I find playwriting to be incredibly difficult compared to screenwriting. Part of it is that I grew up watching movies and not watching plays.

I grew up in L.A. and I don't think I've seen L.A. onscreen in a way that felt real to me. There are definitely movies but they are few and far between.

I was going to make movies. I was the one in the family who was always rolling the video camera making movies of my brothers around town and then screening them for my parents. I still would love to make movies someday... that's something that really means a lot to me and I know I'll have the chance to do it one day.

In terms of number of movies I've been in an extraordinary amount. If you count only the minutes I'm onscreen it's not so long.

Frank is such a great visual storyteller that if you study his artwork you see that his Sin City books are already the best movies never seen on the big screen.

I don't watch the movies I make so I haven't seen 'Footloose' since it came out. You see this young hungry actor it's pretty fun. I was the only one they screen tested. It was an attempt by the director and producer to talk the head of the studio into hiring me because they didn't want me.

With the CGI suddenly there's a thousand enemies instead of six - the army goes off into the horizon. You don't need that. The audience loses its relationship with the threat on the screen. That's something that's consistently happening and it makes these movies like video games and that's a soulless enterprise. It's all kinetics without emotion.

Actors are steeped in a world of agents and where the next job is coming from and what are their expenses and what is the hotel like. You want to take them out of that world and dump them into another world so that when you meet them on the screen they don't seem like the guy who was in two others movies that year.

The nature of the movies is different than it was five years ago and they're all driven by the possibilities of CGI which means you can make anything happen on screen that you can possibly desire.

There are only so many movies you can direct. And yet there are movies that I want to make sure make it to the screen in as honest a way as possible.

It was like in Samoa when they'd put up a movie screen on the beach and show movies and the locals would run behind the sheet to see where the people went. It was pretty grim.

You can't work in the movies. Movies are all about lighting. Very few filmmakers will concentrate on the story. You get very little rehearsal time so anything you do onscreen is a kind of speed painting.

A wide screen just makes a bad film twice as bad.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in you know just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing a character came sort of strolling in and I realized Oh my God I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

You know if you look back in the 1930s the money went to infrastructure. The bridges the municipal buildings the roads those were all built with stimulus money spent on infrastructure. This stimulus bill has fundamentally gone started out with a $500 rebate check remember. That went to buy flat-screen TVs made in China.

When I sent those scripts that was the lowest point of my life. We'd just had our second son and when I went to collect them from hospital I went to the bank to try and get some money to buy some diapers the screen showed I've got $26 left.

I think my first big purchase was actually for my mom. She had one of those '90s TVs in her living room that's like a 10x10 brick so I purchased her a flatscreen for her living room.

Sunscreen is my number 1 2 3 4 and 5 tip. I'm a fanatic partially because I live in L.A. and have fair skin and freckles and partially because of my kids. My mom always made me wear sunscreen and I'm trying to be that mom for them.

For 'So Cold the River ' I'm actually working on adapting the book with Scott Silver who was just nominated for an Oscar for 'The Fighter ' and who also wrote '8 Mile ' which I think is a terrific screenplay. The chance to work with Scott is a tremendous pleasure and I'm learning a lot.

I didn't go to film school so my learning was done out in public and showed up on the screen.

A screen actor is compensated in the knowledge that millions will see his performance at one time where only hundreds will see it on the stage.

There is no worse screen to block out the Spirit than confidence in our own intelligence.

Look at a football field. It looks like a big movie screen. This is theatre. Football combines the strategy of chess. It's part ballet. It's part battleground part playground. We clarify amplify and glorify the game with our footage the narration and that music and in the end create an inspirational piece of footage.

You'd have to have one hell of an imagination to completely make up a story but historians are very anal about what they think should be portrayed on screen. Thankfully they don't make movies we do.