Nothing's going to come to you by sitting around and waiting for it.
I hate going to bed. I read scripts, clean, listen to the radio - I've fallen asleep to 'This American Life' more times than I can count!
That moment in 'Broadcast News' where Holly Hunter is told how great it is to be the smartest person in the room, and she cries and says it's awful - I definitely have moments like that sometimes, moments when introspection and drive can be lonely-making. And it doesn't help that I have a partner who is very work-oriented.
I love to walk around New York. Honestly, that's like the best thing, to walk over to Park Slope and go visit my friend Betty and take her dog out in the park or go walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. I really dig being outside and getting to see everybody in the street.
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.
Writing-wise, I like to have a lot of things on the burners at once, because when I hit a wall, I like to move on to the thing I haven't hit a wall on.
I remember being two, maybe, and hearing my mum's typewriter in the other room and sticking my hands under the door and screaming, 'Mum! Mum!' I was so angry she wouldn't come out. I got used to it quickly.
Maybe this is a way of gaslighting myself, but I think of it this way: In certain circles, my grandpa was considered to be one of the seminal directors of the 20th century. I'm never going to be that. So I might as well do whatever I want.
In New York you can just walk out and be among people. You're on the subway among people, you go to cafes, you can talk to people.
People really do make the assumption that I had some weirdo Hollywood upbringing, but my parents are incredibly down-to-earth people who worked really hard to raise us in a way that was health.
I encourage everyone to read James Baldwin and Malcom X and Aldous Huxley. To read Primo Levi. To read 'Silent Spring.' To read Toni Morrison. To read Zora Neale Hurston.
I read a lot of plays as a kid, but I didn't see that many plays, so I feel better-versed in film history and film structure. I just think it's easier to think in pictures.
I grew up speaking Spanish. The woman who helped raise me was only Spanish-speaking, so it was one of my primary languages as a kid. And I lived in Spain for a while.
If I didn't find art valuable, I would stop doing my work and only work for justice.
I don't like pretentious films or pretentious people.
When 'Ruby Sparks' came out, I had to do so many interviews where I had to explain the film and my politics. And I think there was a willful misunderstanding by some people. They thought the movie was trying to perpetrate the thing the movie was deconstructing.
My schedule is completely different doing a play than it is doing a movie, and I actually think it's a much harder schedule because you've got to do it eight times a week and you've got to do it good eight times a week and with different kinds of audiences who are cold or drunk or tired, whatever it is.
I have mad luck. I'm super-good at games like backgammon or anything that requires rolling dice.
I find playwriting really painful. I love it, or I wouldn't do it, but I don't love the theater as much as I love movies.
Sometimes I feel that the people I'm writing are more real to me than the people around me. When you take that imaginative leap, you're living so much in that world.
