You can imagine what it was like for me to actually be sitting in a room with matching typewriters, working under the tutelage of this guy I so admired, both as a filmmaker and as a man.

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.

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.

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.

I didn't look at it as a transition so much, because I never intended to have a career as a journalist, writing about people who make movies.

I make that distinction only because I came to it strictly as someone who was just a lover of storytellers and cinematic storytellers.