Great comedy is always sadistic.
I'm constantly having to be vigilant with a depressive tendency, an addictive tendency.
It's one of the reasons I don't do drugs. One sniff and I'd go all the way.
When I look back I can't believe I was so stupid as to direct Dealer's Choice.
Always when I directed the play, I was always trying to cast people not who were necessarily like the characters, but people who I felt had the essential component that the character had, some kind of soul for it.
I mean when the play was on in New York I was starting to get film offers coming through, and since the film's come out I get offered more than I used to, but it happens incrementally.
But I'm the sort of person who, if certain structures topple, it could all go horribly wrong.
I think I write serious comedies. I would love to be able to write for pure pleasure, but the undertow is always loneliness.
Well, you just know, as a writer, I didn't really write one of the five best screenplays of the year. There were lots of brilliant screenplays; I was just one of the lucky ones who got nominated.
Oh, I would love to be in Don Juan's shoes for a weekend. Not that I was ever handsome enough to be a Don Juan.
My life is in dialogue with the plays that I write. The relationship I have with my plays is very, very intimate, and I dot my life through them.
I dispute that 'Closer' is about betrayal. Betrayal is one of the elements.
When you're in your early 20s your love life seems to explode every 20 minutes or so. By the time you've reached your thirties, it is every five or ten years.
A part of me would like to see the money go to hospitals or housing, but I have benefited so greatly from funding for the National Theatre, which has been incredible.
A couple of flop plays, a death in the family, and it could all collapse.
I consider myself a Jewish writer, like all my heroes: Tom Stoppard, David Mamet, Philip Roth, Arthur Miller, Woody Allen.
Theatre is how I first encountered art on any level.
The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play.
It doesn't really feel like it's got anything to do with me. I mean, I know I wrote it, and all that and invented the characters and made it up, but it's Mike's film, so doing the press and stuff, it feels a little bit inauthentic. I was just one component of it.
I'm a happily married man and I think to get married you have to be optimistic.
