People will continue to make movies. But I do think the economic model of the studio movie is closing in on a kind of systemic collapse.

One of the weird things about L.A. is that there's always a set of negative perceptions that attaches itself to this city.

Every snotty egotistical teenager thinks they're smarter than the world they crawled out of. It didn't take me so long to grow out of that. I think I was only in my early twenties when I realized I was just relying on received ideas.

There was a moment when the Berlin Wall came down and some people felt, "Oh capitalism won. That's the ideology we can believe in now."

I've always felt that the basic unit of writing fiction is the sentence, and the basic unit of the screenplay is the scene.

I grew up with such mixed feelings about LA, but I do love it. I grew up lectured by Woody Allen, for example, that LA was absurd, worthy of ridicule and contempt. Most people seem to describe Los Angeles as elementally despicable, or as someplace that requires an apology.

I do have complicated feelings about Hollywood, but I also have tremendously affectionate ones.