I remember being out here at the Sunset Marquis, and whoever knocked on the door, I would take that picture that I was writing and I would put that in the typewriter, so when I had the meeting, they would say: 'Oh, you're working on it right now?'

There was a widespread indignation in the American media. They were saying, How can you make a movie during an election that's about politics? What are you doing? Are you trying to influence people's lives? To which my response was, Well, I hope so.

When I was really young I didn't know that there was such a thing as a screenwriter. I wrote stories.

I certainly grew up seeing more movies and television than I read books, but when it came time to do the thing itself you don't have to hire a lot of people to sit down and write a book, so that was the story-telling medium that was available to me.

Well, acting is cheap; I knew all these actors who weren't in the Screen Actors Guild yet, and it happened that they were all just about thirty years old.

There are genres I don't care for, and I've never worked in those genres, and then sometimes there are people that I haven't liked and I haven't worked for those people. But if I feel like there's a movie that I would like to go see, I'll jump into it.

There are very few distributors left to do off-Hollywood movies, and those distributors generally have got thousands of movies to choose from. So you're pretty lucky if you get one to even take your movie and it's pretty rare that they pay anything upfront.