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

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

I acted for so many years and sat on a million sets and worked with a million different directors so that is to me some of the best training you can get.

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..." .

Look, a lot of directors were actors, even if they were unsuccessful actors which I think is helpful. I think it's a really helpful thing for a director to have experienced that. It helps you know how to talk to actors and how to get what you need from them.

We usually break the story first. For instance, on The Monuments Men, and this one is more complicated because there's a lot of history, so before we started, we sat down with Robert Edsel, the author of the book, for about a week, and basically, he just gave us a lecture and went through everything. And then, I had a researcher, somebody who we had actually used on Argo.

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