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When I came to DreamWorks, I was in bad trouble. They were in bad trouble. They were millions of dollars in the hole and a few days from closing their doors. I was on my last leg.

I think I wrote the first draft of 'Nightmare on Elm Street' in '79. No one wanted to buy it. Nobody. I felt very strongly about it, so I stayed with it and kept paying my assistant and everything. At a certain point, I was literally flat broke.

I was offered a choice of a flat salary up front or a percentage of the film's future earnings. I took the up front money. Nobody could have figured what Halloween would ultimately become.

The first Halloween was very well made. The second one was also well made, though I didn't like it as well as the first one. The third one had nothing to do with the series at all and perhaps shouldn't have been made at all.

I do remember reading the script of 'The Nightmare Fair' and looking forward to doing it.

I must confess I took a couple or three jobs just for the money.

I was lucky enough to have a plethora of types of roles before and during the horror movie part of my career.

The story of my very first sale is the fact that I dreamed up a foolproof paper to cheat an insurance company out of several hundred thousand dollars.

Horror films are the ones that pay the bills, and historically, they have shown that they are good investments. They helped Universal survive with that initial splash of horror films in the 1930s and '40s. And horror films kept New Line alive with the 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' series.

After I graduated from Brandeis, I took all the money I had in the world, which was $5,000, and I made a short film. I made every mistake you could possibly make. It was a total disaster as a piece of work, and yet, you know, it was ambitious in some way.