You have to be willing to throw [writing] stuff away and replace it.

You write a spec, and you pour your heart and soul and life into a spec, and you think that spec is the movie that's going to sell and get made... I've never heard of anybody that happened to. What happens is, you write a spec, people get it, they see your writing, they see you're good, they bring you into their office and they say, "Boy, that spec was really good - we'll never make that in a million years. We have rights to the board game of Monopoly. What do you think about a Monopoly movie?".

There are a huge amount of people who sell a TV pilot, every year, but most of them never get produced. It's very easy to make a living and never get anything produced.

For a living I write stuff that I know is gonna sell to a studio and make a lot of money at the multiplex.

If you can learn to be incredibly passionate about your work without fighting for it just because it's yours, that's a huge thing.

You need to know that going in, and you also need to be able to write all the time. So when somebody looks at you across the table and says, "What do you think about a movie where Miley Cyrus switches souls with a basset hound?" You need to be able to sit there and figure out how to make that possibly shootable.

I liked writing, and I loved movies, obsessively loved movies, but I had never made the leap of thinking I would actually come out here and write stuff.