Bruce Norris came in twice to audition for 'The Corrections' and subsequently spent many months negotiating every point in a four-year agreement to appear in the show.
Anybody who understands how a movie gets made understands that a deep-pockets player is not going to make a movie that has anything defamatory in it without protections.
I got fired from a movie that ended up being called 'Windows,' which Gordon Willis, the cinematographer, directed. I got fired because he refused to cast Meryl Streep, who at the time was at Yale. I told him I thought he was an idiot, and he fired me.
If you have the ability and the wherewithal to create work that's basically in a discussion with the culture we're in, how could you not want to do that?
Private emails between friends and colleagues written in haste and without much thought or sensitivity, even when the content of them is meant to be in jest, can result in offense where none was intended.
The best adaptations are the ones that really excavate the material. The movies that work are the ones in which somebody very smart figured out how to take all the thematic material, all the character material, all the filigree, all the beautiful writing and put it into a story.
They say there's no second act in American lives. There's something there worth exploring. Giving up an idea of yourself, examining your failure, and seeing if that failure was the system's or yours. What does it mean to not turn out to be the person you want to be?
You always feel the ground rumbling beneath your feet, and if you don't, you're an idiot. Mostly because it is rumbling beneath your feet, and there is always someone who is coming up behind you who is as good, younger, and, at least as you perceive it, has more energy and more nimbleness than you.
You read a script, you try and think through what is the best, most wide-ranging way of telling the story: who stylistically, character-logically, psychologically fits inside the world of what you're trying to do. A lot of it, when you're casting, is trying to get yourself in the head of a director.
