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.
Curtis HansonAs 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.
Curtis HansonHere [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.
Curtis HansonI 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.
Curtis HansonOn a personal note, a legacy he left me, aside from being a friend who was important to me on many levels, was that the decades I knew Sam [Fuller] happened to be the decades that were his least happy professionally.
Curtis HansonOn 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.
Curtis Hanson