PETER HEDGES

New York just feels real to me, and not everyone is in the movie business.

Writing a really good screenplay is not easy. It can be a very punishing form.

Well, it made perfect sense that I originally wanted to be an actor because every Sunday, we walked into church and we acted like we were the happiest, most together family.

I feel cool when I say I live in Brooklyn.

I've always had an acute sense of mortality, maybe because my father's a minister.

I grew up going to church every Sunday and my mother was a drug and alcohol counselor, so both of my parents' lives have been about helping people at times of crisis.

So much of life's dramas, good and bad, play out against family and so it's really inspiring for any number of stories in all the fields I write in.

If you wanted John Gielgud to cry, he could say, 'Which eye?'

Harold and Maude' is a film I just keep finding myself rewatching.

When I go home to Iowa, people assume I live in this very big anonymous place where no one knows each other or wants to. Truth is, I know my neighbors better in Brooklyn than I ever did in Iowa.

Family is paramount to me in my life, and my own comes first above everything, and that's something universal that people can relate to.

Pieces of April' was going to be a 3 to 7 million dollar film and we had three entities, two studios, and one wealthy man and they all backed out. It was quite a blow.

There's no reason that a writer, if they have some discipline and curiosities and passion, can't be vital for a long, long time.

Lucas is living the life that I wanted, but I want to be clear, I don't feel there's been any pressure for him to live it.

When I was a young lad just out of college at the North Carolina School of the Arts, I directed several plays that I wrote. It was essential theater, meaning we had no money, so our set may be six stools and two chairs and eight cream pies.

Something happened to me when I wrote female characters in my early plays; it was a real liberation.

Ultimately what I try to do is work on stories I love with people I admire, and sometimes they get made and sometimes they don't.

The greatest love I believe... the greatest love I have is for my children, but I think the greatest love probably universally is a mother's love for a child.

And for better or worse, a story like 'Pieces of April' is the kind of story I'm supposed to tell. The kind of story that makes you laugh as much as possible but also breaks your heart.

When you have an intimate encounter with mortality as my family and I did with my mom's death, I took a long look at my life and I asked myself what was the one thing that I hadn't done that I had really wanted to do. And it was to write and direct a film.

There are so many films I lean on and look toward and return to that give me some guidance on how to keep moving in the world, and that's what film does, at its best.

I play this game with my son called Never Seen. We try to see new things every day, and we do. I don't take that for granted.

I think the best dramas are as funny as possible and the best comedies have, underneath them, real substance.

I used to find limitations frustrating, but I find them enormously liberating.

My mother's sobriety - that's when I found the theater, that's when I moved from being a basketball player to being a musician, to being an actor, to then being a writer.