You know, people who can draw get upset when people who can't start telling them what to do!

I started with "Pickman's Model," because it was about Boston. I mean, what I loved about [H. P. Lovecraft], at first is his sense of scholarship of an area, setting an environment, enlivening it. I think that's one of the secrets of writing.

We would go on retreats to Florence. The people in the planning team got to be good friends and so we did things like, we'd all go over to the Fort Belvedere in Florence and take that thing over. Because it's up for grabs, you can rent it. And then have New Age meetings and all that kind of stuff. [Buckminster] Fuller loved to go there.

I went to the Mary Lee Burbank School in Belmont. And it was a place where you, like, learned to go to the store? And I was saying, Oh God, I want to learn something else. I wanted to learn to read and write better and do mathematics better. They were very much into Abstract Expressionism and that artsy stuff. And where most kids did what I call meaningless blobs, I could render perfectly.

Boston is not an avant garde place. It stays literally 15 to 20 years behind New York at all times.

I always had a sense of liking diagrams, from the time I was studying architecture. Architecture is built diagrams, basically.

I'd had the experience with Giuseppe Conti, I said, "My God, that's my movie!" I kept seeing [The Day the Earth Stood Still] everywhere I could. Then finally, when VHS and DVDs came out, I got that. And I keep watching it all the time.