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.

Put simply, there are many people who want to make movies and very few opportunities for them to do it.

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

Having done several of them and also loving other kinds of movies, I'm also tougher on suspense stories in terms of finding one that really excites and surprises me.

I can't speak to how Michael [Douglas] approached it in terms of his process.

I was never a critic.

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.