My grandfather was a Holocaust survivor and his life and history were very formative to myself and my family. The almost unimaginable dichotomy between the different eras of his life always crushed my brain on some level. That this guy who was shoveling carob chips out of a barrel and restocking yogurt popsicles could also have those numbers on his arm. It was an inconceivable juxtaposition. His experience was the main window for our family into any kind of social consciousness, or sense of history, or politics, even though a lot of it went unsaid.

Technology requires knowledge and expertise more than it requires money.

I have a feeling the writers who find screenwriting difficult are usually just not lazy enough for the job. They don't know how to stop before the task is done. I've always had a knack for leaving things unfinished, which makes screenwriting easier for me than most.

This book, 'Free bird', is so entangled with politics. I wanted to channel my own internal political monologue in some way to get it out of my brain. I'm not happy that the themes of the book have become more relevant as the publication date nears. Most of it was written in 2014 or so, before the whole Donald Trump thing began. As people paying attention know, the rise of Trump and Trumpism is not an aberration or sudden kind of phenomena.

I've often said, not totally jokingly, that screenwriting doesn't really qualify as real writing at all. You don't string sentences into paragraphs. You don't maintain a constant breath, or create internal rhythms, or even develop a fully-formed thought. The camera does all that work for you!

I'm interested in the ongoing war between the individual and community. That inner dissent against whatever group is surrounding you. No one wants to cede their selfhood to a group, right? And yet no one can exactly live outside the group, either. Even the most obstinate survivalist probably lives in some telepathic communion with all the other obstinate survivalists out there in the woods.

I would never ever condone any violence of any kind. But in the theater of fiction, blood is delightful.