We're not used to seeing movies, especially with physical action, when it isn't the man who comes in to save the day.

You can dress it up, but it comes down to the fact that a movie is only as good as its script.

I very much had wanted to do a picture with more humor than what I had been allowed to do earlier, which is what attracted me to Wonder Boys so much. I found it funny in a very serious way, which is the best kind of comedy.

I had written the script a few years earlier for Paramount, then later got hired with Sam [Fuller] to write an entirely new script that he was going to direct. And that was one of the great thrills of my professional life.

I wrote a couple of scripts on spec that didn't get made but got some attention, and I then got offers to write professionally.

What I try to do is give each actor an environment in which they can do their best work.

It was just a wonderful experience, one for the memory book for sure. The sad thing about it was that the picture came under this absurd cloud of controversy. Here was a movie based on the central theme that racism is something that is taught, and it's illustrated by this story of a dog and the efforts of humans to re-train it after it had been trained to go after black people. And it created this ridiculous controversy and wound up being the last Hollywood movie that Sam [Fuller] made.