There are times when you work with directors on set, and things are a bit rudderless, and those can be good directors.

What you learn when you direct a film, even more so than as a producer, it's a marriage. It's like a relationship with that film so you've got to make sure that it's really something that you want to live with for three years or however long it is. So I haven't found the right thing to marry yet.

As a writer, you know what the purpose of the scene is. It really has nothing to do with the actor so you have to really get out of that space because for actors it's a micro-focus and then you figure out your arc through what the writers have given you to say. But that arc is just one little piece of the huge arc of the whole film. It took a while to get out of that.

There are times when you work with directors on set, and things are a bit rudderless, and those can be good directors.

Writing a screenplay is like writing a big puzzle, and so the hardest part, I think, is getting the story.

The Ides of March was a fairly cynical film.

You really have to get out of an actor's head to write because actors only care about their part and it revolves around their part so "This is the important part because this is the part where..." .