To have a show have lawyers fighting civil rights cases week in and week out, I think it's exactly what we need.

Certainly, for me, and it's gone this way on every project I've worked on, the "writing" never ends until you're done with the movie.

I think there's a lot of shame in American race relations. There's a lot of suppressed guilt that lashes itself out still. I see that all the time, and whereas opposed to sort of trying to address the issue in an up-front way, they're attacking and thus perpetuating the problem thinking that they're being sophisticated and post-racial, when, in fact, they're being completely regressive.

I had written four scripts before I wrote Recount. Each one progressed my career a little bit, but I didn't make a dime off any of them. Recount was the first thing I sold, and I actually sold it as a pitch to HBO. They bought it as a pitch, which was a miracle. I thought, "Wow, this could be the last time I'll be paid to write a script again, which would be too bad because that was an amazing experience I just had."

Idealism loses to pragmatism when it comes to winning elections.

To have a show have lawyers fighting civil rights cases week in and week out, I think it's exactly what we need.

Usually if a scene's really hard to write, I just don't write it. Nothing's coming to mind.