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Pretty much, the writer's in charge in theater. Of course you're in charge with the director, but no one can change your words. People can give you notes, but you don't have to take them. In Hollywood you take them and you cash your check and that's your job. It's very different.

Being a good television screenwriter requires an understanding of the way film accelerates the communication of words.

The writer in movies is about as low as you can get and you really are a hired hand. You are paid a lot of money to be treated like dirt.

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 don't normally make documentaries. I'm a drama director. I've made a few short docs, but I don't like talking heads or 'voice of God' narrators.

With film, you have very limited tools to convey subjectivity - voiceover, the camera's point of view, good acting - but even the very best actor in the world is crude by comparison with what you can do in a written paragraph.

We've gotten to a point where it costs so much money to make a movie that directors and filmmakers feel they have to make sure that everybody gets it. And that's an unfortunate development, I think, in a lot of narratives floating around in the film industry.

The thing is, as a film director, you're essentially alone: You have to tell a story primarily through pictures, and only you know the film you see in your head.

Hollywood has its own way of telling stories. I was just telling stories that I was familiar with. And it's what I want to do in the future: I want to take my audio cinema and put it on the screen.

For everything you give an audience, you always have to take one thing away. They always have to pay for the story.