I'm not interested in characters who aren't broken. I'm not interested in happy people. It just doesn't draw me as a writer.
Theater people say you are either a comedian or a tragedian, and I'm a tragedian. And the vexing, dark characters, the ones where I don't understand their pain or their anguish, they are the characters that appeal to me.
Young screenwriters are always very frustrated when they talk to me. They say, 'How do we get to be a screenwriter?' I say, 'You know what you do? I'll tell you the secret, it's easy: Read 'Hamlet.' You know? Then read it again, and read it again, an...
By the time I wrote 'Any Given Sunday' or 'Bats,' I sort of knew what my job was in terms of what a writer of dialogue does.
When I started earning money from screen-writing, for a long time my only indulgences were books.
I grew up on the Bond movies. The first one I saw was 'Diamonds Are Forever,' when I was a kid. I just loved them to pieces.
I grew up loving monsters. I'm just a total monster geek. When I was a kid, I had the Aurora monster models, and I would make them. I loved the Universal horror movies and the Hammer movies. I just had an affinity for them.
We wanted 'Hugo' to be a cornucopia of cinema, a celebration of everything we do in movies.
