There’s a basic structure to movies. It’s rigid and reductive. In a movie you only deal with core relationships: a protagonist, an antagonist. But in a novel you can do whatever you want. You can introduce characters that disappear for a hundred pages. You can have a dozen plot lines that interweave and overlap. In a novel, you get to be God. That doesn’t happen in the movies.

I’ve always felt like I was on the margins. Once upon a time that’s what independent used to mean.

—John Sayles