For many years I thought, "Well, I need to know a lot more to direct." But I looked around and watched all the people I know directing and thought, "No. I just need to know what I want it to be." Then there will be a lot of people to help me get it to there, especially Bobby Bukowski, he's a brilliant cinematographer.

When I was in high school, it was the beginning of hippies and free love and sleeping with people was a sign of your liberation and your freedom. Then we [had to worry about] AIDS, so they started lecturing my kids in elementary school about safe sex. Sex turned from something joyful into something kind of dangerous, and it was hard to avoid that sense that it was a different world.

It's very hard to be a screenwriter. I remember getting a couple of awards. I got a PEN West award a million years ago when I did Running on Empty, and I sat in the room with all these writers. They wrote everything from novels to non-fiction to children's books to journalism - any kind of writing - and I realized that there was no one in the room who would ever read anything I'd written.

Time matters less than the nature of the people.

For many years I thought, "Well, I need to know a lot more to direct." But I looked around and watched all the people I know directing and thought, "No. I just need to know what I want it to be." Then there will be a lot of people to help me get it to there, especially Bobby Bukowski, he's a brilliant cinematographer.

I had been at the director's workshop for women at the AFI, which at the time was a great thing to do. I had always meant to direct, and for a variety of reasons that are hard to explain, I never did. I produced many things - there'll be people who tell you I directed through them - and of course I wrote. It took a divorce, a move back to New York and a kind of "now I can do anything" to say, "I really want to do this."

Raising a child is the only relationship you have where if you do it right, it will end in separation.