I learned my job from English dramatists. Tennessee Williams was no good for me, New York stuff was no good to me.

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.

Poetry died as a commercial form and then it died as a serious art form. No one serious touches it. It used to be that somebody like F. Scott Fitzgerald could make a high middle-class income from working as a short story writer for the Saturday Evening Post and other outlets. That doesn't happen anymore. It used to be that a legitimate playwright could make a living on Broadway from writing decent plays.

I've always been a bit repelled by "Sunset Boulevard", which is wrong about almost everything it touches, whether it's fame, Hollywood, screenwriters, or old ladies. Sunset Boulevard would only make sense to me if it was about John Gilbert and the pool boy.

My gratitude to Ridley [Scott] isn't anything new. I named one of my kids after him. But he's a very important person to me.

It's interesting to think that my children know more about the process than many mature critics.

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.