I think longer that you sit on a screenplay the longer you sit. I'm a firm believer that you can write the magic out of a movie, out of a screenplay. I'm not saying that the first draft is always the best draft but a lot of times the magic is in the first couple of drafts. T

Nic [Cage] is more than just a fantastic actor. He will get your movie made. The first thing that we did is that we went to producers and there were a lot of great producers.

Nic is definitely a car guy because Nic and [William] Fichtner and Billy, these guys go on and on about the cars. So we had no choice but to do our research and get everything right because they were going to nail us if we didn't.

It's not like we were forced to do something we didn't want to do. I mean, when you see that scene you'll realize that we're really lucky that the weather came at us because now it has a lot more meaning that wasn't automatically there. There's some sort of undertones that wouldn't have existed had we shot it outside. So we got lucky on that and what we try to do is take whatever obstacles come our way and make them work in our favor.

'Scissorman' is terrifying. The studio at the time didn't want Scissorman because they were afraid that he'd look silly to which my response was, 'Well, then why did buy this because that's what the game is.' But I lost that battle.

It's funny, if you go back and look at all those old movies a lot of times they didn't have the budget for music. Each scene here was written to a different time, whether that be 'Breakfast in America' or just different soundtracks that we had for different parts of the movie. I'm interested to see how it all plays once it's all put together.

That's where the inspiration was and so the more that you rewrite and the more you rewrite and the more the numbnuts are coming in to give you notes then the more problems you run into and the more it suddenly doesn't seem like the movie, the story, the characters changed, watered down and we don't have that with this.