There are many people who want to make movies and very few opportunities for them to do it. I had a checkered early career with a lot of very unhappy experiences where pictures got taken away, re-cut, re-titled... all the nightmares one hears about. Consequently, it's so gratifying to then make a picture that's successful and gives you leverage to have better circumstances than you've ever had, before the next time out.

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.

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 was never a critic.

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

On 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.

Samuel Fuller pictures were both written and shot in such an unusual way that his voice came through loud and clear, and it made a big impression on me.