When I'm casting a picture, I think who I'd like to see in it if I was sitting in a theater. Who would surprise me?

I approach the movies I make as a movie-lover as much as a movie-maker.

It was also a new role for me as a writer, because I wanted to just be there to serve Sam. I recognized that this picture would be "a Sam Fuller movie," and I was just trying, in whatever way I could, to help him get what he wanted.

In L.A. Confidential, it was great to surprise the audience with Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe - two Australian actors that they didn't know at all - and let people discover them through the course of the film.

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.

That's what I love about Michael Douglas' performance in Wonder Boys, because I feel like he surprises audiences that know him from very different roles in his other work.