Wildlife was the only thing we've written together with Paul Dano. It's based on a book by this author Richard Ford, who just published a memoir about his family that's really wonderful. Paul fell in love with his book, and we optioned it ourselves, and he took a first pass at writing it. He asked me for notes, and then our note session devolved into an argument really quickly.

Most adults get to a point in their careers where they feel secure, where they have a body of work behind them that will ensure longevity, and for actors, it's just not like that. You're basically always a temp, going from job to job.

I've always really been interested in the Pygmalion myth and both what it has to say about creativity and what it has to say about relationships between men and women. I'd been thinking about what I would want to do with that if I was going to write on that theme, and one morning I woke up and Calvin and Ruby Sparks were in my head.

I think most actors jump at the chance to do something where the camera's on them all the time.

Part of the challenge of being a girl living in the 21st Century, looking back, the danger is to not judge your character by your own standards.

In a way, you normalize your own childhood to yourself, so I never thought about how much I wrote as a kid. So I was there, confronted with it - so many notebooks, so many tiny plays. Every week we put on a play. We had a big futon, so my sister and I would use the futon as our stage, and I wrote little skits and made her faint because I found it so funny.

I think action should be revealed through character, so if you have a plot problem, it's probably a character problem.