I read an interview with Aaron Sorkin and he said he plays every part when he's writing. I thought, "Oh, I do that too! I'm doing okay."
I had written four scripts before I wrote Recount. Each one progressed my career a little bit, but I didn't make a dime off any of them. Recount was the first thing I sold, and I actually sold it as a pitch to HBO. They bought it as a pitch, which was a miracle. I thought, "Wow, this could be the last time I'll be paid to write a script again, which would be too bad because that was an amazing experience I just had."
I still recognized for television. Buffy is 70 percent, Gilmore Girls is 30 percent, and then Mad Men. If it's a mother/daughter, it's definitely Gilmore Girls. They usually say, "We always watch it together, and we feel like we're the Gilmore girls." I've heard that like, 5,000 times.
I started writing when I was 26, so I don't even know what year that was. I wrote a script for me to star in. A friend of mine, who was an actor that I would compete against a lot, had written a script and was taking all these meetings. He just kept pushing me and was like, "You got to do it. You're going to love it!" He's a very successful screenwriter now. His name is Michael Bacall and he wrote 21 Jump Street, Project X, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. So it was a few factors.
In the case of Game Change, the discussion in that film was how our politicians have become so much like celebrities - personality becomes more important than substance so that they can function in a 24-hour news cycle. So the question is, how do you feel about that? Is this what you want from a politician - somebody who's wildly charismatic, but has so little knowledge of substantive issues?
Certainly, for me, and it's gone this way on every project I've worked on, the "writing" never ends until you're done with the movie.
Everything I've written up to now, hasn't had anything to do with my life really.
I don't see myself directing things I don't write because, to me, directing was just an extension of the writing process.
To have a show have lawyers fighting civil rights cases week in and week out, I think it's exactly what we need.
The exciting thing about today with the Internet, streaming, and YouTube, is you can just go do it. You can go make a short and put it up, and it, very well, may be seen. You can create your own Internet series and just put it out there. It wasn't like that when I was in my 20s. People weren't doing this sort of thing - now they can and they should try it.
People that work at the White House, they stay forever and love the job. Someone asked me, "Was there really a butler that was there for 40 years?" I said, "No, they're all there for 40 years."
I'm very political. Because I read politics every day, so I'm familiar with the world. I approach the films is I'm trying to write what is true, so that supersedes partisan spin, in my opinion. I find partisanship is a thing for cable news and newspaper articles, but it's not interesting for art. I think we all believe what we believe, and I don't think a film is going to change someone's mind.
In movies that tackle these political issues, there are far more interesting themes to be explored than partisan politics, which is what we get on cable news every second of every day.
It seems to me that our presidential elections have turned more into a popularity contest than a real analysis about who really should be President of the United States.
