The other thing - and writers can say whatever they want - is casting. You need to find a person who can inhabit that role, who can not sugarcoat the bad stuff, and not be too hard on the good stuff, but who can come across as a three-dimensional human being with some depth and some thought about what they're doing. When you find James Gandolfini or Jon Hamm, someone who can inhabit this role but still has a natural humanity to them, no matter what they're doing? It's a gift.

As far as casting, I'm there for every single person that's cast. Even if it's one word, I'm there for their auditions.

That's the miracle of telling a story in film: You can express something inside someone's mind.

Identity is part of drama to me. Who am I, why am I behaving this way, and am I aware of it?

I'm a different writer now. You don't sit in a room with Sopranos creator David Chase and writer Terence Winter for four years and not learn something. And just watching the way the show was done, and watching the way that David encouraged the imagination.

It's an ugly thing to see ambition and to see people satisfying themselves.

I think there's a kind of elegance to it, to work within that framework where what you don't see is often more enticing.