When you produce and direct your own film you havethe somewhat consoling feeling that the producer will kill for you..

The thing that usually gets me through the writing is that my feelings of wretched inadequacy are irregularly punctuated by brief flashes of omnipote….

Things get very distorted when you do a movie, weirdly so..

What does it mean for an actor to make a part his own? It means that he takes on what you had intended and starts to put in his own stuff so that it ….

I always believe you can't kill good movies, because somebody's in some room and will die unless it gets made..

Once you read the script, it's the only way it can be..

You become so obsessed, and that's not a bad thing for a movie. Serve it with that sense that it's the whole world..

I think you have a pact with an audience in every picture, and I think the pact is to try and be truthful and to be real..

I took some time out for life..

I had a marketing idea that everybody hated, decency is sexy..

[Screenwriting] is no more complicated than old French torture chambers, I think. It's about as simple as that..

A lot of things just aren't true any more..

I spent two years telling studio heads that it wasn't a cancer picture. I hate cancer pictures. I don't want to see a cancer picture. There is only o….

There was a great director who directed a picture that I wrote who barred me from the set quite appropriately and said, "I'm sorry, Jim. When you're ….

Media reporting denied privacy to anybody doing what I do for a living. It was no longer possible to work on your picture in privacy..

It never stops, accepting that fact is difficult. I took some time out for life..

You have more and more people coming into the tent with the creative guys [on Hollywood films]. You have marketing and concept testers, advertising p….

Dagwood Bumstead was a great unrecognized hero of American literature. He showed up every day, he got knocked down every day, he never got to eat his….

Kids in general make things fresh and alive and they have this great appreciation for, Holy mackerel, we're making a movie!.

I have a lot of nightmares..

I love romantic comedy, but I think you have to have another idea that you're chasing along with romantic comedy..