Every director should take an acting class. At least one. You know, you panic with actors. It's like, "Okay, this is back in college, I know how to talk to these guys. I know their vocabulary, and I get what they're saying back to me." So basically to learn the vernacular of acting, that's very important.

For years I was doing the excruciating weightlifting of writing scripts - but then I stayed thin and someone else got all the muscles.

The spotlight was on me. I pretended it wasn't, but it was, and for every wrong reason. It was all about money, it was all about my supposed competition with Joe Eszterhas over who'd be the highest-paid screenwriter. I didn't care. I just wanted to write stories, try to become a better writer, improve my style, change genres, even try new things. I didn't like action so much any more.

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.

I think a lot of people - by the time I came back with a script I liked, which took me many years, they'd forgotten who I was. Doors all the time are slamming, you meet friends that you've had for years, you'd go to the studio, and they'd say things to indicate clearly that they hadn't read it, or that they'd had their assistant sort of skim it. They wouldn't buy it. They wouldn't make it.

I think the most important thing is to, without belligerence, stand up for what want. Argue compellingly if someone tries to change your script. Yeah, legally they can if they want to. But rather than give up, as some of the writers do, and just wail about how your script got rewritten, it's much more difficult - but well within the realm of possibility - to argue very sincerely, calmly, and reasonably from your point of view, such that the director or the producer might decide, "All right, let's do it that way."

The Nice Guys movie was the first time in my career where what I wrote on the pages is on the screen. I'm more proud of it than anything else I've done. It is effectively what I wanted. If this movie's bad, it's my fault. It's not somebody else who changed or censored or edited it. This is the stuff I wanted, and that's what's on the screen, and if you don't like it, it's my bad.