After I made my first short film that wasn't terrible, people were interested in potentially developing a feature with me. Every time I read a script, it was a bizarre, too-dark, genre-less thing that no one wanted to make.
Some films I say no to and they end up working very well, but I don't care, I just want to do something exciting.
The last thing I ever wanted to get involved with is Hollywood. The way it works is that people get an idea you could possibly do something, but there's a one-in-a-hundred chance that it could get made.
It's happened time and time again, but the committee has always decided against it-the work was too conservative or didn't fit within the budget; there are millions of different reasons.
The Beatles once approached Stanley Kubrick to do 'The Lord Of The Rings.' This was before Tolkien sold the rights. They approached him, and he said, 'No.'
You can't control the quality of projects that are coming to you, so if you get several in a row that are quality, you take them.
Out of 10 projects I get sent, seven or eight are female protagonists, and that's not the only thing I'm interested in.
It is so hard to get movies made in Hollywood that you got to have six going at once, and you know, probably none of those get made.
I remember when we did 'Shaun of the Dead,' and when we were trying to get it off the ground in 2001 before we actually made it, a lot of people just didn't want to know.
I would never sign on to a project that was male-bashing, because first and foremost I'm a man... what guy would sign on for that?
My first production job after M.I.A. was actually the xx, but they didn't like what I did, and at the end of the day, we used their demos.
It was very tough to get people to believe in my project. Everyone had their own ideas, and they wanted to mold me into something I wasn't.
At first, 'Westworld' was a project we had declined to do.
What I proposed was a computer that would be easy to use, mix text and graphics, and sell for about $1,000. Steve Jobs said that it was a crazy idea, that it would never sell, and we didn't want anything like it. He tried to shoot the project down.
I started pitching shows and sold a show, 'Losin It,' about my Jenny Craig days. It never was made. I think it didn't work, partially because I didn't write it.
I'm not interested in wasting money on a project.
Saying no to a project is not easy. I'm always under the impression that I might end up upsetting the director or producer of a film.
As creatives, it's a hard thing to push, to make something you're truly excited about, especially if you've written 100 different concepts and they keep getting shot down.
I sold my first screenplay six months before 'Glee,' but they had the option for a year and now it's back with me.
Pilots get made, and they don't go to series. Stuff gets written and never gets made. I've tried to develop stuff that never went. It comes and it goes. It's a part of the process.
No, I'm not doing 'Star Wars.'
But, George and Steven asked me to write the Indiana Jones sequels, and I didn't want to.
I've turned down projects based on raunchiness before.
I have said no to many, many Day of the Dead projects in the past, about 10 or 15, because every time I heard a take it was from someone who didn't know the celebration.
But most scripts are terrible. Most projects are bad, that's just kind of the way it is. And I'm not really attracted to those.
