Yeah. It was a very humbling experience. Seriously so. There was a point where, if I wanted to turn in something, it would generally be read the same day. People would grab it and throw it to an assistant and say 'quick quick, grab it! Read it!' But Jesus? now I got to the point where I finally had a script that I liked, and people would get back to me in two weeks, or three weeks, and their analysis and comments would clearly show that they had not read it.

In the intervening years, say between '95 and the Millennium, the studio had been totally changed into something like some teenage hip guy who had no idea of who I was. I was just some vaguely referenced guy who had written these movies, Lethal Weapon, the series that was so tired, the series that had died, the series that dates from the 80s. It really was a different place. My cachet, such as it was, did not exist any longer. I went in all brash, I finally had a script I liked, I was going to throw it out there and do it all myself, and nobody liked it. Everybody hated it. Some people said it was weird, someone said 'we don't do period pieces' obviously having not read it once again, and finally after knocking on enough doors and getting enough 'no's', I said if I keep doing this, this is just going to be a big albatross around my neck. I thought I'd better find someone who wants to do this and quickly, so I went to Joel because I thought he would get it and he did.

No, it was pre-downscaled. My initial budget was $16 million and Joel got me $15 million. I didn't downscale anything in the script, but we sat down and said 'how do we do what we wanna do for a million less?' And we figured out ways. Could I have used an extra million? Would I like to go back and take another whack and have five more shooting days to touch up things here and there? Of course. But for the first time I can honestly say that, having worked twenty years, that the script is what you see on the screen.

No, if anything, if it were an entertaining story, it would involve a great deal of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. It would be great. None of the above, unfortunately. I talked about all the movies I'd like to write. I collaborated on a thing that didn't get produced, called The Tin Man, and worked on a script for a thing called The Nice Guys, which may finally see the light of day. So it wasn't entirely bankrupt; but largely I knew it all had to come back to the act of sitting down, and once again deciding to assign myself to my own piece of material. And that was the scary part; still is.

I think so. More so. This has certainly set the record for the longest process from start to finish. But it morphed in the middle, thanks to a few straight comments that Jim Brooks made. Basically, this film is sort of the bastard child of Jim Brooks and Joel Silver, the upside of which is that through the romantic comedy thriller parts you are never quite sure if you can relax because there's something that could go wrong. Someone could genuinely get shot in the stomach in the middle of a romantic scene and it would fit the tone of the movie, so that's, I think, an advantage. I had these influences, over the period of two years, acting on me, and trying to combine them.

So I threw out hundreds of pages of stuff, until I figured out what this cute little movie was. And hopefully that has an advantage in that it's not entirely cute. It's not a world-saver, it's not the Second Coming, it doesn't even aspire to be literary, but what it is is full of stuff, just as much as I can pack into that movie. It's like a Tetris game, there are no empty spaces in the movie where people are just hanging out and saying lines that don't pay off later or don't come back or relate to something else. Everything is jammed onto something else and that took two years.

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