If you need someone to come out of the sewer with a wire you don't hire someone who needs laborious collective instruction. You let someone do his job, whether he's a focus puller or a surgeon.

I need as much of the business of making a film to be in my own workspace. It really ought to be a bit more like doing a novel, alone, at first. I'm feeling my way.

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

If you need someone to come out of the sewer with a wire you don't hire someone who needs laborious collective instruction. You let someone do his job, whether he's a focus puller or a surgeon.

The novel ceases to be looked at as a novel. Such is the overwhelming power of motion pictures. Gore Vidal pointed out that the movies are the only thing anybody's really interested in. The association with movies and movie money can, and certainly did in my case, occlude a novel as a novel.

I think probably everybody works most on the beginning and the ending.

There's only one way to prep, so far as I know. You have your script, you hire the people you want, you find your locations and your setups, everybody shows up and you shoot the film.