The TV industry works in this crazy system where everybody's trying to get the same actors at the same time.

I don't know how that budget would have been worked out, but that was the initial idea. Obviously, we couldn't have had a show with nine expensive actors in it. It was very nice that they were even interested in doing that. But, I was so proud of what we'd done that I couldn't think of a compelling reason to do a lesser version of it.

There's a lot that you can do in television that you can't do with a film, theoretically. At the time, the only possibility was to do a movie.

Violence has not really been an issue. Even in my wildest hopes, I wasn't trying to get violence in.

I remember being asked when I was in high school what do I want to do when I grow up and the answer is so indicative - I would like to have been a successful playwright.

I think it actually makes more sense for a new audience than the old show did because we're focusing on one character at a time. It's all conjecture why somebody didn't watch, but one of the theories was that there was just so much information, even in the trailers and promos, of all these different people.

Well, at the time, you have to remember that we were not successful. The Showtime offer, as it was presented to me, was half the money for half the show. I was not interested, at that point, in doing a smaller cast and a more simplified Arrested Development.