I came into screenwriting from an odd direction, because the first screenplay that I read was and is better as writing than the top one percent of literary novels.

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

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

If you see, as I do, in edited film, you're going to end up as a director.

Even though a screenplay is performed only once, unlike other forms of drama, it's still a performance in itself, and unless it's a great performance, odds are that actors will not come, and a movie will never be made.

When I started writing screenplays, as early as I started writing anything, I hadn't seen any ordinary screenplays. I saw movies and figured out how I thought they should be written.

They're done by guys who have talked a good game and then have scrambled together the simulacrum of a drama, so actors are habituated to sometimes having to save a picture on the floor because it's usually part of their job, but they'd rather have a writer doing his job, so that they can do theirs. But I like nothing better than working with actors.