If you decide to do Hamlet in a funny hat staged in a ruined factory, it doesn't make you Shakespeare.

As first time director, though, you're like a new officer coming up to be in charge of very serious veterans, and you're always going to have guys looking at each other for the first day until they realize you're not screwing around.

I don't think you need $35 million bucks to make a movie. I think what people should do is make a lot more movies for a lot less money. You can really do it.

I don't like scripts leaking. On the other hand, the more real attention a script gets, the better.

I love editorial and sound and music, and I was working with the best people, so you learn a lot.

Novelists who get shitty about screenwriting invariably can't do it, or they can't hack it in the world of what's really, in truth, very bold and very public enterprise.

A writer is a performer as well. A writer isn't the literary department. That gets tried on but nothing's a script unless a good writer goes away and does his thing alone.