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'Traffic' was so good, and I really don't want to take a step back.

I wanted very much to do Traffic and at one point it looked like I was going to work on it. And then, of course, Catherine Zeta-Jones had her relationship with Michael Douglas and it suddenly didn't happen.

I thought that was the crown jewel of the reporter's resume - to actually go to jail protecting a source.

As I travelled around Australia, strangers in pubs, on airplanes, in beach parking lots would bring up Gina Rinehart, not knowing I was writing about her. Everybody had something to say, some of it thoughtful, some of it poorly informed, some of it vividly obscene.

Traffic is one of the most powerful films to come out in recent years. It blew me away.

'Blind Curve,' the book I'm working on now, sprang from a crazy incident that happened to me last year while on my book tour. I was pulled out of my car for a minor traffic violation - an incident that escalated into my being thrown into cuffs and told I was going to jail. Except in my story, the hero doesn't get off as easily as I did.

I've been doing interviews for years, and in all that time, I've virtually never read one and gone, 'Yep, factually and tonally that's exactly what happened.' Pretty much never.

That's one of the problems with Hollywood. It'll say 'policeman,' and an unless it says 'black policeman,' a lot of times you won't even get the opportunity to read for it, which is kind of crazy, but that's the way it is.

Where typically the cops are generally the good guys, 'The Red Road' blurs the lines intelligently and shows corruption from all sides of the law. It provides unpredictable drama where the audience is kept guessing about how these characters will each choose to act.