Michael is a funny character, for whom I have a great deal of affection. He sat across his desk and seemed to be a bit of a blunt fellow. We began talking about the characters and he opened up about his vision.

After you have a kid you're just so happy to be alive!

I phoned Joe Roth, who was head of the studio at the time, and told him how beautiful the film was, and that I was fully ready to support it, that Michael's work was wonderful and I imagined that Daniel would feel the same. He listened quietly and read between the lines.

Yes, the marriage proposal was shot. Michael excluded the dialogue from the final edit.

The Kiss scene was attempted three times. The first was in a peculiar spot of the fort on the ground level. It felt forced to me, and I knew right away that, in spite of what others were saying, it was dead wrong.

A lot of people in the movie industry tend to run and hide from it like ostriches. Movie industry people are definitely in denial right now, but you do become desensitized to violence when you see it on the screen so often. Let's face it, violence exists for one reason in movies, and that's to get an effect, create an emotion, sell tickets. - on the link between movies and school violence.

There were mornings in the make-up trailer where I'd have fits of laughter because of the extraordinary daily events of the shoot. Sometimes, it was all too much to believe. But the wildest things happened.