There are people who are put on this earth to do everything.

It's funny when you put music up against picture, and all your preconceptions go away, and you start over. You just realize that that doesn't work at all.

When your characters are not white hats or black hats but something in between, you do have to be very careful about your details. So, that takes a while. I'm not interested in white hats and black hats. I don't think that's how people are in real life.

I knew I wanted to work in Cinemascope because I find it much more beautiful just in terms of the shape of the screen, the wider image, and it's also less like television, which is important.

The good thing about being in advertising was a lot of the skills cross over: you have to be accountable for your jokes; you have to tell a story quickly. It's the most expensive filmmaking foot-for-foot in the world, so it does teach you how to use all of the machines and how to think of things in terms of the physical process of capturing the images. And you have to sell your work. You have to walk into whatever it is and stand up in the middle of a conference room with a storyboard in your hand and make people laugh.

It's hard to hand a script to a director, there's no question about it. You've lived with these characters, you've started with a blank page, especially when it's an original work and something not based on a preexisting piece of material. But if you don't like it, write a novel.

I like to write about love plus an obstacle. Not a really big obstacle; not too serious and not too funny. Just somewhere nicely in between - a combination of the two.