For me, writing is a solitary thing and a personal thing. And it's weird, because when you make something that requires money and collaborators, you have to talk about them. I don't enjoy that part of it. I still want to keep it to myself.

As a director or writer, you have to be so controlling.

I started out writing when I was young; stuff about exposing the truth about how people are not what they appear, about how they are much more dysfunctional than they seem. Pulling back the curtain - that felt smart. But as I got older, exposing how frail people can be seems less and less deep.

Sometimes when you write something on the page, it can seem very funny, but when you act it out - and this happens to me a lot, actually - the melancholy of the situation becomes more front and center.

I used to have a road-rage issue.

To me, I definitely stand in the corner of wanting to give voice to the bullied, and not the bully.

You feel a little weird, as a writer of scripted television for many years, to say you're a fan of reality TV. You feel like a traitor. But I am a total fan.