I had a long writing history behind me before I got into anything in film. It comprehended science fiction, it comprehended historical, it comprehended, you know, just about everything that you can think of.

There's always a great hue and cry when you sign onto a "remake," and that's always been sort of annoying me and freaking me out. This profession that we're in is drama. What drama has been since the beginning is, you restage plays with new casts, or a writer will take a new run at an old story.

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.

Get Carter is a classic, but it did nothing in the United States. It came out on a double bill with a Frank Sinatra western.

The old days of screenwriting, and myths about screenwriting, are maybe over. It's a literary form, if you can wake up to it.

I have a library room with four desks in it. On one of them is a spec, on one of them is a present work, on one of them is reading for a future work, on another desk is a novel I'm not doing until I'm a hundred and fifty, and things like that. But, contractually speaking, you just do one at a time when it's on and paid and live. You do your real day on one project and the rest is just literary life. Or intrusions.

Without English art, I never would have understood myself, my own family, or the New England world I lived in.