My goal isn't so much genre, or fact-based or not fact-based. I just want to work on projects that I think could be great.

I have absolutely no musical talent of my own!

I was alone a lot as a kid, because my parents were divorced.

I took a lot of writing courses.

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."

I've found that sitting around and obsessing about projects moving forward, when there's actually nothing I can do about it, at a certain point, is really counter-productive.

I spent so many years of my life as a stage actor and when you do all these plays, a lot of really great plays are very politically driven. They deal with deep social issues, and that's the kind of stuff that I love, as an audience member.