I’m very much interested in doing actual theater.

I’ve always shot on film, but the times are changing.

As soon as you’re finished shooting, you have to go into the edit room and choose all of the shots that you’re going to commit to because the visual effects vendor has to get it...

Even as a kid, I was more enchanted watching Bette Davis than Errol Flynn.

I’ve been a teenager. I even feel like I’ve been a 16-year-old girl. So I have a lot of voices inside my head!

You can have ambiguity in television that you are not allowed in film… at least in Hollywood studio films.

Connie Heermann is a Freedom Writer teacher. I believe she represents the best of what dedicated teachers can be because she chose to serve her students, not her school board.

Every marriage is weird! That’s what it is – we just all need to start embracing the fact that there is no normal.

It’s not uncommon to have chaotic writers’ rooms.

My true nature, I believe, is writing.

I had to audition as an actor, and I got so tired of doing the same monologues over and over, so I started writing my own, and then I started selling them to other actors.

Families always have these unspoken dramas, and at holidays, everyone is supposed to sit down and pretend that none of that is going on.

My dad was a presence, of course, but he worked nights a lot, and I would only see him one day a week.

‘The Last Five Years’ was a musical in 2002, and it’s a deconstruction of a marriage.

I think musical theater fans – obsessive fans – are very much like Comic Con fans in our personalities. We’re very possessive, and we’re very obsessive, and we’re very critical. So don’t screw with our...

I always thought that if you don’t feel the breath in the actors’ bodies, you lose all the intimacy and truth.

Nowadays, Skype is a generational way of putting both people on camera at the same time.

The South is like a foreign country to me!

In 1996, Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’ was removed from classrooms after a school board passed a ‘prohibition of alternative lifestyle instruction’ act. Apparently, a young female character disguised as a boy was a danger to the...

I didn’t write to become a director, which many people do.

Paul Hicks is the only guy The Beatles will allow to arrange, mix and engineer their music, so he did the Cirque du Soleil ‘Love’ show.

Women have to take more control of their careers. They can’t just wait to be cast in a film.

The real Liberace – and I’ll preface this by saying that I didn’t know the real one – was a man who didn’t come from much. His father left him and his family for another...

I don’t want to be a writer where all the characters sound the same. There’s a facility in that kind of writing.

The death penalty issue is obviously a divisive one. But whether one is for or against, you can not deny the basic illogic – if we know the system is flawed, if we know there...

Sondheim is my god; I love the man. I learned a great deal about writing from his work, his lyrics, and his structure.

How do you survive living in a cell knowing you are innocent? Many of those exonerated whom I have met seem to have a more benign, grateful attitude toward life than those of us who...

The territory has changed, and a lot of really good actors want to do cable series, but they don’t necessarily want to do network TV and make the commitment of 22 episodes or whatever. They...

I really like Rosamund Pike very much.

I tend to believe, when you’re in a relationship, if you don’t fight, it’s not a real relationship. You have to have arguments and tensions, otherwise I don’t believe it.

‘Thelma & Louise’ really hit a nerve, and I loved that movie.

I just really have an affinity for women. Watching them go through journeys is more interesting to me than watching men.

The thing that I love is human behavior – why people do what they do, who they are, and the choices that they make – and that has to always be plot driven.

I’m a dramatist.

When I was young, I had two older sisters, and since I was the youngest in my family, my mom took me around with her all the time. I was forever with her when she...

There is a musical rhythm to great writing, especially if it’s performed correctly.

If I can make a living as a writer, I can do anything.

We have people in our lives who help us evolve along the way. If you’re lucky, you find someone who evolves along with you, and that’s what you call a long-term relationship.

I’m not really a believer in romantic, happily-ever-after love stories.

The woman who runs the Pennsylvania Innocence Project told me that there’s a man she’s been trying to get out of prison for 26 years. Every night before she goes to bed, she thinks, ‘What...

TV is where a writer can write his novel.

Barbara Stanwyck movies drove me nuts, like ‘Ball of Fire’ and ‘Double Indemnity.’ I used to go cuckoo when I would see those films.

I’m tired of doing rewrites for executives.

Academy Awards don’t really solve anything.

A friend of mine from college is married to Neil Levy, who started on ‘Saturday Night Live’ in the early days and is a really great guy and funny writer.

Disney usually doesn’t do pitches for original ideas.