Basically I was a theatre fanatic. I had a job with Home Box Office as a theatre consultant for a long time.

I have a tremendous respect for writers who scribble away their torments, and their passions into plays.

What was good was that I had friends who were actors and in theatre who were really good, because I think my strengths were visual, like pictorial.

I hadn't studied theatre and I hadn't studied actor training or anything, but I did have a sense of movement and composition, and what the final product would be like, but luckily I had friends who were good actors, who would help me get them, who would get themselves to the place where a good director should get them to build characters.

I like to figure out what the production opportunities are for the things I'm interested in before I put pen to paper.

I just started to want to be more hands on, and again, because of the nature of this job which was to evaluate the writing apart from the production, I got clear on what a director did and I became interested in directing, so I started to do that in the late 80s.