House was the first film where I had no influence on the script. I had to buy the script with the game rights.
I was definitely surprised when Talk Radio took off as a play. As a film it has become somewhere between a popular thing and a cult thing.
You see so many movies... the younger people who are coming from MTV or who are coming from commercials and there's no sense of film grammar. There's no real sense of how to tell a story visually. It's just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, you know, which is pretty easy.
Being a good television screenwriter requires an understanding of the way film accelerates the communication of words.
Film provides an opportunity to marry the power of ideas with the power of images.
If you look at the game and everything, it's not quite like looking at an animated film, because that's total character. This, this is really movement, but it's got funny little things if you look for the humor. They're actually getting to the character.
Dragon's Lair 3D is about as close as you can come to controlling an animated feature film.
The marketing department is really an important part of getting an animated film to work. If the people running it are used to selling live action films and the hard rock music and the sex and all those things... Anything outside that, they just don't know what to do with it.
Once you work with a studio on a film, the studio is sort of like this enormous clam that just opens, takes everything and then closes, and no one enters again. They own it all.
Although it is a fantasy film, it's as real as it can be. You have to imagine that an audience will buy their ticket to a cinema and get on a first-class flight and journey to Middle Earth.
I think a film set is a quite controlled environment and you feel like you can trust them and it is going to be a safe place to work, but I really don't think about it.
I've done movies with a sword before. But I haven't really been given the full responsibility of something like a Ridley Scott film.
I don't do a film unless it has a sword in it. And if it doesn't have a sword in it, I insist that they have one in the same room to keep me comfortable.
Film is different for me now. If the money is good and it's not totally revolting, I'll do it.
I knew Secrets and Lies was a great film, but I didn't expect it to get the attention it did because none of his other films had and I thought they were just as good.