[John] Hughes is a great loss, I think. He was the first filmmaker that could look at someone who was young without seeing them as being less.

As a kid, I had a crush on Sophia Loren and Raquel Welch.

[St. Elmo's Fire] it was pretty soon after that. I know we didn't do Breakfast Club knowing we were going to do that.

We worked six days a week [on the The Breakfast Club], so you have one day off. So on that Saturday night, it's not like we could all go out and have a drink because Molly [Ringwald ] and Michael [Hall] weren't old enough. And Ally [Sheedy] pretty much kept to herself. So Emilio and I, every Saturday night, would go into Chicago because we were shooting outside of Chicago in Des Plaines. It's so funny, because even though we might be adversaries in the film, we certainly weren't off-camera. He's a very funny guy.

Phil Hicks was the guy that was in the ROTC, that was going to go into the Vietnam War and thought that was the responsibility of the citizen.

[In The Dark Backward ] someone who has writer's block and kills people in A Cabin By The Lake. I guess he's a type of serial killer, but I don't know.

It's more like the inner workings of John Bender. He feels like he's been given a short shrift, he's not been provided the opportunities that maybe these other kids have. So he feels like he begins in a hole. And instead of trying to raise himself up, he wants to bring all of them down. That's a dynamic that's pretty universal. And so that was the real foothold on that. It wasn't like, "Oh, my high school experience is like John Bender's [in St. Elmo's Fire]."