it burned out as the industry burned out and moved elsewhere.

I had a checkered early career, for sure, with a lot of very unhappy experiences where pictures got taken away, re-cut, re-titled... all the nightmares one hears about.

So the city [Pittsburgh] was faced with that question of "What to do now?" because it can't turn back the clock and be what it once was. So thematically, it seemed like the perfect location for the movie. And then, it's a matter of how we get that feeling into the picture and make it a part of [Michael] Chabon's story.