How does writing short stories fit into that?
I was a novelist and short-story writer before I was a filmmaker. That was my segue into the world of screenwriting. But writing fiction takes a lot of energy. The new collection, Dillinger in Hollywood, is stuff I’ve written over the past 30 years or so. Every once in a while I come across an idea that is best told in short-story form. It’s usually because the short-story arc is so tight. Short stories can only get into the details so far. A novel has to go in deeper, and so, for a novel, I have to take a year off of filmmaking. These stories have been published in various places, but they’ve never been collected before. The subjects of your storiesthe Hollywood leftovers, the barflies, a rock drummer who finds himself drawn to the life story of a janitoroften reflect the themes you touch on in your films. Do you have a specific reason for telling the stories you tell? My short stories are immersions into very specific worlds. There’s this idea implicit in my writing that Americans ha
