When I was young I was only thinking of writing, and whatever was going on was unreal and comparatively unimportant.

For me, film has been good because I'm able to work at top crack, working at something I love to do, in the only literary form in which you can still make money. There are no famous novelists, not as novelists used to be famous.

Some reviewer might be out there saying, obviously Edge of Darkness didn't come off because of the script, blah blah blah, but everybody has read the script, except the journalist attacking it.

By the time someone gave me some samples of standard screenplays I was already beyond that stuff, because I was not only a tinkerer in ways to do things, I'd started from Dylan Thomas. As a screen dramatist he was a very intense visualist, with great timing and fluency.

Whatever you cut when there's no deadline isn't really a cut. You're just pushing colors around.

Casting is all about availability, as much as anything else.

I'm a guy whose first motion picture experience was seeing Ridley Scott glide past on a camera on a hundred and fifty million dollar film, and prep two movies, and there is no way to overstate that when you've worked with Ridley, it's like having been a quarterdeck lieutenant to Lord Nelson.