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If you're writing a novel, you can afford to see where the spirit takes you, but in terms of structure and engineering with a screenplay, you have to be quite pragmatic; otherwise, it will run away from you.

I actually think I'm probably more interested in structure than most people who write screenplays, because I think about it.

Writing a screenplay is like writing a big puzzle, and so the hardest part, I think, is getting the story.

It's hard writing screenplays.

I think of myself as a guy who tries to write screenplays and now has tried to direct one. Anything more than that is meaningless and it gets in the way of being a real human being.

I always find the first thing that really bothers me when I start a screenplay is, I have to find a different form. You can't follow the form of the novel. It's a different thing completely. It's impossible. You just somehow have to find a structure for the whole thing. You have to crack that.

It's much like writing a screenplay with someone else and that's how we view it, I think.

I didn't know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay.

I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.

For me, each film, each script is like a little journey in itself, and I'm reinventing the wheel. It's like, 'How do I make this film?' That's part of the pleasure, and that's why I'm not a normal professional director.