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I generally don't walk out of films. If I start a book, and I don't love it by page 100, I will stop reading because it's just too much of a time commitment. But you never know with a movie what's going to turn around.

Generally, with films, what tends to happen is that a few people get a lot of momentum out of it, and a lot of people don't.

Sometimes a movie knows you're watching it. It knows how to hold and keep you, how, when it's over, to make you want it all over again.

As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.

Watching a movie from beginning to end is like reading, because even though what you see are images, they are telling you a story.

A movie goes from several stages, from idea to script. As you continue shooting, you will make some adjustments. You're constantly adjusting. It's like a piece of music. You're constantly trying to make it better.

Books provide context and allow you to think about things over time. Film is like writing haiku; there is an immense amount of pleasure in paring down and paring down. But it isn't the same.

If you think about movies that are adapted from books, they never feel like enough. There's always too much cut out in the end. You either make a five hour movie or you leave out stuff that should be in there.

I'm always frustrated when somebody makes a movie out of a book and they leave the book behind, or the heart of it.