I "started" as a fiction writer, publishing some short stories and a novel called Pride of the Bimbos in 1975. The novel was originally a movie in my head. I started with a couple scenes that I saw dramatically, saw the setting, imagined a certain graininess to the image, heard a country Western soundtrack compressed through a tinny jukebox speaker. But in 1975 I was working in hospitals and factories or was on unemployment, had no track record as a writer or movie-maker, had no connections whatsoever in the movie business. I hadn't even gone to film school. A practical look at the situation told me any screenplay I wrote was going to sit on the shelf for a long time, especially one about a white-trash kid, a midget shortstop and a six-foot-six black hustler with violent revenge on his mind. I began to rethink the story as fiction, mentally adapting it into a long, episodic short story that eventually became a novel. But the pictures and sounds were there first, and in the writing I did my best to give the reader the idea and the feeling of what I had first "seen."

I eventually got to make movies through writing. I had to get a literary agent to sell my second novel, and his literary agency had a connection with a Hollywood talent agency that handled books as potential film "properties." I contacted that agency, wrote a screenplay to show them what I could do, and they agreed to represent me if I'd move to the West Coast for a while. I got my first assignment, rewriting a movie called Piranha for Roger Corman, at least partly because Roger's story editor, Frances Dael, read fiction for pleasure (a rarity in Hollywood) and had actually read some of mine. I got to direct Return of the Secaucus Seven because I made enough money writing screenplays for other people to finance the movie myself. The budget was so low ($60,000 out of pocket to get to a first print) that I had to back up a bit and stop thinking in pictures, as I had been able to do in writing for others, and start thinking in budget.

When thinking in pictures it's important to consider whether a certain image will have the same meaning to someone else as it does to you. No matter what your experience of the Vietnam War, Platoon is a rugged movie to enter into, a meaningful assault on the senses. But the images in it are bound to have a different resonance for people who have been in combat than for people who haven't. The trick is not to ignore one group and concentrate on the other, to become either a caterer to the elite or a panderer to the masses, but to pick and build your images so that anybody can get into the story on some level, so that maybe people are drawn in deeper than they thought they could or would want to go. And you have to do all this without lying to them.