JohnSayles

Every movie is a world that you enter with its own rules. And its own vibe. And it can be more of a real world vibe, or a fantasy vibe, and what you have to do making or writing the movie is be true to that world. So that as a writer, I take a world like The Howling as seriously as I take the world of Matewan. But those two worlds can't coincide. And as Apollo 13, I was the last writer on it before they shot it, and my job was to actually bring the script back closer to what actually happened. So the most fun was getting to talk to Jim Lovell and Dave Scott (two astronauts) about what really happens up in space. And to find a way to bring the science and technology back into the story so that people understood just how incredible that situation was. How dangerous and how incredible that anyone would dare to go into space with walls that were no thicker than canvas in the landing module, and a computer so primitive they had to re-check the math with a pencil.

Honey mustard.

I think really listen to your gut instincts.

I would say that truly, because I work in Hollywood as a screenwriter, that some of the lack of good roles for women is truly lack of interest on the part of the people who say yes or no to movies. Some of it is economic - they show you that those movies don't make as much money - but I think truly it's that the executives just aren't that interested in women in general. So the stories don't pop out at them. (*And that includes a few female executives)

The obstacles for Matewan is that we are fighting to get the rights to it back so it's really only available right now in pirate copies. And we have at our own expense done a much better looking negative, so when we get the rights back, we will be releasing it with interviews and a whole package, and we hope that is going to happen sometime next year. And then when we are done with that, we are going to try to get the rights to City of Hope, which has never been done on DVD, and then release that.