I never thought about being a writer as I grew up. A writer wasn`t something I wanted to be. An outfielder was something to be. Most of what I know about style I learned from Roberto Clemente.

My argument has always been that this is not an anti-Bush film, it`s a pro-democracy film. And if Bush comes out on the wrong side of democracy, that`s his problem.

I like to act. I work for scale. I don`t have an acting agent. I`m in the book.

I certainly grew up seeing more movies and television than I read books, but when it came time to do the thing itself you don`t have to hire a lot of people to sit down and write a book, so that was the story-telling medium that was available to me.

Well, acting is cheap; I knew all these actors who weren`t in the Screen Actors Guild yet, and it happened that they were all just about thirty years old.

I probably wouldn`t have done as many as I did in one year, which I did when I was trying to raise money.

Michael Moore, whether you like him or hate him, has done something very important.

Basically, if you could get a good trailer out of the script, Roger had no objection to you making a really good movie. He liked it if you did. He liked the more cleverness and ingenuity you could bring to it. He just wasn`t going to give you any more money.

I figured, `When is that ever going to happen again?`. So I basically set out the opposite way movies are made; I set out with a budget first. I said, `What can I do well for $40,000?`.

Fahrenheit 9/11 took public domain information that should have been on the news every night and put it in a film that a lot of people went to see. But still Bush has never had to answer those charges.

With Roger, it would be: `On Page 67, we think this is a little quick to have another attack of Piranhas, so could you put it off until Page 69?`

There are genres I don`t care for, and I`ve never worked in those genres, and then sometimes there are people that I haven`t liked and I haven`t worked for those people. But if I feel like there`s a movie that I would like to go see, I`ll jump into it.

If you write a movie for Roger Corman, it`s going to get made. You saw it almost the next day.

And is there a movie, whatever the genre here, that I would like to go see? If I can see the germ of that there, I`ll usually take the job.

But compared to writing a novel, where you can be God, I did the Bay of Pigs invasion in six pages once, and there were 50,000 guys with boots that I didn`t have to pay, and all those extras; we didn`t have to pay them.

What I often find is it has to do with, is we need somebody who`s in one scene to intimidate somebody who`s over 5`10` and there I am on the set.

Those are fun, especially if they`re going to shoot them in four weeks, because you know they`re not going to mess with anything you do, so it can be very imaginative.

But once I discovered that there was such a thing as a screenwriter and a director and all that, it stayed in my head as a possibility.

I think I got spoiled and that writing a short story and getting it published, or writing a novel and getting it published, you pretty much get to do the first, second and third draft yourself without a whole lot of interference.

You get to say, `Here`s my philosophical idea about what the costume should like,` and the costume designer comes and gives you choices and sometimes they`re all good, and I say, `What do you think?` and they pick the right thing.

I always felt like, okay, I`m going to try to tell stories whatever way I can and it would be cool to make a movie, and tell a story that way.

In a movie you have all these logistical problems; all these practical problems. But you`re also going to have people come who can do things that you can`t do, and you get to direct their talents.

I made it about a three-day weekend so people wouldn`t have to change their clothes a lot. We didn`t have an art department; we didn`t have a make-up department.

So when I came to making movies, that`s the way I wanted to do it. I didn`t kind of wanting to just do one part of the process and leave it at that.

I remember being out here at the Sunset Marquis, and whoever knocked on the door, I would take that picture that I was writing and I would put that in the typewriter, so when I had the meeting, they would say: `Oh, you`re working on it right now?`

I figured somebody wrote a story who had a typewriter and I thought that movies were made by the cowboys and that they just said, `Okay, you fall off the horse this time.`

We just said, `Okay, you`re in the movie. Bring what you would bring for a three-day weekend and I hope you like the way you look in it because once you`re on camera, that`s your wardrobe.` But it worked; it worked and we were very surprised.

For me the writing, when I`m going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don`t change it very much; I only change it on average about two lines per movie.

Not that I`ve always loved the movie when they finally come out, or if they ever come out-because many of them don`t come out-but I`ve gotten to work with really good story editors and stuff like that.

The media in America has become so cowed and compromised.

To this day, I get rewrite offers where they say: `We feel this script needs work with character, dialogue, plot and tone,` and when you ask what`s left, they say: `Well, the typing is very good.`

There were not fifteen people in the story department and twenty-five producers and stuff. And Roger had produced 1,000 movies and directed a couple of hundred, and their comments were always very, very specific.

And it was out in the theaters in two weeks. This is not, `We`re going to develop twenty-five and maybe one`s going to get made,` so the first three things I wrote got up on the screen and, good, bad or indifferent, I got to see them on their feet.

I take more jobs when I need more money, if I`m investing in films. I take fewer when I don`t. Or if something really good comes along, I usually find a way to do a good job on it in the time that I`ve got.

When I was really young I didn`t know that there was such a thing as a screenwriter. I wrote stories.

There was a widespread indignation in the American media. They were saying, `How can you make a movie during an election that`s about politics? What are you doing? Are you trying to influence people`s lives?` To which my response was, `Well, I hope so.`

The hardest thing about movie acting is that if you`re playing a character who changes within the movie, you`ve got to do that, but you`ve got to do it out of sequence, because we never have gotten to shoot in sequence, and that`s really, really tough.

I always feel that there are no final victories and no final defeats. But it`s true that America is in a hole right now. There are a lot of dead fish in the water.

I`ve always felt like I was on the margins. Once upon a time that`s what independent used to mean.