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I had written for the theater and didn't know that I knew how to write for film. Ultimately, I think it's just trusting your voice, trusting your characters, and then telling them in a different medium.

I come from a tradition where the writer writes a play for the actors, rather than for himself, and the dialogue is made to work onstage, so it needs actors to help shape it. So you never get a play right straightaway.

When you write for a show that's not yours, your job is to hear the voices of the characters and write as best you can for those voices.

In the theater, there's an emphasis on the singular voice. You know, it's your play. And in television, there's so much institutional involvement. So you end up having to negotiate with a lot of people, and that provides a kind of wear and tear on the spirit.

The writer creates the role on the page and then the actor takes it and makes it their own.

I always had a problem when I did the audio books myself because they weren't made to have me doing all the voices. And to hear established actors, and you think, 'Wow, that sounds like it's supposed to sound,' is great. They've got the right inflections, which is an enormous skill.

To make theater out of real life, you need to catch dialogue when it happens.

It's about storytelling. The story is told through images. So with the cast, I had to make sure that the emotions were readable without sound... I know some great actors, if you turn off the sound, you don't really know what they're saying.

I believe that as a writer and a director, you're only providing the skeleton of a character, and you're hiring actors to fill it out.

That's what acting is - it's about... having the courage to allow your audience into the private moments of your characters' lives.