But the longer I'm in the business, you see a lot of times these screenplays have been rewritten 5 times and you're not really offending an author.
You get spoiled as a novelist because you get to be the director and the editor, and you play all the parts, but as a screenwriter, you are a bit down the ladder.
I think it's a bad habit for an actor to change scripts because that's not your job. You're not a writer, necessarily - although there are some actors that are good at it.
So much of what you see now in Hollywood is written and directed by committee, and you can see it.
I wrote the script of Patton. I had this very bizarre opening where he stands up in front of an American flag and gives this speech. Ultimately, I was fired. When the script was done, they hired another writer and that script was forgotten.
Capra always wanted a screenwriter with him, even on the soundstage. The writer had to be there at his side.
When you see two writers named on a movie, one of them did some drafts and got the boot.
I've had various experiences where I've been called by Hollywood studios to look at a script or comment on various scientific ideas that they're trying to inject into a story.
You can't fix a bad script after you start shooting. The problems on the page only get bigger as they move to the big screen.
When I was in New York, a lot of my friends were studying filmmaking and would bring their scripts to me, as I was a good script doctor. I would read their scripts and make corrections to them for $20 per script and was fascinated by films.
When I finally finished writing 'Sisters,' I started getting hired for lots of rewrites.
In TV, I did scripts that were not well-written, and I learned how to make bad material okay. That's a hard thing to do; you can learn bad habits, but you can also learn to find something in anything.
The Indian film industry does not believe in investing financial resources in scripts.
I did three or four weeks of work on 'Godzilla;' it wasn't a page-one rewrite or anything like that. The term is 'script doctoring,' is what I did on it.
