You work with each individual actor as you perceive their needs to be. It's something that you've figured out in the weeks of pre-production.

Novels have become equally important to me as films. I consider myself a storyteller and passionately engaged in both of those disciplines.

You work with each individual actor as you perceive their needs to be. It's something that you've figured out in the weeks of pre-production.

Deirdre Maddon has an extraordinary, almost celestial way of telling a story. There are so many great writers now - although I also want to go back and read all of Dickens again.

I am half-Jewish, and yet really hadn't been brought up within the Jewish faith. So I had felt culturally Jewish, if that's possible, without really understanding it.

I had a lot of great lakes of ignorance that I was up against, I would write what I knew in almost like islands that were rising up out of the oceans. Then I would take time off and read, sometimes for months, then I would write more of what I knew, and saw what I could see, as much as the story as I could see. And then at a certain point I had to write out what I thought was the plot because it was so hard to keep it all together in my head. And then I started to write in a more linear way.

I was always very curious about other people. I would always stare and my mother would say - just please close your mouth!