People would say, "Well yeah, if I wrote action films, if I wrote the trash that you write, I could make millions too. But I want to write my real movie about these Guatemalan immigrants, and how they hid under a truck for 300 miles." And that's fine. I'd love to make that film too, but to dismiss everything I did just because it's action seems wrong.

I love the idea of a super villain that doesn't wear a cape, that doesn't wear a super suit.

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 had my group of friends, and they stayed my group of friends, they were good about that. We all started to succeed at the same time, so that sort of took the curse off it. I didn't have a bunch of people scowling at me and being potentially jealous. I just had good friends who I was able to help, and they helped me. Yet it eventually came to feel debilitating.

Writing scripts is a laborious job that can be a real pain.

I have a shoebox: for ideas, fragments, snatches of conversation I hear. I scrawl it down, throw the scraps in the box. Every time I start a new script I start picking through the pieces. Suddenly you get five pieces together and think: this is almost the first Act of a movie, if I flesh it out a bit.

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.