Dialogue is used to reveal not what we want to say, but what we are trying to hide.

In all honesty a gangster picture was the easiest kind of film for me to get made.

Poetry died as a commercial form and then it died as a serious art form. No one serious touches it. It used to be that somebody like F. Scott Fitzgerald could make a high middle-class income from working as a short story writer for the Saturday Evening Post and other outlets. That doesn't happen anymore. It used to be that a legitimate playwright could make a living on Broadway from writing decent plays.

On historical you take the known facts, dramatize them, and then stitch them together by invention. It's a projective thing.

Certainly some guy eating cardboard in Cincinnati has lost any ordinary impetus to review your novel decently if he's just read you just got six figures out of Warner Bros - which incidentally was not true.

As far as executing work is concerned, you do it all in order. You do it in contractual order. There's no overlap, it's just continuation of your ordinary work. You move from one project into another.

Refreshing honesty has been getting me in trouble since I was five, but it's probably had some positive effects - like not being a liar.