Quotes

I'm not a real writer; I'm a screenwriter.

Dawson's Creek has always been very personal and autobiographical; I live and breathe in all the characters...Dawson represents the filmmaker and dreamer, the Spielberg-obsessed idealist who views the world optimistically; Joey represents more of the cynical, angry side as well as my roots and upbringing; Pacey represents the joker in me; and Jen, the rebel. This year we added two new characters to the mix: Andie represents my overachieving, sometimes-manic personality and, in Jack, I wanted to create a character to represent my sexuality, which is my greatest asset in life...

"I always wanted to direct. That's my passion. I was an actor. That went nowhere. I tried directing theatre. Nope. I wrote this movie called 'Killing Mrs. Tingle.' Sold it. It sat on the shelf. My unemployment dried up. I couldn't get work. I had borrowed money from all my friends. I wrote 'Scary Movie' [later retitled: Scream]. Just banged all it out, as fast as I could." - His success story.

I like emotional horror. I don't like horror movies. I hate them. But, if you can make emotional horror movies, I'm in. If I can care and root for the main character, then I'm in. I don't like stupid stories about people I don't know. There is a slew of low-budget horror films out there, where you just don't give a crap. But, once in awhile, something will come along, like "Halloween" in 1978, and there's this one girl, Jamie Lee Curtis, who's that young, sweet girl, in the midst of all of this, and you just root for her and feel for her, all the way through the chase scene. You have to figure out how to do that and care for the characters.

[after Dawson's Creek (1998) was turned down by Fox] "It went away and my life was over. I went and got a dog and named him Dawson. I thought that would be my only memory of this script."

I left after the third reshoot. If we had made a documentary about the making of that movie, it would have been so awesome. It was just cursed. It really was. We knew it as we were making it.

That was a bad year. I was doing a lot of work. I remember Bob [Weinstein] sent henchmen down to Wilmington, North Carolina where I was shooting Dawson's Creek and they locked me in a room and made me write [Scream 2].

The movie "Killing Mrs. Tingle" is a movie I really stand by. I really loved it. Then Columbine happened and basically, they said it was too violent, it was too - because we killed the teacher - I mean, a lot of things happened. It was a lot more violent and a lot darker than the movie that it became. Then we went back and reshot the movie to lighten it up. It became sort of a PG-version. It became "Teaching Mrs. Tingle". We changed a lot of it and it kind of lost its tone. When it lost its tone, it lost its way. It was not quite the result I wanted when I started out, but it was probably the most fun I'd ever had in my life. It was just awesome.