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The more unique your film is and unusual it is and difficult it is, the harder it is to get it financed. That's why a lot of good filmmakers are doing television. They do HBO movies.

A lot of filmmakers from my generation were lucky enough to have their work more or less perpetuated by people who saw them originally on TV and on HBO and certainly on home video.

I thought if I was lucky it would be a nice, modest-sized, modest-budgeted film that would be a modest success. And then something happened.

My first film out of the gate was financially so successful that I guess, being in Hollywood, you get kind of put into a certain box.

I feel that I've been very fortunate in the films that I have gotten and that I've chosen to do.

I don't really expect much from my life. So when I heard my films are premiering in film festival circuits I was glad of course but I thought it was lucky accident.

Well I directed a few feature length things for HBO in the late eighties.

My first movie was this independent that I did on the Erie Canal in 1995, called Erie, that I don't know if you could even get, actually with Felicity Huffman. And then from that I did this film that was eventually called The Broken Giant later that fall. And then I kind of started getting into doing pilots.

The movies I've made, I'm really proud of them. But the experience I've had is, people say to me, 'Oh my God, I saw your movie on HBO. It was actually funny.' Like, that's always the experience. It's a backhanded compliment.

The Whole Wide World is the first movie I've ever produced.