You have to be in California in order to write or direct movies. People say, "Oh, I'm gonna do it from Pittsburgh. I'm just gonna deliver scripts or fly out, like, once, then fly back." You have to make a full commitment. You have to actually get on a plane, come to L.A., rent a place, and live there. And that's how you forge your career. Not just sort of haphazardly. Once you've got a few hits under your belt, assuming you do, then go back and move away and correspond with the studio.

The other thing being at UCLA was just being in California and around the movie business. Which I honestly believe, and I've told this to screenwriters, you have to do. You have to be there in order to write or direct movies.

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

You have to be in California in order to write or direct movies. People say, "Oh, I'm gonna do it from Pittsburgh. I'm just gonna deliver scripts or fly out, like, once, then fly back." You have to make a full commitment. You have to actually get on a plane, come to L.A., rent a place, and live there. And that's how you forge your career. Not just sort of haphazardly. Once you've got a few hits under your belt, assuming you do, then go back and move away and correspond with the studio.

I've turned down lots and lots of work. Things that could have made me some money.

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.

I think about the audience in the sense that I serve as my own audience. I have to please myself the way, if I saw the movie in a theater, I would be pleased. Do I think about catering to an audience? No.