It really started after The Long Kiss Goodnight sold for just a sinful amount of money. People were angry that I took the money. People offer you $4 million for a script - what are you going to say? "No, I'd rather sell it for $100,000"? But it engendered so much anger, I lost friends over it. And no one talked about the creative content of anything I did any more. They all just assumed I was this guy with a formula, a hack formula.

I have no power, and that's what's so humbling.

I owe a great deal of thanks to this man who will be gracious enough to say I've helped him with his career and comeback, but it's every bit the opposite.

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

Sometimes I'll have a scene that strikes me, I just feel like writing a scene, a mini-story that seems like it might lead somewhere. But that is such a tentative, fishing-hook way to go about it that these days I've found it's easier to kind of at least have your concept and start attaching things to a skeleton. So I try to find the armature, the kind of backbone of it first that you can start to hang those scenes on.

When you are making a lot of money people forget you are trying to be creative and they picture you laughing all the way to the bank ... especially with an action script, automatically it gets boo-hooed as being worthless. It was very difficult to hear that sort of thing and I lost a good many friends over money issues because they didn't have money or their scripts weren't selling and mine were.

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.