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

I had the great fortune to actually become friends with Sam [Fuller] and ultimately collaborate with him on White Dog, which we wrote together.

The bigger problem still is that it determines in many ways what movies get made in the first place. Because as sources of finance are considering a project, they ask themselves, "Does this lend itself to a simplistic marketing approach which will guarantee a big opening weekend?" As a movie-goer, I think that's tragic, because when you look back at those movies that made us fall in love with movies in the first place, most of them were not high-concept, and most of them would not have "won their weekend."

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.

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

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.