If you're creative, they let you be the showrunner, producer. The first thing my partner and I did as producers was hire ourselves as directors - because who else would hire me?

I started as a journalist actually. I graduated from Northwestern Medill School of Journalism and with my degree discovered, once out in the real world, I wasn't very good at it.

I was crying when I was editing [Beacher] but I stopped all the screenings years ago because I had a headache but then I had seen it again... Well I always cry at the same place, when they play that song "Wind Beneath My Wings". It gets you.

I really wasn't too interested in writing "Father Knows Best" and "Ozzie And Harriet." I thought they were pleasant enough, but it wasn't really what I wanted to do.

I was very proud of that, of taking women and making them vulnerable and so I continued doing that. Right after Beaches I did "Pretty Woman", then I did "Frankie and Johnnie" and then I did "Other Sister" and "Princess Diaries" so that helped me get into the vein there of understanding women and trying to make them very pretty and very interesting.

You do a little more of a record album these days. See I just wanted to put a few songs in Beaches and we did very well. The album of Beaches went gold.

One of my thrills of the business is to find young people, there's a window. I like young people who are in that brief window between on their-way-up and rehab. In that window I can make stars. It's not really true but it's not so far off.