You can win as long as you chose your battles. You can win more arguments then you might think as a writer, even though you legally have no recourse, and your script can get muddied and altered in any way possible. You can use reason, logic, and passion to argue persuasively for a case in your favor. So what I've learned is to just basically not buckle - not be belligerent, not be angry, not throw fits, but just not buckle.

You can just start writing, but you're gonna go off on 10 or 12 starts and weird tangents, and yeah you'll have those pages to use later - to gift wrap some fish for your mother - but either way you're gonna have pages.

I think it's an obligation to make a movie full, so you have to see it twice to get all the moments.

I don't mind women who want to act. That's fine. It's odd that men want to act, in that there's still a degree of vanity associated with it.

I'll say, what makes me happy about making movies is, every once in a while through movies we find a kind of honesty. There's an honesty in fiction that's as effective or even more powerful than the honesty of our lives. We can find something that's genuinely true, like a chemistry between people or a statement that speaks to an audience.

Any time anyone fires bullets in an action movie that don't hit the target it immediately undermines the movie.

Going to UCLA, as far as I'm concerned, afforded me two things. One was the advantage of meeting friends and getting to know a group of guys I hung out with, was chummy with. All of us eventually had success with film. Making films, cutting our own little movies together, 3 in the morning going out and shooting stuff, finding gels that people had thrown away, making our own lights. It was like a frat house for film geeks, the Pad O' Guys. That's what being at UCLA afforded me.